Designing Postdigital Futures: Which Designs? Whose Futures?
Felicitas Macgilchrist, Heidrun Allert, Teresa Cerratto Pargman, Juliane Jarke
Abstract
Designing technology for education is never only a problem-solving practice. It is always already about creating spaces for inherently political and affective sociotechnical future relations (Light and Akama 2014 ). These can point towards ‘big futures’, i.e. radical ruptures and epochal change, or ‘little futures’, emergent processes in mundane, everyday practices (Michael 2017 ; Pink et al. 2022 ). Beginning with these assumptions, this commentary identifies key issues for concern at the nexus of futures, education, and design in the postdigital condition, in which digital technologies are embedded throughout educational spaces, but no longer conceived as a panacea for socio-economic-ecological ills. Instead, power relations and tensions lie at the heart of assumptions about designing futures. In the midst of the inequitable ‘planetary ruins’ in which we now live, learn, and teach (Tsing et al. 2017 ), we need new narratives about the future (Facer 2019 ).