Nick Foster on Designing for the Future: Could, Should, Might, Don't

Designing for the Unknown

• 🚀 Designing for the future is an inherently ambiguous space, unlike tackling known problems with user feedback.
• 💡 Nick Foster, formerly Head of Design at Google X, has decades of experience in this realm, working on over 200 moonshot projects.
• 📚 His book, "Could, Should, Might, Don't: How We Think About the Future," argues that predictable thinking patterns hinder our ability to anticipate what's next.

Navigating Ambiguity in Design

• 🧠 Comfort with ambiguity and unpredictability is a primary skill for futures design, as the long-term future is unknowable.
• 🛠️ Design's role can be to "knock the edges off" uncertainty, gradually giving form to the unknown.
• ⚠️ Projects exploring the future will inevitably encounter dead ends, requiring resilience and a willingness to invest energy without guaranteed outcomes.

Google X and Experimental Space

• 🌟 Working at Google X offered a unique privilege to experiment on large-scale projects with significant unknowns and long runways.
• 📈 While not driven by traditional KPIs or ROIs, this work demanded tenacity and forward momentum to explore nascent technologies and societal shifts.
• 🚫 A culture of killing ideas quickly was essential to focus on projects with the potential for major scale change and commercial opportunity.

The Four Futures Thinking Categories

• 🗺️ Foster proposes a taxonomy of futures thinking: Could, Should, Might, and Don't, not as rigid categories but as overlapping territories.
• 🤔 Could futurism is characterized by ambitious, often sci-fi-inspired visions (e.g., flying cars, crystal cities), seen in world's fairs and tech trade shows.
• 📊 Should futurism relies on predictions and corporate strategy, using data to assert a specific future, which can be counterproductive in a VUCA world.
• ⚠️ Don't futurism focuses on potential negative consequences and externalities, urging responsibility for second and third-order implications.
• 🔮 Might futurism explores multiple potential futures through scenario planning, acknowledging the difficulty humans have in imagining exponential change.

The Role of Ethics and Responsibility

• 💬 The book emphasizes the importance of ethics in designing for the future and the dangers of "numeric fiction" or over-reliance on data-driven predictions.
• 💡 Understanding the future as an evolution of the present, incorporating both change and continuity, is vital.
• 🗣️ Fostering open and honest debates about what