Beyond the obvious negative connotations of futurists, I’ve long been drawn to realities that imagine me in their ideas. One of the inherent contradictions of being a minority in the West, is always being aware that statehood, nationality, and the contents therein are fraught with complexities. You are what you say you are, but not everyone accepts this as fact.

So much of speculation is framing what you think tomorrow ought to look like. It’s easy to ignore people you don’t see in that reality, not always out of malice, but a myopia that is hard won. If you’ve always lived on the other side of the tracks, it’s hard to imagine a world that’s different. Even when you venture elsewhere, indelibable memories shape the lens of how we see the world unless you venture far afield and are forced to practice new ways of living and being.

One of my deep frustrations with long-range plans by elected leaders, working groups, and committees is they’re always ambitious, rosy and completed ignorant of the realities of the practice.

Lou Downe’s book Good Services talks about 15 principles of good services, aimed to be some kind of building blocks of what services are composed of. what the principles lack are the constraints to what makes services good. Service design has borrowed so much from user experience and interaction design that there’s often difficulty in seeing the differences and being able to differentiate the disciplines.

Service design needs more differentiation. At its core, service design is about people and the things they interact with. There are a lot of gaps between what service designs are involved with and where they should be participating. Right now, service designers are working on interactive problems, trying to make widgets better and improving the flow of making, buying and selling stuff. This is important work, but not knowing how to make something doesn’t make it easier for designers to move forward. Without being able to stop something that isn’t good, without something isn’t great.

Towards Civil Futures

In my mind, there’s a gap between the stuff that gets done and the people who need the services. There’s a poor information flow that needs disintermediation between the stakeholders, decisionmakers, and so forth and the people at the root of whatever services, system or platform. I was thinking a lot about civil engineering and the infrastructure of physical experiences and how there lacks a nomeclature and speciificity of roles for people who work spatiatlly betwen interaction and physical and being able to translate the lessons and learnings of these interactive layers more fludily and easily. The longer you work on engagements in certain spaces, the more context you develop for the problems of that specific space and how to translate the concepts of your own work.

Right now, there’s no real job in any of this. People just show up and start trying to figure it out. Even if you write it all down, unless someone else has also experienced that same situation there’s no good way to make sense of the actual role you did, because it’s part management, part operations, part strategy, part advisory and researcher all at once. These roles exist across multiple industries and fields, but few are as peremable as designing in the civic - public sector/sphere.

Being able to grow and advance the practice of whatever service design purports to be, requires the field (?) to develop itself as a profession and practice that goes beyond the professional email job that it’s percevied as now, coupled with whatever veneer of tech workerdom that helps the roles catch the fumes of tech salaries and downstream prestige.

Civil futures is a conceptual bet that isn’t a real profession, but has one embedded. With the ways that bureaucracts persist in the ecosystem of any government, the attraction of these roles to a sort of hall monitor-type individual prevents the sorts of progress that gets demanded by the public, coupled with the artificial noise between the public, the bureaucractic layer, any sort of press/lobbying and the decisionmakers themselves. Civic futures thinks ahead and epowers people with the strategic foresight skills melded with the other stuff to make a more holistic, impactful industry.

Civil futures imagines something past what public administration roles already do, positioning people with strategic foresight and tech fluency into roles that helps move stuff forward in places.