Future Generations
One of the instructors in my graduate design seminar related a reaction that someone once had during a class exercise years ago. It went something like this: “Why should my work serve future generations? What have they ever done for me?”
He brought it up as an example of the egocentrism he wishes designers to purge from their mindsets. But I think a serious consideration of these questions reveals a very compelling answer in favor of a future-oriented approach in design.
What have future generations done for us? Well, their very existence validates that the present generation will have survived successfully enough to propagate our species. We won’t have blown ourselves into oblivion or rendered our environment otherwise uninhabitable. In short, future generations signify that we won’t have screwed up humanity beyond all hope. Naturally, future generations can’t communicate this comforting revelation to us. The fruits of our labor will be realized in their lifetimes, not ours.
So, getting back to the original question, why should our work serve future generations? In the spirit of being audience-centered, I shall address this question from a self-interested perspective. Future generations will be more affected by our actions than we are, just as we are more affected by the actions of past generations than they were. You can call it the butterfly effect, compounding, or whatever you like. Our work affects future generations whether we intend it to or not.
If we work either without regard to how our actions will affect future generations or suspecting that our actions are likely to cause harm to future generations, we decrease the likelihood of their existence. The grosser our negligence, the fewer future generations there will be. If the number of future generations goes to zero, then our generation is the end of the line. We end humanity. Do you want to take credit for that? No? Then get to work and stop bitching. The future is waiting.
Of course, if you are really, really successful at eliminating all future generations, there will be no one left to blame you. So I guess the takeaway message is, do whatever you like, but do it well.
The attitude, and thus the question, is already reversed. By definition, of course, future generations can do nothing *for* us unless we wish to violate temporal causality, but they can do something *to* us. While other species can probably conceive of the concept of time–changes in stimuli, essentially–none of them seem to have history, which is to say a sharable culture or story of that change. Because we do have knowledge that our species, in theory, can continue indefinitely (within reason of the time frames conceivable easily by the human mine) but we, individually, cannot (I assume) then by definition once we have knowledge of this possibility of “future”, our attitude, whether we know it or not, has shifted.
So what can “the future” do for anyone? If we take it in the literal sense of not-yet occurred events and unborn humans, then nothing, obviously. If we take “the future” as a concept that has motivated human history for the past 10,000 years, then “the future” is the abstract notion of progress, or at least continuation, that got us here to our present world. I would advise snarky bestial egoist that if he doesn’t like what “the future” has done for him, he go back to picking berries in the woods and living in caves like some friggin’ hippie in the Hobbesian state of nature. Gah, hippies.
FINIS.