Seymourpowell | design@seymourpowell.com
May + June 2008
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What the hell happened to the future?
Everything was going just fine in the early 1950s, even though much of Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union were still flattened under a shroud of ash and broken bricks. Even as the icy grip of the Cold War tightened, those of us who were growing up then found time to look with thrall and optimism into the future. Men went to the moon and back, Teflon and liquid crystals and lasers and Velcro changed our lives (as had nylon and cellulose before them). And although life wasn’t unremitting fun, we could all sense a faint, underpinning mantra: Gradually, things were getting better.
And then suddenly it stopped.
I’ve been trying to isolate the moment when it came to a halt. Some say it was Jack Kennedy’s assassination. Others claim it wasn’t a single moment at all, but a gradual descent into collective depression after the Summer of Love didn’t make good on its THC-fueled dreams. But as far as the U.K. is concerned, I’m absolutely sure I can trace it back to a specific moment: January 1, 1974.
The “Three-Day Week,” as it came to be known, was a virtual halving of electricity output brought on by an energy crisis that arose from industrial action over coal mining in the U.K. It showed us Brits that we could no longer be considered world-class
at all. We’d finally lost the ability to build big, exciting aeroplanes; Blue Streak, our own much-vaunted, independent nuclear delivery missile, was a dead duck; our railways were screwed; and we couldn’t run a bath.
We suddenly realized we were crap.
A couple of years before that, people had run screaming from the initial screenings of “A Clockwork Orange,” claiming that such a barbaric vision of a future dystopia couldn’t possibly happen. Now the news slowly began to reveal that Little Alex’s ultraviolence was a hideous creeping reality.
Then came several global depressions, the end of the Space Age, shrinking ozone layers, global warming, airplanes into buildings, rising fuel costs, and, bingo, here we are. Comprehensively screwed and wondering what we’re doing here.
If you look around the now, poking your head in popular culture, you’ll usually find a doomy view of the future promulgated—from Japan’s manga and anime to your regular, everyday news reviews—nihilistic, posta-pocalyptic visions prevail.
We just don’t seem to be shaking off this maudlin streak in Europe. The French, though, are an exception. And it comes from an unexpected quarter.
France has a highly developed adult-cartoon culture, fueled
for a good 30 years by the brilliant foresight of the likes of Bilal and Moebius (Jean Giraud), both graphic novelists from the crucible of modern social imagery: Metal Hurlant. And it is in this unlikely medium that France’s “optimistic futurism” is at its most obvious. Certainly it has its dark moments, but hidden within the pages of your average French cartoon you’ll find a core of ebullient humanism trying to get out.
It’s something we all need to see.
Designers cannot be, by definition, pessimists. It just doesn’t go with the job. We’re supposed to be defining the future, aren’t we? Populating it with the kit and the buildings and the decor that everyone else is going to move into when they get there. If we can’t see the world as a better place to live in, then what chance does anyone else have?
It’s exciting listening to genuine design optimists, like Apple’s Jonathan Ive, talk about how things are going to get progressively better. Easier. Faster. Simpler. Yummier. Or Gordon Murray’s lyrical waxing about how he’s left McLaren to “sort out city mobility.” Or U.K. designer-cum-wizard Tom Heatherwick giggling like a schoolboy because he’s turned a bridge in Paddington Basin into a living, breathing piece of mechanical ballet in front of yet another haughty Richard Rogers glasshouse.
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