A dispatch from Nick Foster, from the future…

My new book Could Should Might Don’t is about how we think about the future.

I may be biased, but as I see it, thinking about the future with depth, detail and rigor is an increasingly important skill. And yet none of us is very good at it. I should know: I’ve been thinking about the future professionally—within companies like Google, Sony and Nokia—for the last 25 years, and I’ve seen countless people stumble and crumble whenever the conversation turns towards the future.

In the book, I break this type of thinking into four buckets—Could, Should, Might, and Don’t—and explore the origins, strengths and weaknesses of each. It’s a wildly varied set of approaches, but through them all runs is one common theme: when talking about the future, we all tend to view it as somewhere else, somewhere extreme, or somewhere other. But the future is actually none of those things. It’s simply an evolution of the present, just as the present is an evolution of the past.

In my work, I’ve found that presenting future changes as ordinary, familiar moments has an uncanny knack of grounding conversations in ways that escapist movies, shocking statistics, or fantastical images struggle to do. The future is, in a word, mundane.

As a way to get these conversations started, I have a long history of taking everyday items—snackfood packaging, receipts, parking tickets or newspaper adverts—and using them as canvases to tell stories about the future. This is a simple way to make major changes feel normalised, lived in and relatable, a process that we refer to in the biz as ‘Design Fiction’.

As a nod to that work, when it came to promoting Could Should Might Don’t, I naturally reached for the tinned tomatoes and breakfast cereal. I’m not about to claim that a huge amount of detailed thought or critique went into these objects and images, but they do make me smile, which is sometimes all that we need. And while the products may be fictional, the lasagna recipe is entirely real—try it out! It’s a winner…