1 Facing the Future

His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.1

So wrote Walter Benjamin, referring to a drawing by Paul Klee and supplying the foundation for critical writing that has been growing skyward in past decades. My reason for bringing Benjamin’s angel into the current discussion does not have to do with history, war, rubble, or the way a series of events can appear as a single catastrophe. Rather, I find it interesting that we mortals are similar in certain ways to the angel of history. We, like the angel, can have knowledge of the past that is based on our experience, but do not have the same direct awareness of the future. We, like the angel, cannot resist entering the future—the future becomes the present at objectively the same rate for all of us, as long as we are still alive. Perhaps the angel’s orientation toward the past will seem unusual, but what it is able to see rings true to our experience, and it should also seem apt that it is being drawn into the future.

The angel’s orientation might seem perfectly appropriate to speakers of the Amerindian language Aymara, who live in the Andes. In this language—and, so far as modern cognitive scientists know, only in this language—the future is conceptualized as being behind the speaker, while the past is in front.2 Speakers of all languages, as far as we know, frame time in spatial terms. A typical underlying metaphor is of journeying into the future. On a journey, one knows what is behind, all that has already been visited, but not what lies ahead. Those who communicate in Aymara are apparently unique in considering the future to be behind them, but their perspective on time and the future is not completely inscrutable. They simply use a less dynamic metaphor, considering the future as unseen, the past as being known and evident—just as what is before them is evident. In this way, they agree with everyone else about an important aspect of the future: It is unknown.

We imagine that a person traveling forward into the future, walking along, is in a very different situation than an angel being drawn backward. But even if our underlying concept is a journey—and this seems to miss an important aspect of time, that it continues to run on regardless of what we do—even in that case, the terrain is there in front of us and we can, at best, choose a route or choose our own adventure. A more powerful metaphor was offered by Joe Strummer, lead singer of The Clash: “The future is unwritten.”3 Not just unwritten in the sense of an unwritten history, in the way we might lack documentation of something that has already happened, but uncomposed and unimagined, yet to be made. This is the concept of the future I select.

We hear mixes of metaphors that involve these future concepts quite often in political discourse. In concluding his first inaugural address, President Barack Obama said: “Let us answer the call of history and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.” While these were stirring words, they present the future as a dangerous darkness to be carefully explored. This does not make for the most empowering concept of the future. Earlier in this speech, Obama had said that “we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.” While this expression was more conventional and prosaic, concerned with caring and investment, the future is actually described in a more empowering way here. The underlying metaphor is that we must work to construct it. We are not to poke around with the light of freedom and see what is out there in the dark, but to build what and how we choose.

I’m calling the act of imagining a particular future and consciously trying to contribute to it future-making. This term is meant to distinguish a potentially productive perspective on the future (let’s build a better future) from a less productive one (let’s predict what will happen, for instance, so we can react quickly by anticipating it). There is another important distinction to be made between working at incremental sorts of invention, necessary as this may be at times, and more radical thought and development, which may be more significant, if also more dangerous. This is between seeking a future that seems plausible and one that may be exaggerated beyond belief, or that takes some turn into what looks absurd. All of these ways of considering the future will be part of my discussion.

What’s the point of an implausible idea—for instance, one in which faster-than-light travel is possible, transporter beams disassemble and reassemble people, and a tiny universal translator device can interpret between any languages, even ones that aren’t known to begin with? If one wants to develop a specific blueprint for concrete action, imagining a world (or universe) like this one, the world of Star Trek, doesn’t seem to make much sense. But there are other reasons for imagining the future. Our imagination might inspire us to improve our world in way that would be hard to do by only thinking incrementally and plausibly. We might see a world in which exploration and building connections with other cultures is at least as important as military action. We might see a world in which scarcity, and even money, are greatly reduced in their significance and instead of seeking power through force, people (of all sorts) focus on discovery, development, and improving society.

I think there are many more subtle points to the utopian world of Star Trek. Again and again, it’s shown how the universal translator or even knowledge of a language, held in common, does not resolve cultural differences—they have to be worked through consciously and respectfully. This seems like a good point to keep in mind as, powered by immense data sets and machine learning, our own translation capabilities approach those of the universal translator. In the world of Starfleet, scare resources and militarism still exist to challenge a mostly peaceful and hopeful galaxy; it’s just that addressing these issues is not always done in a framework of colonialism or conquest. The people of this universe are also as concerned with understanding their past as imagining their future.

Perhaps it’s not fair to point to a well-respected science fiction franchise whose cultural influence is vast, and which goes far beyond just provoking viewers to think differently. But a long history of outrageous future visions shows that such imaginations can indeed pertain to our world, and can sometimes be more effective because of their distance from our present day and the way they exaggerate. Because of this, although I will keep a focus on computing, digital media, and related technologies, the future-making that interests me and that I will discuss will range from more plausible sketches of the years immediately before us to much more extreme imaginations.

Escape from the Kitchen of Tomorrow

As we move to consider specific historical examples of future-making, I’ll describe one concept that, however prosaic, cuts across time. It is one that bears directly on the home and domestic life. If we’re looking for the future within our homes, I suggest heading to the kitchen. In Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the imaginative potential of the attic and cellar are discussed at length, but almost nothing is said about the kitchen, which I believe best focuses our hopes for the future. The bathroom may be similarly clean and futuristic-looking, but it is a private space, which perhaps is why “bathroom of the future” doesn’t have much of a ring to it. We have many kitchens of the future to choose from, however. The Museum of Modern Art even put on an exhibit in 2010, Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen, showing documentation of several of these. The project of advancing the kitchen into the future is one that brings together art/design approaches, technology, consumer-focused concerns, and the broader social world, so I will use this example to conclude my initial discussion of the future, to show how new types of future-building can be more limited or might break free of certain cultural concepts.

The kitchen is our maker space, where new technologies are particularly welcome, whether they are to be used for sous vide cooking or to hermetically store kimchi. We had a standing desk in our kitchen long before we had one in our home office. Smart refrigerators (the kind that order food when you’re low on staples) were iconic of ubiquitous computing in the home, as it was imagined early on. The kitchen can be closed off, a separate room with a door setting it apart, but very often is open to guests, as a part of the social life of the house. The kitchen is even charged with both creative and destructive potential: As police officers responding to domestic violence calls are well aware, the kitchen is the place that offers the widest range of improvised weapons. Because the kitchen also offers dangers, even in ordinary use—from fires, being cut on blades, being pierced by broken glass, or suffering injuries from blenders and food processors—this part of the house also has plenty of room for improvement, for better safety as well as better functionality.

Kitchens have been run for the upper classes by domestic servants, have been considered the proper place for midcentury U.S. housewives, and are now getting harder to maintain as truly usable parts of the house as more people in the United States are moving to smaller living quarters in cities. The kitchen is therefore involved in social issues of class, gender, and urban life as well as serving as a technology showcase. In the mid-twentieth century, it’s certainly the case that “kitchens—futuristic or not—are thick with messages about the cultural meanings of feminized domestic labor and about prevailing understandings of the relationship between women and technology.”4 The way kitchens are imagined also, of course, has to do with people’s relationship to food and the industries that supply it. It’s hard to just add technology to a kitchen without having some idea of how people’s social lives are changing and should change in a broader context. Some would even say that this social context looms much larger than the technologies that are usually our focus—as one image of the kitchen of tomorrow suggests (figure 1).

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Figure 1 Barnes & Reinecke (Chicago, established 1934). Publicity photo for Future Kitchen scale model. Silver gelatin print. Architecture and Design Study Collection. Photo: Charles McKinney, Chicago, c. 1946.

In 1944, as World War II neared an end and companies began to wonder about what would be done with the return of consumer demand, Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass developed “Tomorrow’s Kitchen.” This was a design based on what new properties of glass could accomplish—as with a famous video that I will discuss in chapter 8. It was one of many kitchens of the future. Among other things, this one offered to almost eliminate most cookware by having everything—even a waffle iron—integrated into the countertops. The few pots and pans that would still be needed would stow away and could be used as serving dishes.

This kitchen was documented in Life magazine, and its virtues were extolled there and in other news articles. For instance, the Uniontown Morning Herald noted that “between meal times and without the help of a magic wand the kitchen can almost instantly be transformed into a gaily-decorated play-room for the children.”5 Sounds like a great repurposing of the most weapon- and hazard-filled room in the house, particularly given that one would have to kick the kids out when it’s time to cook.

In 2015 at the New Museum Triennial, the collective DIS presented a different sort of kitchen of the future, in their installation The Island (Ken), a functioning kitchen island that allows a woman to relax and bathe herself in flows of water as she also washes lettuce (see figure 2).

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Figure 2 DIS, The Island (KEN) (2015). In collaboration with Dornbracht. Co-designed by Mike Meiré.

This project is rather hilarious, but it isn’t hard to see that the functions of this installation are based on stereotypical feminine activities—the comforts of a self-pampering bath, the ease of food preparation for the family. The Island (Ken) just takes what consumer society already thinks of women’s activities in the home and brings these notions together in a convenient package. Yes, it’s especially funny when the function of bathing, relegated to the bathroom, is joined with one from the more public and social kitchen. But any kitchen of the future, when designed for the woman of the past, has a tendency to amplify old ideas about where and how women should work in the home.6

As Rose Eveleth wrote, “No matter how far in the future we imagine, in the kitchen, it is always the 1950s, it is always dinnertime, and it is always the wife’s job to make it.”7 But rather than take this observation as a reason to abandon the kitchen as a portal into the future, I’ll offer a few other ideas about how to redesign this part of the house, just to get us thinking.

Of course, my suggestions (including one that has already been realized by a design firm) are mostly based on existing social ideas and constraints on consumption of food. They are not original, and in a few years, some of these may seem extremely silly. But they are nevertheless ideas that could, by being otherwise focused, escape the most housewife-confining concept of the kitchen of the future, one that plagued this room throughout the twentieth century.

My point in speculating about the kitchen in this way is that one cannot imagine better technologies just existing by themselves—not productively. Technologies, like the people who use them, have social lives, and so one must imagine the social future as well as the improvements brought by better materials, better engineering, and new types of computation. As I detail the way we conceive of the future today, and the way we can try to undertake future-building, this connection between the social (and cultural, and political) world and the specifics of new, imagined technologies will be a common thread. It can be sensible to start thinking about the future in the kitchen; we just need to look beyond our existing social assumptions. And, of course, our thinking shouldn’t stop there.

Notes