What is Future Backwards Design?

Future Backwards Design invites us to begin by believing we can escape the powerful tacit logics of the present via speculative ideation. These practices seduce us with the provocation of a future we wish to inhabit. The unfounded claim is that rather than projecting forward from today’s trends, this approach allows us to escape the horizon of the present: What if we start from a novel vision of 10, 20, or even 30 years out—and work backwards to map the critical inflection points, capabilities, and actions needed to get there?

At its heart, Future Backwards Practices claim to be a strategic methodology for creativity and innovation that reverses the usual direction of planning. Instead of forecasting from the present into the unknown, we anchor ourselves in a compelling future scenario and trace our way back, step by step, to the present.

The profound problem with these methods is that they assume that the future will be an extension of the present. And because of this, they have no way of accounting for qualitative novelty or emergence. As such, they give us a false sense of causality, the nature of the future, and how the future emerges in a non-linear and radically indirect manner from the present.

We need to move away from such logics toward emergent, distributed, enactive logics that refuse the illusion of future backwards planning and embrace the creative act of co-emerging with an open, dynamic future-in-the-making.

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See also: Emergence, Exaptation, Configurations