Books
Dark Matter and Trojan Horses. A strategic Design Vocabulary - Dan Hill
Future Positive - Edward de Bono
Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure - Vaclav Smil
Not Here, Not Now - Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming - Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design - Anthony Dunne
More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology - Ruth Schwartz Cowan
The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 - David Edgerton
Towards the Realm of Materiality - Designing Philip K. Dick’s Non-Existing Technologies - German A. Duarte, Andrea Facchetti and Seçil Ugur Yavuz
What Technology Wants - Kevin Kelly
The Future - Nick Montfort
Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World - Georgina Voss
Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema - David A. Kirby
The Future: A Very Short Introduction - Jennifer M. Gidley
New Dark Age - Technology and the End of the Future - James Bridle
The Seven Measures of the World - Piero Martin
Not Here, Not Now: Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination - Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Rescuing All Our Futures : The Future of Futures Studies - Ziauddin Sardar
Dark Horizon : Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination - Tom Moylan, Raffaella Baccolini
Designing Futures: Speculation, Critique, Innovation - Eileen Mandir and Benedikt Groß
The Extrapolation Factory Operator’s Manual - Elliott P Montgomery and Chris Woebken
The World as a Mathematical Game - John von Neumann and Twentieth Century Science - Giorgio Israel and Ana Millán Gasca
The Analogue Alternative - The Electronic Analogue Computer in Britain and the USA, 1930-1975 - James S Small
Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures - The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Kevin Strait, and Kinshasha Holman Conwill
The Manual of Design Fiction - Exploring “the practice of creating tangible and evocative prototypes from possible near futures, to help discover and represent the consequences of decision making”.
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence - Kate Crawford
Articles
It’s 2020 and you’re in the future - A lovely, short post by Tim Urban which illustrates how we struggle with timelines and chronology (see also)
Design and the Construction of Imaginaries - A transcript of an incredible talk given by Tobias Revell to the Bartlett Cinematic and Videogame Architecture course in 2024
The man who saw the future - Art Kleiner - The story of Pierre Wack, Shell and the birth of Scenario Planning
The Bubble That Tony Built - Nick Cohen - A lengthy takedown of the Millennium Dome
The Radical Design Movement - An excellent overview of the underpinning explorations which led to the emergence of Speculative Design
The Image of The Future - Fred Polak - English translation of Polak’s epic book from 1961
Small Vehicles of Shanghai — DeepSeeking the city - Dan Hill - An excellent exploration of how technological change happens
Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real - Charles Stross in Scientific American
Moral Choices Without Moral Language: 1950s Political-Military Wargaming at the RAND Corporation - Texas National Security Review
Better - Daisy Ginsberg’s excellent thesis on the problematic word ‘Better’
The Futures Cone - Joseph Voros’ now classic blog post about this useful futures device
Sci-Fi Interfaces - Chris Noessel’s exhaustive site tracking computer interfaces in Sci-Fi movies.
“Zeerust” - The particular kind of datedness which afflicts things that were originally designed to look futuristic.
Design and Futures - A major collection of essays, manifestos, interviews and peer-reviewed articles, edited by Stuart Candy and Cher Potter (PDF)