Could Should Might Don't
How We Think About the Future
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- ¥1,800
発行者による作品情報
An invaluable guide for how to think—and not to think—about the future, from one of the leading futurists of our time.
You might not know the name Nick Foster, but after just a moment of googling you’ll realize he’s been guiding the missions of companies that have been shaping the world you live in. From Sony, Nokia, and Dyson to Google itself, where he was the head of design at Google X, Foster has been at the forefront of innovation for over twenty-five years, but his name might be unfamiliar because until this point, he’s been hidden behind countless NDAs.
Could Should Might Don’t is Foster’s public debut, the first time this much-sought-after designer is free to share his perspectives, explore how other people approach the future, and suggest how we can all improve our thinking about what might lie ahead. But this isn’t a book filled with predictions and prophecies, and it makes no assertions about what the future will hold. It’s a book that unpacks how we think about the future.
Foster has identified Could, Should, Might, and Don’t as the four primary mindsets we all adopt when thinking about what’s over the horizon, but he doesn’t advocate for any one of them. Instead, he explores how humanity has grappled with the concept of the future throughout history, tracing the emergence of distinct schools of thought and exploring the virtues, blind spots, and inevitable shortcomings of each. The book is, in some ways, about the history of the future and the history of the different futures that we have imagined, designed, or projected for ourselves.
But most of all, Could Should Might Don’t is a no-nonsense appeal to every one of us—whether we’re busy creating future ideas or trying to understand them—to radically improve how we think about the future, so we can improve what we leave behind for those who will follow.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Starry-eyed visions of glamorous people enjoying miraculous technology misrepresent a future reality that might be glitchier and grungier, according to this intriguing if flawed debut manifesto. Foster, a designer who works with tech companies including Google and Sony, outlines four schools of futurist prognosticating that inform government and corporate planners: "Could Futurists" are boosters for things to come, which are often showcased in "vision videos" of families beaming at their gee-whiz gadgets; "Should Futurists" lay out unduly confident road maps to an improved future based in sketchy quantitative models that are little more than "numeric fictions"; "Might Futurists" evaluate the probabilities of different and potentially clashing future scenarios; and pessimistic "Don't Futurists" look for the complex ways in which the future will go wrong. Foster offers biting and persuasive takedowns of stale futurist tropes as a mix of sci-fi schlock and consumerist porn but stumbles in his pointed refusal to paint a clear portrait of what the future might actually look like (he suggests it will be more of "a quotidian, lived-in evolution of the present" but leans heavily on vague theoreticals: "What happens when we imagine this VR headset in Derek's backpack rather than in the hands of a scientist in a pristine white laboratory?"). This abstract exercise may be of interest to professional designers but will disappoint lay readers. Photos.
