John Thackara and the Map of the Decade

It's often the case that an outsider can see things in your work that you can't. John Thackara recently posted about the IFTF Map of the Decade, and exposed some elements of its intellectual heritage that I hadn't known about:

Jason Tester, an alumnus of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, is helping IFTF enhance its maps by the development of 'artefacts from the future'. At Ivrea, the design of enticing representations of imagined futures was regarded as a core process, and a technique was introduced there by the English service designers Live|Work. Live|Work called their technique evidencing. One of the roots of evidencing, in turn, was the development by Tony Dunne and Bill Gaver of "cultural probes" at the Royal College of Art during the late 1990s (where the Live|Work guys studied interaction design). I don't suggest that a linear history is playing out here - but every now and again in the chaotic blizzard of life one briefly glimpses tracks in the snow.

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