Future Observatory Journal
A new online journal from the UK’s ‘Future Observatory’, the national design research programme for the green transition
You don’t really expect the UK to produce something like Future Observatory, at this point—but it has, and credit where it’s due. Since 2021, Future Observatory has been a “national research programme for the green transition” oriented around “cutting-edge design research”, coordinated by the Design Museum, via a decently-funded partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which is part of UK Research and Innovation. It’s well-led too, by the sharp intelligence of Justin McGuirk and his colleagues.
With that provenance, you will see that the emphasis on culture is what sets Future Observatory apart from other ‘green transition’ research programmes. In that sense, it has been pursuing a similar path to the EU’s New European Bauhaus perhaps, but has done so with rather more imagination and impact. (That’s not a criticism of the latter, which might still deliver on its original promise if it can evade ‘legacy-industry’ capture. Rather, take it as a compliment to Future Observatory.)
I visited their How to Build a Low-Carbon Home exhibition in January 2024, which complemented accessible and evocative exhibits organised by material—produced by leading practices Material Cultures (on straw), Waugh Thistleton (on wood) and Groupwork (on stone)—with thoughtful descriptions of the systemic challenges and opportunities in shifting towards biomaterials for construction. More might have been made of the financialisation of housing—such policy agendas being another kind of design—which drives the over-production and under-occupation of high-carbon homes in the UK and elsewhere, as described in the paper I wrote a few months ago with Mariana Mazzucato. Yet it remained an excellent show about the long history and possible futures of low-carbon housing, the likes of which help substantially in preparing the ground for necessary systemic change.
Scanning Future Observatory’s diverse set of collaborators (which they fund and enable), variety of funding opportunies, and linked to inventive public engagement, we can get a sense of the value produced by this kind of innovative research and development. Not taking the back seat typical to mere funders, standing back from the front line, but by being involved too, by taking care, making and supporting commitments, producing different modes of engagement, and ‘staying with’ the challenges. It’s another good example of the role of “design-led agencies that can work as cement between bricks, allowing systemic responses to systemic challenges” that I described previously when considering the value of the Vinnova x ArkDes relationship I was fortunate to be part of in Sweden—as an agency for holding up questions in public:
Further to this, Future Observatory have just produced a journal:
“A new online journal from the Design Museum on new thinking around design research, ecology and a future (featuring) in-depth and interactive essays, critical analysis and stunning photography all platforming vital thinking for designers shaping liveable futures around the world.”
They kindly asked me to join the editorial board, and also to contribute a short piece to the first issue — more on that below. Each issue takes a theme, and the first is bioregioning:
“Future Observatory Journal’s first issue centres around Bioregioning — a method of using our local environments as the template for design, politics and regeneration. The issue features contributions on architecture, textiles, rare earth mining, typography and more, covering bioregions from Kagoshima, Japan, to the Cauca Valley, Colombia.”
In a related post, I’m sharing the alternate mix of the article I wrote for the journal about recent research in Kagoshima, Japan, in the context of Kohei Saito’s excellent, if a little frustrating, recent book Slow Down: The degrowth manifesto (2024). (NB. There’s little overlap with Danny Dorling’s Slowdown (2020), which popped up halfway through my own Slowdown Papers, written under Covid from 2020–22, and which — perhaps not coincidentally — started exploring these parallels between Dorling’s demographics and so-called Japanification. All these slowdowns!)
You can read the Journal version, Reading Saito in Kagoshima, originally published at the rather beautiful Future Observatory Journal website here:
The alternate version cuts at a different angle through the same themes, foregrounding how culture, and particularly various forms of narrative settings, unlocks the imagination about such possible futures, just as much — if not more — than philosophy, economics or political science frequently deployed elsewhere. (See also my review of Liam Young’s Planetary Redesign (2023), for another take on this idea, using different media.)
In this, it draws motifs from a recent film Unrueh/Unrest (dir. Cyril Schäublin, 2022), various recent historical fiction from Annie Proulx’s Barkskins to Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill, and to the Japanese classic Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari—as well as being hugely informed by reading Dougald Hine’s At Work In The Ruins (2022) and Justin O’ Connor’s Culture Is Not An Industry (2024) alongside Saito’s Slow Down. Working with the Future Observatory editorial team, we felt a tighter cut, focusing on the Kagoshima stories and Saito, was more appropriate for the bioregioning issue—but here is this alternate iteration:
Thanks to Patrick Tanguay’s excellent newsletter Sentiers for picking it up too. Patrick writes: “The three most salient points for me are; that forced degrowth, because of a shrinking and aging population results, in some places, in a change of how property is valued, making possible these community projects and a re-commoning of resources. Slow growth instead of degrowth, but ‘growth’ as in nature, not as in capitalism.”
So this ‘director’s cut’ version highlights different notes, and I’ll complement it shortly with another piece written around the same time, based on the work at Circular Design Week Kagoshima in December 2023, which in turn builds on my previous Autumn to Spring piece on Japan and circular economies. A version of that is already available as part of Re:public’s conference proceedings, available here. More soon!
