(Hi)stories and the Future

Abstract

Welcome everyone to the year in which Marty McFly first hoped to travel in the 1985 pop culture hit film Back to the Future! The year 2015 was the time target of a youthful Michael J. Fox in the role of Marty, a young man who sought the opportunity to reshape the present by visiting the future in a time-traveling DeLorean automobile. Now it seems that the future is here … and yet somehow it remains eternally beyond us-occupying a space that we love to imagine but can never quite attain. Whether our world today looks like the world found by Marty McFly when he traveled through time some thirty years ago is really neither here nor there (he didn't actually make it to 2015 until a sequel came out in 1989). I raise the issue here to make the point that there is much to be learned when the present intersects with the past as it did in this Oscar-nominated and top-grossing film of the ever-more-distant Reagan era, and as it has, again and again, in the cycles of design practice and intervention to which we regularly contribute and so diligently study.Interior designers (and designers in general) seem to be obsessed with the future. Perhaps this trend is not truly new, since the act of designing has always required the consideration of the anticipated future life of the building, space, object, product, system, or service, along with corresponding expectations regarding the real or imagined client for whom every design act is ultimately conceived. But designers' preoccupation with the future seems more vocal and visible to me now than it did in 1985 when, as an undergraduate interior design student, I contemplated the mysteries of Windows and an early AutoCAD release on my IBM computer under the shadow of the AIDS crisis and the Unabomber, accompanied by the ironic soundtrack of Madonna's pop anthem "Material Girl" and the altruistic collaborative performance "We Are the World," both of which were delivered to my ears on the newly minted technology of the CD. It was a shrouded future filled with threat, thrill, and possibility then, but I suppose the concern of youth is always with the present.It may be that our current obsession with the future is a lingering reaction to the recent Fin de siècle and its attendant risk of Y2K and its promise of a shiny new twenty-first century beginning-at least until the despicable acts of September 11, 2001, cast their dark shadow over the new century's promise. Similar fervor for the future could be seen in the early twentieth century and particularly in the aftermath of the even darker World War I when the new century and a newly configured Europe spawned new art, new literature, and a new tempo for technological development and cultural evolution. As Gertrude Stein noted in the cadence of her 1925 essay Composition as Explanation, "The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it make...