Significant mutations of everyday life over the past 15 years have been integrally tied up with innovations in digital technologies. We can now see a similar trajectory underway in relation to biotechnologies – not as a different technological event, but one that builds on changes and capacities developed by the digital. It seems more than likely that biotechnological innovations will become increasingly intertwined and infused throughout the realm of domestic everyday life in unprecedented ways, and that this will modify the patterns and rhythms of everyday life (something very much underway). As such, how might we imagine everyday life of the near future? What ethical and aesthetic challenges are we likely to face? Might our future imaginings indicate more about hidden dimensions of the present, than of any likely future?

In a context of palpable economic, environmental, socio-cultural and political change, ideas about innovation (of how we create valuable difference) is also changing, involving a shift in emphasis to ‘open’ platforms. As Nigel Thrift has put it, this involves a move away from the idea of innovation as “a trawling for the new” and toward “the continuous process of interaction that now seems to be becoming characteristic.” (Non-Representational Theory, 2008, p33) This trend has been largely related to digital technologies. Once again, what relevance might this particular trend have for the coming biotechnological era (and vice versa)?

Models of instrumental control have largely been usurped by emergence: a model of change and evolution defined by the absence of simple cause and effect relations. Global communities are aware that we need to innovate, quickly, in finding ways to guide our future trajectories toward better rather than the worst of imagined futures. We find ourselves in conditions wherein we increasingly strive to innovate in preparation for the predicted, rather than for problems already known. In other words, we are finding ourselves working with problems that are still emerging, or haven’t happened yet. In this light we perhaps need to focus less on problems, and more on how to realise, develop and manage potential. This is what we are pursuing here, initially through the act of exploring and designing futures and/or alternative worlds as a way of realising potential in the present.

Investigations undertaken via this blog facilitate aspects of a project funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, and involves a collaboration between The School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia) and the SymbioticA Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts at UWA (Perth, Australia).

In 2009, three investigatory projects are being carried out:
1. Plastic Futures 1: designing for change
RMIT seminar with architecture students, exploring futuring and plasticity.
May to March 2009
2. Plastic Futures 2: emergence, adaptation and communities of tomorrow
Intensive workshops at RMIT and SymbioticA leading to Plastic Futures exhibition for Victorian State of Design Festival
June/July 2009
3. Plastic Futures 3: SymbioticA Biotech Art and Design Workshop
November 16-20, 2009