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1. Optimistic
Futurism
By Richard Seymour
So what the hell happened to the future?
Everything was going just fine Then came several global depressions, the giggling like a schoolboy because he’s turned
in the early1950s, though much end of the Space Age, shrinking ozone layers, a bridge in Docklands into a living, breathing
of Europe, Japan and the Soviet aeroplanes into buildings, Global Warming piece of mechanical ballet in front of yet
Union was still flattened under a and, bingo, here we are. Comprehensively another haughty Richard Rodgers glasshouse.
shroud of ash and broken bricks. screwed and wondering what we’re doing
Even as the icy grip of the Cold War tightened, here. It’s exciting because I believe them.
those of us that were growing up then, found
If you look around the now, poking around in And it’s exciting because these people are
time to look with thrall and optimism into
popular culture, you’ll usually find a doomy embracing big, complicated issues which
the future. Men went to the moon and back,
view of the future promulgated - from Japan’s affect all of us, not just running away into a
Teflon and liquid crystals and lasers and
manga and anime to your regular, everyday corner to design yet another salt and pepper
Velcro changed our lives (as had nylon and
news reviews, nihilistic, post-apocalyptic pot for an Italian luxury goods company.
cellulose before them) and although life wasn’t
unremitting fun, we could all sense a faint, visions prevail.
And it’s exciting because, in this post-
underpinning mantra: gradually, things were convergent world, we really can fix a lot of
We just don’t seem to be able to shake off
getting better. the stuff that didn’t serve us well before. We
this maudlin streak in Europe. The French,
though, are an exception. And it comes from can make sure that impossible-to-programme
And then suddenly it stopped.
an unexpected quarter. crap like VCRs don’t happen again. We can
I’ve been trying to isolate the moment when connect ourselves to virtually anyone around
it stopped for ages. Some say it was Jack France has a highly-developed adult cartoon the planet, for any number of reasons and for
Kennedy’s assassination. Others claim it culture, fuelled for a good thirty years by a fraction of the price. We can fix shopping for
wasn’t a single moment at all, but a gradual the brilliant foresight of the likes of Bilal disabled people. We could even convert a bus
decent into collective depression after the and Moebius (Jean Giraud), both graphic system into a book-your-seat personal limo
Summer of Love didn’t make good on it’s novelists from the crucible of modern social service.
THC-fuelled dreams. But as far as the UK is imagery: Metal Hurlant. And it is in this unlikely
medium that France’s ‘optimistic futurism’ is We can do almost anything we can imagine
concerned, I’m absolutely sure I can trace it
at it’s most obvious. Certainly, it has it’s dark now, if we put our minds to it. Which puts us
back to a specific moment:
moments but hidden within the pages of your squarely in the same position as our forebears
January 1st 1974. average French cartoon you’ll find a core of were in the early 16th century, with a new age
ebullient humanism trying to get out. of technology and capability stretching out
The ‘3 day week’ as it came to be known, a in front of us, as far as the eye can see, if we
virtual halving of industrial output, brought on It’s something we all need to see. only choose to.
by an energy crisis which arose from industrial
action over coal-mining in the UK, showed us Designers cannot be, by definition, pessimists. So now it’s no longer down to what we can do
Brits that we could no longer be considered It just doesn’t go with the job. We’re supposed – it’s about what we should do. And that takes
world-class at all. We’d finally lost the ability to be defining the future, aren’t we? more than just imagination, it takes wisdom.
to build big, exciting aeroplanes, Blue Streak, For instance, distributing power generation to
Populating it with the kit and the buildings and the point of use, such as in the infrastructures
our own, much-vaunted, independant nuclear
the décor that everyone else is going to move imagined in the Hydrogen economy, could
delivery missile was a dead duck, our railways
in to when they get there. If we can’t see the utterly revolutionise the way we live.
were screwed and we couldn’t run a bath.
world as a better place to live in, then what
We suddenly realised we were crap. chance does anyone else have? It doesn’t have to be done all at once. We
can do it a bit at a time and still win. Even
A couple of years before that, people had It’s exciting listening to genuine design apparently tiny changes can still make a
run screaming from the initial screenings of optimists, like Apple’s Jonathan Ive, talk about phenomenal difference. In the US three years
‘A Clockwork Orange’ claiming that such a how things are going to get progressively ago, five large schools got together to see
barbaric vision of a future dystopia couldn’t better. Easier. Faster. Simpler. Yummier. Or what impact that tiny folding, aluminium kids
possibly happen. Now the news slowly began Gordon Murray, waxing lyrical about how scooter had made to the school run. They
to reveal that Little Alex’s ultraviolence was a he’s left McLaren to ‘sort out city mobility’. calculated the fuel saving over a year, where
hideous creeping reality. Or designer-come-wizard Tom Heatherwick, Mom wasn’t using the SUV to take junior to

2. Optimistic Furturism (cont)
school, but walking with him scooting his up and design a really bad train, though, I’m
little steed instead. They made a going to visit a trillion devils on thousands
phenomenal discovery. Over only five schools, of people for years to come.
the fuel saving was an amazing 830,000
gallons of gasoline, almost enough to drive a History tells us that before great business
compact European car to the Sun! can happen, it first has to be a Mission. And
a Mission starts with a Dream.
There’s nothing on the planet that can’t be
made just that bit better (rather than just that As designers, we potentially hold enormous
bit different). But before you do it, you need power. And with it comes responsibility.
to have an idea where you want all this to go
Wield it imaginatively and wisely.
eventually, a vision of the future, with a set of
stepping stones to let you get from the now And optimistically.
into the future in an effective and efficient way.
Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, an exquisitely- Or fuck off and do something less dangerous.
illustrated comic strip did this beautifully in
the 50s and 60s, portraying a virtually utopian
future with recognisable ‘emotional signposts’
along the way. The planet-hopping shuttle
rocket in this picture is surrounded by battered
leather suitcases with ‘Mars’ stickers on them.
That’s not because the illustrator/futurist Frank
Hampson lacked the vision to imagine the
luggage of the future, it was just his little way
There’s nothing on the planet that can’t be made
of saying: ‘It’ll be everything you dreamed just that bit better (rather than just that bit different).
of, but with all your favourite, familiar stuff
still there’.
And that’s what we should be doing: leading
the way by visualising and articulating
achievable futures that get us out of this hole.
I’m pretty sure Apple don’t call themselves
optimistic futurists, but that’s exactly what
they are. My favourite Steve Jobs one-liner
is: ‘It’s not the consumers job to know
about the future, that’s my job.’ And he’s
absolutely right.
Jurassic corporations need to learn from
the mammals. The secret of the ‘next big
thing’ isn’t lurking inside the ‘consumers’
head, waiting to be liberated by some well-
paid focus group. It’s inside the heads of
the dreamers, the futurists, the Utopians.
You and me.
And sometimes we get despondent and
knocked-back by the beancounters who tell
us we’re wrong and that the ‘consumer’ is
always right. Or by the supply chain who say
it can’t be done. Or by the MD who can’t
see further than his own Excel spreadsheet.
But the difference is that we’re the ones with
the imagination to see beyond what things
are, which is why we applied for art college in
the first place, rather than accountancy or law.
If I wake up depressed tomorrow and design
a really bad poster for hair gel, who’s going
to give a damn? (other than the client). If I get
The shape of things to come