Future Convergences: Time Matters

Abstract

While in the history of design, spatial qualities have been central to the search for techniques and tools, temporal qualities have come to take part in design, with the advent of the digital revolution, as qualities capable of deforming, compressing, reconfiguring spaces, and supporting new ways of living.

The essay investigates various time-based approaches, developed by scholars and designers from different disciplines, to build tools that can identify convergences capable of generating various forms of future.

The time-based design approach will allow future studies to explore:

Spaces: Digital algorithmic design/production technologies will make spaces and components adaptable and able to govern kinetic and sensory performance.

Experiences: Time-based technologies will make perception and emotions more adaptable, through a continuous dialogue between humans and inhabited spaces and by employing machines and computer systems capable of formulating personalized proposals.

Behaviors: Media technologies, have changed people’s behaviors and their interaction with spaces, with people, with objects. Through temporal analysis we could understand parameters such as presence, speed, proximity, to redesign spaces and services.

The essay explores the directions taken by design that can be considered time-based, to identify the temporal and convergence tools that can prefigure future spaces and ensure coherent and congruent visions based on collaboration rather than competition, presence rather than absence, optimization of space rather than unsustainable waste of resources.

The essay aims to demonstrate the relevance of temporal dimensions, which offer increasingly reliable tools, called chronotopes, available to Future Studies to identify trajectories and possible configurations of the world in which future generations will live.