Inverse futures models

ACRONYM: FCT - PTDC/ART-DAQ/3197/2020 

Principal Investigator: Susana Leonor Mateus

Other Investigators:

• Américo Mateus
• Ana Paula Rainha
• David Palma
• Gabriel Patrocínio
• José Carvalho
• Miguel Henriques

Partners: ISMAT

Abstract: The responsibility for transformation arises mainly from the way young people today are trained. Teachers and academia have a responsibility to help young people develop skills through exploratory paths, with greater purposes, focusing on their responsibility and social and individual awareness. Even if their vision lacks an altruistic conscience, we must challenge them in favor of the relevance that these competences have for the effective construction of a different, desirable future. In different areas, particularly in functional creative, where it is essential to challenge young people to elevate and transform their vision, usually conventional and marketing, to a transmutational and transdisciplinary dimension. Contemporary design and architecture already incorporate issues of conceptualization of space, interaction, sustainability, agents and consequences; however, it is necessary that the creative methods and processes of these disciplines, potentiate new visions for the society and for our life in common. It is no longer enough to think about the future, changing the behaviors of today, for tomorrow, in the light of dominant knowledge.

Future, Critical and Speculative Design and Architecture, have resized this reflection, bringing fictional narratives that explore desirable utopian scenarios, or dystopian scenarios that build undesirable societies.

The Inverse Futures research project aims to explore these domains, reversing the sequence of the traditional creative process, deconstructed discourses and exploring the positivist dimension of desirable speculative futures. The research process through the project is an open field to develop the necessary supports to review promising future, developed in the long term and carried out by a design with purpose, which structures social objectives, with a critical eye and an active and not passive attitude, resulting from norms current economic conditions.

The research proposal goes through the literature review of the practices of Future, Critical and Speculative Design and Architecture, but the main objective is not the debate about “What if” and the use of negative scenarios about a hypothetical future, to counter behavior. But yes, through the creation of a wider scope and reach of these methodologies; build desirable speculative futures that identify fundamental and structuring vectors of society. It will be based on this vision that the “inversion of that future” should be carried out and the path for the construction of stages that will make it possible to fulfill and transform the present in this desirable future must be traced. We propose to build a Model structured in an research through design and architecture project, which is based on a Design Science Research methodology, whose objective is to use it in a real environment. This model should be tested and tried community of designers, architects and educators, who share our ambition and vision that society has to set goals where we want humanity to arrive, to identify how to travel this path and as a priority establish nature preservation as a central factor for quality of life and human well-being.