“Alicia Shao is a Senior Service Designer at The LEGO Group, an external lecturer at the Köln International School of Design and L’École de Design Nantes Atlantique, founder of Future Unfurled and a most importantly, a futurist at heart”.
Her brief bio is concise as relevant: I stumbled upon her teachings in Amsterdam, at the October 2024 Awwwards, and I found in her words not only inspiration but also that kind of hope that, in our dystopic times, fuels life and creativity. I contacted her after the conference and asked if we could interview her. She was extremely kind, and here are her answers.
Future is one of my favorite topics: some time ago, I stumbled upon an intriguing statement—there are numerous animal species with language, sometimes very rich and sophisticated, but the only species that, as far as we know, has a future verb tense and the very concept of the future embedded in its language is humans. This is said to have provided a greater evolutionary advantage than the opposable thumb, which we share with other primates. Interestingly, in Italian, it’s becoming increasingly common in conversations to avoid the future tense (“I will go to the cinema tonight”) to describe future actions, favoring the present tense instead (“I’m going to the cinema tonight”), as if stating something in the future appears naive or fragile, while affirming it in the present makes it feel already realized. What do you think about the status of the “future” as a concept in media culture?
That’s such an interesting question! There are studies show that language really shapes how we see time, which then affects how we think about the future. In English, for example, we tend to see time as linear, and we also talk about time the same way we talk about money. We “spend” time, we “save” time, we hope something is “worth our time.” I think the abstraction of time extends to our abstraction of the future, since future is just time yet to come. Through the abstraction of time in our language, we have commodified the future, turning it into something to manage or control rather than just experience.
If we consider media its own language, you find some trends of commodifying future there too. The future isn’t just something we imagine, it’s something we consume. Sci-fi movies, dystopian thrillers, futuristic worlds… they don’t just explore what’s possible; they package the future as entertainment. I am speaking generically here about media portrayals, but it’s often more about the spectacle than the substance. We get the same cyberpunk cityscapes, AI villains, space colonization stories, but they rarely push us to rethink the present. The future becomes a genre, something predictable, rather than a space for real imagination.
For the records I would watch a blockbuster sci-fi movie any day, it is just when the future is commodified as idle entertainment, it can feel distant, predetermined, or out of our hands. It’s easy to consume these visions without questioning them, but I think the real power of the future is using it as a tool—to reflect, to challenge, to guide what we do now.
A very moving article published recently highlights how difficult it is for us to feel empathy for future generations. In some countries, declining birth rates have become a conscious and even desirable choice. In your discussions, do you sense a prevailing desire for an individualistic future rather than a collective one?
Another great question! At first glance, it seems impossible to feel empathy for future generations who doesn’t exist, and may never exist. But this is not a unique issue – In Imaginable by Jane McGonigal, she talks about the issue of people perceiving their future selves in third person, as when you think about yourself in 10 years, most people imagine another person standing in front of them, that looks like them but older, instead of seeing it from a first person perspective. It seems that we can’t even empathise with our own future self and imagine them as another person all together. But despite these evidences, we actually feel empathy for non-existent people all the time.
We laugh and cry with fictional characters in TVs and movies, we feel a sense of longing and melancholy thinking about the person we were or could’ve been. There are 2 kinds of empathy when we talk about the future, emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. Emotional empathy refers to the ability to literally feel what another person feels, while cognitive empathy refers to the ability to understand what another person feels, without necessarily feeling it yourself. An example of this could be that you understand why your friend is frustrated by a situation they are in, without feeling the frustration yourself. However cognitive empathy is less intuitive than emotional empathy, it requires conscious effort to cultivate. I think the first step is always learning to build our cognitive empathy for our present environment, empathising with the complex and sometimes contradictive attributes of the people from around us. Then, moving onto building empathy for our own future self – start seeing our future selves as an extension of you right now, rather than from a 3rd person perspective, and finally, we can move onto building empathy for the collective at large. The final piece is much easier said than done, in my classes, I have an exercise where I get all the students to write a diary entry on the same day of as someone living in whatever future we are designing for. Then, we have a diary reading session where we review all the multitudes and complexities that one day may have. This really helps the students see the future and these future people as something more “real”, because they see that the future is just as complex and multi-faceted as our present reality. I think empathy for the collective is not only needed but crucial, because after all why should you pay more for sustainable products, or give up eating meat, or drive an electrical car for someone that doesn’t exist, may never exist, and will not do a single thing for you? Building empathy for the collective is what will help drive behaviour change especially when we talk about future generations.
Science fiction has helped shape our present as the dreamed future of its writers—the inventor of the mobile phone (not the smartphone, the actual mobile phone) openly admitted to being inspired by the tricorders in Star Trek. However, there now seems to be a shortsightedness about the future; the visions we are presented with are often dystopian or cold, whereas I was captivated by your comments at Awwwards about a “future inevitably warm and not bloodless, because it is born of our breath.” One of my theories is that many people have stopped believing in a different future because the current state of things feels both inevitable and, at the same time, desirable: in a Western context where people generally live with dignity, the fear of losing stability outweighs the drive to find new solutions, leading to economic monopolies and populism. In other cultures, social mobility is simply not possible. Does this resonate with your experience? Do you have any other perspectives you’d like to share?
I think this question greatly relates back to the part about empathy for the future. I don’t believe we’ve lost the ability to imagine a different future, it’s just that the dominant narratives we consume oscillates between two extremes, either we’re headed toward technological utopia (AI saving humanity, space colonization, etc.), or we’re spiralling into dystopia (climate collapse, authoritarianism, AI taking over). It makes sense that when we talk about the future, it is often volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. These are uncomfortable feelings to sit with, so in the attempt to make the future more digestible, we flip these words around to create futures that encompasses stability, certainty, simplicity and clarity. The problem is that in this process, we have greatly reduced the future into tropes and we lose a lot of the possibilities along the way. Different cultures, different values, different people will produce different futures. The problem isn’t just the fear of losing stability, it’s that we don’t see a variety of futures to choose from.
Another trap is we sometimes treating “the future” as something separate from reality—something linear and easy to categorize. But the future isn’t a neatly packaged concept, we don’t experience reality in black and white—we live in shades of gray, navigating both beauty and struggle, progress and setbacks, hope and fear. The future should be imagined with that same complexity. It should account for contradictions, unexpected shifts, and the deeply human ways in which people adapt, resist, and create meaning. A truly humanized future is one that isn’t just about technological progress or economic stability, it’s about the full spectrum of human experience, with all its warmth, friction, and unpredictability. I really like the quote from Love at first sight by Wislawa Szymborska, “Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.”
The concept of the future is also a deeply cultural bias, varying greatly from country to country: values and choices diverge radically between younger and older nations. Europe and the United States tend to see themselves as the center of the universe, but—through the eyes of the rest of the world—they lost this role long ago. Do you think we are moving towards cultural polarization and a phenomenon of partial deglobalization?
Yes to a certain extent but there are also active efforts to combat these. This is also a long debate in the field of future studies that it is heavily focused on the global north, but there are organisations that focuses on bringing voices from the global south into the conversation. I think often we associate future with technological progress, which is why it often feels like it’s only centered around the global north, but as futurists say – sometimes you have to look back to look forward. We are now finding many ways that indigenous knowledge or traditional ecological knowledge that helps us live and produce more sustainably. Afterall future affects everyone, and everyone is an active actor in pushing future forward. The more voices are at the table, the easier it is to make the future we want, happen. In my personal experience, the field of future studies is much bigger than what it was just 3 or 5 years ago, and I am seeing, talking, connecting with many more futurists from all parts of the world, which is a great signal to me!
Many nations are not halting immigration outright but instead aim to have full control over who enters their borders. At the same time, we hear more or less appropriate outcries against cultural appropriation. Some time ago, I heard an Italian politician say, “…for centuries, we were skilled merchants and navigators, traveling the world and sharing our finest goods, and now we’re closing ourselves in, hiding within four walls to defend what little we have.” Do you think cultural exchange and contamination are still considered a value and a wealth? Even in terms of products and how they are conceived?
This may be a little out of my field of expertise, but I have some interesting signals to add to the conversation. As we see from the last few years of digitalisation as accelerated by the pandemic, the physical borders between cities, states, and countries are diminishing. Some interesting signals I collected includes the “nomadic” visa that allows people to work in different countries, or when USA banned TikTok earlier in the year, TikTok users migrated to the Chinese app RedNote and called themselves “refugees” or “explorers”, with Chinese users jokingly responding providing “asylum” and “skilled worker visa” on the app. These points to interesting trend that technology being a border-blurring force between our physical and digital spaces. However, while technology enables exchange, digital spaces themselves are becoming more regulated. Countries are implementing their own policies around AI, data privacy, and internet access—China’s Great Firewall being one of the most prominent examples, and few years ago the proposed Net Neutrality debate also points to the same direction. Meanwhile, algorithm-driven content platforms increasingly create echo chambers, where people engage primarily with like-minded perspectives, shaping and sometimes isolating cultural narratives.
Because of these shifts, cultural contamination will always stay relevant, but what constitutes “culture” and what are the borders it crosses are changing. In the past, cultural exchange happened through physical migration, trade, or artistic diffusion. Now, it happens through algorithmic curation, digital communities, and even geopolitical control over online spaces. The question may not be whether cultural exchange still holds value, but rather what the borders around our culture are, and who controls them.
Every major tech company wakes up each morning with the precise idea of finding the successor to the smartphone, both as a physical object and as the next megatrend. The new generations, however, seem to avoid even the most conventional forms of communication. Do we really need a “new smartphone”?
The search for the next smartphone is really a search for the next way to fulfill a fundamental human need. Some things change about the future, but what doesn’t change is the needs that we have. We will always have the need to connect, to access information, to express ourselves, to be entertained. If a better way emerges, the smartphone will naturally fade away. A smartphone is just the best tool we have right now to get the job done. This is like that Henry Ford’s quote, if you ask people what they want, they’ll say faster horses. A new smartphone is our “faster horse.” It’s the dominant tool because it integrates so many jobs into one, but that doesn’t mean it will always be the best solution. In the same way, if younger generations are rejecting “conventional” methods of communication, it just means that it doesn’t fulfil their current needs for communication and they want to do it differently – and one day their preferred method will become the new normal. What changes about the future is the technology that we use to serve our needs, so perhaps the future is wearable devices, perhaps it’s brain-computer interface, perhaps it really is just a new smartphone.