KMYQ7_Futures Interrupted

M.A. Materials, Anthropology and Design Dissertation
Futures Interrupted:
Future-making and Other Stories in
London Consumer Research Practices
Sakti Nuzan
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment
of the requirements for the degree of
M.A. in Materials, Anthropology and Design (UCL)
of the University of London in 2016
Word Count: 14,988
University College London
Department of Anthropology
Note: This dissertation is an unrevised examination copy for consultation only and it
should not be quoted or cited without the permission of the Chair of the Board of
Examiners for the MA in Materials, Anthropology and Design (UCL)

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Abstract
This writing examines the relationship between future, practice,
knowledge and self within design-led consumer research endeavors.
Utilising ethnographic methods, it derives analysis from encounters with
professionals working in agencies and consultancies in London. This
writing argues that there are disparate typologies of future at play in such
enterprises: from futures that are assigned to practice and put forth as
symbolic goods to institutionalised ‘social futures’ that internally affect the
individuals, both discretely and collectively. Also considered is the way the
notion of future exerts influence on the dynamics of practice itself by
accentuating the actors’ subtle capacity as future-makers, taking into
account the roles of such practice in cultural production, which develops
distinct ways of extracting and exchanging knowledge from, among many,
design and social research methods. This is concluded by suggesting the
weight in seeing futures as a cultural notion, which provides scope for a
wider contextual comprehension among the increasingly global practices.

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Table of Contents
Abstract...........................................................................................2
Table of Contents..........................................................................3
Acknowledgements ......................................................................4
Introduction ..................................................................................5
Methodology ................................................................................10
Literature Review ......................................................................13
Temporality and Anthropological Advancement of ‘Future’..................13
Fabricated Futures and the “Turn to Technology” ................................16
Design and the Practice of Future-making ............................................20
Situating Design and Consumer Research within Cultural
Production ................................................................................................23
Framework for Analysis ..........................................................................25
Ethnography & Analysis...........................................................28
Future as Symbolic Good.........................................................................29
Bourdieu’s Fields and Practice of Cultural Intermediation ..................33
Practice and Future-making ...................................................................36
External Futures......................................................................................41
Conclusion....................................................................................45
Bibliography................................................................................49

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Acknowledgements
I am forever grateful to the helps from these special people
throughout various stages of this dissertation.
Dr. Adam Drazin, whom conscientious guidance spurred me on to venture
through new and exciting ways of thinking about what it means to
straddle between the hybrid and ever-uncertain discourse, kept me from
going astray, and assured me of the simple fact that this will come out
fruitful in the end, which I too often neglected.
My informants who gave up time among their busy schedules to
accommodate this research.
Hilary and Claudia for taking the time to read and comment, fellow
anthropology students for the endless motivation exchange in the (many)
times of distress, and the faculty at the UCL Anthropology department for
making this past year a thrilling and unforgettable ride.
Panda for exporting insights from Kanazawa and for the
encouragements to advance in this uncharted territory; Shabrina, for the
invaluable help with the tedious bit of researching; Andi, Gamia and
Annya for the warm home.
Most importantly, I would not have been able to even imagine this
accomplishment without the overflowing support from my mother, whom
compassion and hard work nurture me; my late father whom qualities,
good and bad, I inherit contentedly; and my brother.
Finally, this research would not have been possible without the
generous funding from the Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education.
My extended gratitude to family and friends, all of which are dearly
loved.

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Introduction
Addressing future as a social problem compels us to consider the
manifold layers of it, and to go beyond the simple knowledge of the
difference between our own and everybody else’s futures. Across the domain
of social sciences, the debate leaps beyond the philosophical approach of
the solitariness of temporality and time (an eminent example would be
Martin Heidegger’s text Being and Time) and advances the term as
culturally problematic. What dictates when future as a concept might be
taken as existential or social? Take, for a straightforward example, the
future of a nation. Such future will certainly, to a great extent, conflict with
those of other nations, so must be negotiated to be won over. Yet it will also
be intertwined with smaller ones, all of which are constitutive to the
‘national’ one, and are characteristic to particular communities, class,
geographical surroundings, ways of living, and so on; and even more
complicated with futures withheld by each individual within these groups.
Thus a nation’s or a group’s future cannot be considered as merely an
augmented version of futures that are individual: since although we
nurture our own futures, the collective ones, however external, affect them
still. It is on this ground that Urry (2016), before his untimely passing just
a month before the time of this writing, presses his argument for ‘social
futures’ – with emphasis on the plural form – to note the effects of potential
futures on lives, practices, and even social institutions. In this regard, they
are thus also political: be it bound by law, religion or social codes, one must
consent to her place in the future in accordance with the enforced social
ones which applies in almost all circumstances.
I understand that when taking modern concepts of nation as
examples, we can easily succumb to discussing democracy in which
political freedom is central, and therefore conclude individuals as having
the right and means to act according to their own visions. Sadly, this is a

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rather simplistic rationality. Collective futures, although could be
purported as representative of its members, are more often than not
structurally imposed on individuals, and by means of subtle persuasion.
Even today, it is argued that futures are not evenly proportioned, as
aspirations are perpetually contested (Appadurai 2013). This can be
potentially seen as the expansion of the position of self in functioning
nations or government bodies, which ideas are attributable to thinkers
from Weber to Foucault, but it is also true of smaller institutional layers
that act in shaping identities, social positions, relations between actors,
and of course the trajectory of futures (Michael 2000). Economics scholar
Ha-Joon Chang makes a particularly pertinent observation when
explaining the logic of ‘confidence’ in banking, where people are expected
to believe in something that “could be true or false, depending on how many
others believe in it” (2014: 281). Likewise; collective futures, too, have
similarly evolved to be a sort of complex ‘confidence trick’ up to the point
of they becoming “a big business” (Brown, Rapport and Webster 2000).
For us modern humans, prescient understandings not only of one’s
own, but of others’ positions in the time ahead are virtually prerequisite.
This makes headways for an active domain of future-making that
encapsulates our pre-emptive nature for the times to come, which,
according to Urry, “[has] profound consequences for the present” (2016: 8).
We are closer and more familiar with the future than ever, as manifested
in roles and pursuits that pulls our consciousness closer to the coming
times. For example, we have the widespread use of phrases such as ‘future-
proofing’ in both advertising and architecture, engineering and
construction (AEC) industries1. We cannot dismiss our familiarity with the
way science fiction (usually pessimistically) depict futural visualisations
by prophesying what is in store for humankind. We are conversant with
how finance industry speculates with the ever uncertain flux, not only of
figures that project future values of stocks, but also of the intricate moods
of the broker-dealers and countless other actors. Trend forecasters, in
many industrial, commercial, and cultural applications, gaze into their
crystal balls by reading and connecting clues either from the past, the
1 Just the other day as I wrote this introduction, an unsolicited advert email came into my inbox telling
me to ‘follow the five easy steps to future-proof’ my career. As troublesome as the phrase can be, it is
utilised extensively. However it has to be noted that in AEC industries, as is also in engineering design,
the term is primarily reserved to technical jargon, such as in sustainable and energy-saving activities
or materials.

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present, or both. Scholars, most relevantly in the social sciences, but also
extending to politics, environment, technology and humanity are also
present in advancing the topic, notably progressing along with the postwar
abstraction of stability (Newfield 2005). Journals such as Futures or
Foresight, for instance, serve as a potpourri that ‘seek[s] to promote
divergent ideas and opinions about the future’. Future studies or
futurology is even progressing as a branch of knowledge, which some argue
originated from H. G. Wells’s rumination on technological and historical
advancements in Anticipations (1902), that includes mathematical method
of extrapolation to yield technical and narrative predictions of the future.
Finally, the contemporary world witnessed how design, either as a
pragmatic discipline or culture (Drazin 2013; Julier 2008), percolated
many aspects of everyday life and steadily transformed its vista with
innumerable aspirations associated with the act of constructing future. Its
ubiquity is ascribed not merely to the increasing demands for applications,
but also to being as far as a fundamental human faculty, which Herbert
Simon (1969) alludes to when saying “everyone designs who devises
courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”
(p. 111).
Thus the heedful and anticipative characteristic of design is
extensible to an inexhaustible spectrum, not least to wide professional
endeavours. Following the burgeoning business of expert advice in
consumer culture in the form of consultancies, the commercial world also
began to forage for design knowledge that departs from ‘conventional’
services (e.g. product or graphic design) to induce interdisciplinary
expertise that suffuses application-oriented researches with provocative
methods. In recent years, this has gained significance and reshaped the
landscape of consulting industry, where agencies combine design
knowledge with methods from social research, business administration, to
innovation studies to provide their clients with access to knowledge about
consumer in lieu of traditional market research (Rodgers & Yee 2014;
Moisander & Valtonen 2006).
In this dissertation, I will be particularly focusing on the extended
use of design knowledge in consumer research enterprises, which I call
‘design-led consumer research’, and its interrelatedness with futurity.
Firstly, following Michael (2000) that future and temporality are
fabricated, I venture to describe future as a cultural imperative that

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dictates distinctive practices and collective sensemaking (Weick, Sutcliffe
& Obstfeld 2005). These, however, are fulfilled across variable typologies
of future, all of which retain characteristic social properties and therefore
demand different ways of understanding from my informants. Secondly, in
these ‘insight laden’ consultancies, I presume there are new kinds of
relationship between such experts and their clients that open up languages
such as ‘briefs’, ‘frameworks’, or ‘deliverables’ into different
manifestations, from the shape of concrete artefacts to ‘tacit knowledge’,
or “knowledge that is hard to grasp and cannot simply be written down”
(Mühlenhoff 2013). Proportional to that, also considered are the reciprocal
exchanges between the actors and their consumer subjects that are made
possible through experimental methods. Here, I argue that these
consultancy practices locate themselves in a particular junction in both
attempts of relaying knowledge and producing and intermediating culture
(Hesmondhalgh 2002).
I should state that I share my inquiry with that of professional
anthropologist Lucy Suchman (although doubtlessly on no account as
eloquent as she), whose oft-cited article in 2011 critically impugned the
way design and technology pan out as two celebrated notions that are too
often precipitously heralded as ‘universally good’. Contrasting the
ostensible optimism with anthropological awareness, Suchman makes
further call for us to attend to the contexts of, among all, localities, with
each carrying its own “cultural familiarity…[and] political and economic
centrality” (2011: 15-16). In this spirit, balancing an anthropological slant
of extracting knowledge from observation and interaction with a set of
apposite informants while specifically allotting ample presentiment on
such undertaking to carefully walk past the ‘cult of creativity’ gloss (Moor
2008) is essential. Here the choice of London as the backdrop to my
investigation hopefully pertains to both purposes, as the city adequately
represents a progressively global site for the many permutations of design
research in commercial settings to bloom, and for the same reason, also
provides sufficient challenge for my later analysis to further Suchman’s
plea.
The theoretical framework of this writing will be arranged in the
following order before culminating in the analysis: I will first look at
precursory accounts in anthropology to discern the cultural layers of
future, the capability of future-making, and, by a larger token, temporality

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as a concept, which is followed by the progressing debates in relation to
technological and scientific advancements, and later juxtaposed with
writings in design theories, specifically those that highlight design’s oft-
displayed potential to interact with the future. Finally, following Pierre
Bourdieu’s concepts of practice and cultural production (1979; 1993), I will
attempt to analyse the exertion of ‘futural’ and ‘designerly’ postures (in a
vigilant manner, I must add, as it is unmistakably unwise to abruptly
synonymise the two) among the professionals and their close proximity to
academic endeavours to explain the continuous dialogue between theory
and the formalisation of practice.
As the title of this dissertation suggests, design knowledge and the
way it challenges futures that are formerly unattainable will occupy much
of the discussion below; yet it is essential to acknowledge that design is
merely one way to talk about future. Through my brief examples, I hope it
will be apparent that, while design provides access to methods that aid the
creation of new knowledge to the otherwise inflexible pragmatic measures
in businesses, there is intricate entanglement of social and increasingly
political discourses in future-making, especially in relation to the
pervasive yet discrete practices of my informants.

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Methodology
This dissertation focusses on the varying methods and practices
that embodies the wider ethos of consumer research, but with specific
dedication to design and social research methods, especially anthropology.
It will be certainly misleading to identify these disciplines as proviso for
the burgeoning practices; however, it has been known that certain
approaches, such as scenario making from the first and ethnography from
the latter, have developed associative familiarity to professional practice
in the past years (Garvey & Drazin 2016). The scope of my research was
indeed more inclined to exploring the minutiae of habits and attitudes
toward different typologies of future rather than assigning an
epistemological basis to the ‘hybrid’ practices my informants do.
What motivates me more to pursue this particular theme is a
personal concern I developed while studying anthropology about the extent
of discernible access the subject has to future as cultural notion. Of course
the discipline has overcome many constructive (and epistemologically
deconstructive) debates, especially in the past three decades, most notably
with Paul Rabinow, George Marcus, and James Fabion’s recent discussion
with Tobias Rees on the effort of contemporising anthropology through
reflecting on the way a design studio works with conceptual tools (Rabinow
et al. 2008). Thus in an enhanced relation to design, the discipline is
transitioning into new terrains, although more substantially apparent in
practical applications rather than theoretical, and even so it is still done
in a rather chary manner2. Among my informants, this can be drawn by
scrutinising on how they perform different ‘futural’ methods that
2 We must be mindful that hybrid practices, in particular the ones exerted in the context of consumer
research, can only contribute partly to answer my question for they touch on epistemic notions only
just; yet they do enrich the breadth of each of the two sources as distinct disciplines. Therefore, the
notion of future-making is as much anthropological as it is about design.

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constitute their expertise. On a par with that, at the very beginning of my
research there also occurred an event I (rather opportunistically) regarded
as a felicitous chance to talk through what future can mean: the surprising
outcome of the 2016 EU referendum. Expanding on Riemer’s (1977) idea of
‘opportunistic research’ that takes account certain social phenomena that
emerge out of a sudden event, this global history-in-the-making
consequentially made particular social issues that was previously hidden
transparent. Within my informants’ professional circles, Brexit observably
affected layers of sentience from individual, collective, to corporate levels,
and thus through prompts such as the economic aftermath, changing
policies, or uncertain future for the young (which occupies most of the new
industry’s labour market), I can circumambulate between these layers
(Hammersley and Atkins 2007: 8).
The ethnography for this research took place over the course of
three months from June to August 2016, during which time I conducted
extended interviews and observations with a total of 7 practitioners in the
design-led marketing sphere across London. All of them work full-time for
different scales of agencies/consultancies, albeit can be equally classified
as either small or middle scale. The interviews spanned between half to
two hours and were all done at respective informants’ workplaces, and the
position of the professionals within the companies range from part-time,
associate to executive employees. In no particular order, the positions of
my informants are, Research Director, Innovation Manager, Founder,
Creative Strategist, and Research Intern.
The intricacy of getting and securing access to the ‘life world’ of my
subjects already unfurled when I attempted to make contact, as I found
that my initial intention to do a short internship in one company while
doing ethnographic research was, more or less, unrealistic. Some of the
companies I approached objected the lamentably short period of my
research, while others simply did not follow up after I fulfilled the
submission requirements. I did succeed in making access for a participant
observation while working as a project-based ‘apprentice’ in one of the
agencies later on; however, the observation is regrettably limited to only
rudimentary comprehension of the office’s workflow, inasmuch as I
managed to be present for merely irregular intervals, and for the duration
of less than a fortnight. This surely has its downside: there is difference
between being merely physically present in a place and having access to

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move freely among the social relations that take place there (Anderson
2006). Moreover, what an informant presents in an interview also cannot
be mistaken as contextually true for the entirety of the social space. It can
be difficult whether to infer utterances as representing collective or
individual views, and thus to discern the layered structures of the
professional setting. Settings are variable, constantly maintained through
social strategies (Hammersley and Atkins 2006), and more often than not
lead also to varying contexts that present in a single social space, leaving
anthropologists with challenges to distinguish between the ‘frontstage’ and
‘backstage’ of a social environment (Goffman 1959).
Nonetheless, this should not be seen as impediments to the chance
for critical analysis. Through this method, interviews and observations will
interchangeably act as ‘theoretical samplings’ (Glaser and Strauss 1967),
where a certain number of cases are studied to produce deeper
understanding of the subject. At least with examples from business and
institutional anthropology practices, this ‘spasmodic’ posture can be also
ideal to adroitly evade the ethical issues of working with and for
organisations (see Cefkin 2009). Likewise, my position and professional
background in the vicinity of design will in many ways affect the
standpoint I am taking for the research; however this close proximity
should be taken as advantageous. For instance, this very familiarity is
useful to build preparatory accesses to the meanings that guide my
informants’ behaviour (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007: 8).
Finally, concurring with the many reflections of preceding
ethnographies, my overriding concern is the precarious walk to pursuing
the representativeness of the research’s findings: could this enquiry
eventually epitomise the delicate world of qualitative research? The
immediate answer that replenishes this doubt is the understanding that
this text should not all the more aim to generalise; instead of collating cold
data to explain my findings in a concise set of pigeonholes, I am
concentrating more to put my analytical effort to describe and interpret a
specific occurrence with an intrinsic interest.

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Literature Review
This section outlines the literature that serves as theoretical
background for the research and the subsequent analysis in this
dissertation. Here the varying notions of future and, in parallel, the
concept of temporality will be examined from both anthropology and design
perspectives and, where relevant, compared to provide foundation for
further discussions. Alongside that, this section will also place the
‘prescriptive’ practice of knowledge-making in relation to design,
particularly in formalised settings and with futural orientations, as a
subject of theoretical investigation.
Temporality and Anthropological Advancement of ‘Future’
In many respects, it is not difficult to discern the consensus among
anthropologists that the progress of assorting futural dimensions with the
discipline has been perceptibly lagged (Wallman 1992; Rosenberg &
Harding 2005; Appadurai 2013). As the latter author pinpoints in his book
Future as Cultural Fact (2013), the conventional reluctance in imposing
progression and change into ‘pure culture’ arbitrarily construed the notion
as being immune to development, as did the spreading propensity to freeze
anthropological subjects narratively in “the present that has no before or
after (Wallman 1992: 6). These, Appadurai notices, hindered the flight
from “one or other kind of pastness” (2013: 180), and furthermore
overlooked, even dismissed the potential of future as a cultural receptacle.
To enrich our discussion, I shall first look for relevance between the
sociocultural capacity of future with the preceding concerns towards those
of time and temporality. Iparraguirre (2015) methodologically
distinguished the two terms by assigning temporality as the cognitive

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capability inherent in human beings to apprehend time as a vessel for their
own becoming (p. 2). Similar to Appadurai, he linked this to his observation
of the Western ‘hegemonic temporality’ to point out the indubitable bias in
anthropology that inflict a certain time frame on ethnography. It was not
until anthropologists critically reflect on their practice that they finally
became cognisant of the abstraction humans place for their coming times.
Fabian’s account in Time and the Other (1983) is arguably among the first
to further this epistemological turn in anthropology by demanding an
ethnography that is critical of the temporal and spatial “coevalness”
between the ethnographer and its interlocutor. Shortly afterwards, Alfred
Gell published a timely, albeit contended, critique against a set of ‘inert’
ethnographies The Anthropology of Time (1992), which among all accused
numerous thinkers of oversimplification by imposing a ‘motionless present’
on their analyses, including Geertz’s classic description of Balinese society.
Appadurai (2013) corroborates this by drawing parallels between
anthropological concepts, from custom to kinship, and the flowing
continuity of time, assuring the embeddedness of time and temporality in
most if not all cultural manifestations.
History, or the past, accumulates and materialises in the present,
and is engrained in more tangible properties, in contrast with futures that
are cast from imagination and aspiration (Tsing 2005). Although
numerous studies on indigenous communities has associated collective
sensemaking and rhythm with temporality (Evans-Pritchard 1977;
Fischer 2003), the study on projections of future in societies was
discernible only recently as opposed to being obscured in the past. This can
be argued as happening concurrently with the evolution of the discipline:
before the “postmodern moment” that finally turned our attention to
temporality in the recent decades (Harris 1996), it seemed that we had
only incomplete epistemic tools to make future apparent in the traditional
anthropological subjects. Likewise, Verdery (1999) posits that temporality
as a phenomenologically progressive subject appears as more necessary
when analysing societies that have endured diverse phases of social
change.
Our dialogue with future is constructed in present times, but it also
tells us something about the amassing of history—or rather histories. We
can first trace this process from individual selves, where the projection of
our becoming in our temporal (and spatial) surroundings is akin to

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phenomenological practice: time is what we experience (Das 2007). In
Being and Time Martin Heidegger famously asserts that temporality
“temporalizes itself” (p. 314), and every act we conduct towards conscious
awareness of time (that is, the positioning of our being on either end in
temporality) is futural (p. 326). In connection with design as an act
indispensably oriented towards future, Tony Fry (2015) incorporates
Heidegger’s understanding of zeit with ‘designerly’ anticipations. As a
historical being, “retrieving the meaning of the past within the situation of
the present as a possibility for one’s own future” (Bambach, cited in Fry
2015), we have to apprehend history as much as we prepare for future. To
understand that “…to a large extent the future is already that which has
gone from us, shipped beyond our capacity to grasp it” (2015: 134, emphasis
in original), Fry wrote, we open possibilities from both sides of temporality
and maintain our power to alternate ourselves within it.
In social contexts, Zerubavel (2003) discusses how “sociomnemonic”
features play an integral part in the shapes of the past, and so history is
manifested post hoc from collective memory and hope. Similarly, criticising
the lack of leaps beyond assumptions that rendered temporality as a stale
subject in social theory, Adam (1990) proposes the role mind and
consciousness in projecting both past and future in the present time, where
“the locus of reality” (p. 29) is. This implies that it is also useful for us to
think of temporality as nonlinear. Such development for a ‘temporal
ontology’ is methodologically apropos to approaching historical disruption
in culture, not least to address the progressive characteristic in global
societies. Thus as Hodges (2008) notes, as social experiences among
unbounded postmodern cultures are “fluid”, so is temporality:
fluidity has become an even more appropriate root
metaphor for the temporality of analysis, facilitating both
the empirical analysis that rapid social change is endemic
to modern social life and the political economic thesis that
social change was also intrinsic to ‘premodern’ societies.
We can thus propose that entangled notions of temporal
flow and socio-historical change lie at the heart of the
temporal modalities of contemporary anthropological
theory. (Hodges 2008: 401-2)

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Of course, what excites us most is the unembellished premise that
the future is yet to happen. The future is malleable, be it envisioned by
individuals or collectively, and layered with endless vectors of possibilities.
Much as it lies beyond the attainable reality, future nevertheless takes
shape as a concrete expression that has specific agency to impose on
humans, which we then reciprocate by recurringly negotiating with it. To
put it in Lévi-Strauss’s reasoning, future is good to think with, not merely
since it has become an increasingly extensive subject, but also since it is
now instilled with diverse salient themes, from narratives and hopes to
visions and consciousness. Visualisations of the future may be utilised to
justify present action, and belief towards it underpins a sense of self and
survival (Wallman 1992). This everydayness of future in our contemporary
lives adds up to be a valuable phenomenon for social scientists, where we
can now “understand what ‘the future’ is by looking at what ‘the future’
does when it is called upon in practical situations in art and politics and in
everyday life” (Rosenberg & Harding 2005: 9).
Fabricated Futures and the “Turn to Technology”
Some would object and accuse the examples above of being only
narrowly sufficient to encompass the sociocultural purview of future:
surely to acknowledge the accumulation of individual futures into ‘big
futures’ is also to realise its inexorable complicatedness? To maintain an
anthropological context to address futural notions further, as Appadurai
demanded, we ought to capture the latency of a “politics of possibility” in
cultures. Devising aspiration as a ‘cultural capacity’ that emerges from
global phenomena (cf. Appadurai 1996), he debates the unevenness of such
capacity in any society, and posits that the capacity to aspire is naturally
something to be won over:
… it takes its force within local systems of value, meaning,
communication, and dissent. Its form is recognizably
universal, but its force is distinctly local and cannot be
separated from language, social values, histories, and
institutional norms, which tend to be highly specific.
(Appadurai, 2013: 187)

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This suggests that the very capacity is also a disputed field, where “the
relatively rich and powerful invariably have a more fully developed
capacity” (ibid). Anthropological studies in postcolonial societies elsewhere
hold social imaginary as a key faculty that equally mobilise individuals
and groups through an oscillating projection between present and future
times (Agamben 1999; Ferguson 1999). Chronicling the unmet
expectations of migration amongst young Guineans, Vigh (2009) argued
that by envisaging potential futures, individuals put themselves in an
imagined social category (cf. Anderson 1991). Social imaginary allows a
collective “[anticipation of] the unfolding of the social environments our
lives are set in—evolving positively or negatively from the potentialities of
its current state” (ibid.:100, emphasis in original). The problem, however,
lies in the incompatible sets of cogs and wheels between those that lay in
store and the silenced imagination: the supposedly prevailing ‘global
awareness’ has turned to what Ferguson (1999) termed as the ‘global
disconnect’.
Here it is important for us to take into account the sociocultural
tensions that ‘institutional’ futures cast on humans. Through both the
industrial and scientific surge in the past two centuries and the sociological
analyses that followed, control over future shifted inward, and was
significantly relegated from external agents, such as the ‘divine’ or the
‘natural’, to technological actions. The study of futures in sociotechnical
contexts then took the responsibility to conceive social values that can
eventually sum up to creating the ‘good future’ for the many. This view
grew and became especially pertinent following the debates that were
concerned with the influence of technological actions on ideas in the social
sciences, hence the establishment of science and technology studies (STS)
and the like (see Woolgar 1991). In their edited volume Contested Futures,
Brown, Rapport and Webster (2000) attempts to contextualise power
relations in futural representations from an STS vantage. Discussing
political narratives and the “grammar of the future” that inevitably
“utilis[e] a range of differing resources with which to create ‘direction’ or
convince others of ‘what the future will bring’” (p. 4), they argued for the
dominant permeation future-making as a social activity, be it present in
practices, actors, objects, or materials. This, again, brings us close to
comprehending how futures are socially fabricated, where the language as

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to how future is represented constitutes a powerful method of heralding
alternative futures:
…’the future’ is constituted through an unstable field of
language, practice and actor compete for the right to
represent near and far term developments. By all
measure, the future has become a big business. (Brown et
al., 2000: 5)
This helps us to think about the way in which the
disproportionately placed futural visions are distributed. Future is
packaged and branded with promises and relational representations
through different polar opposites: fast and slow, far and near, positive and
negative (Michael 2000). For this reason, one of the main tasks in thinking
about the future now are to identify the performative characteristics of
these messages and to disclose the impact on different audiences as well
as reflexively on the speaker.
Brown et alia proposes further that agency can be laid on future as
a property of time itself (ibid., p. 9). Thus the potential of the notion to leap
beyond abstraction and galvanise human movements can be found in such
‘grammars’ by which we extrapolate to produce speculative actions as an
act of anticipation. In this logic, the languages of the future regenerate
independently, whether through the logics of commerce, politics, or
technological determinism (see Winner 1977). This tallies with the fact
that technology results in and from ecstasies over change, development,
and perpetual newness portended by futural visions. Novel approaches in
nearly all aspects in life are sought after. This temporal disjuncture we
now experience has put the future as a vocabulary closer to our
consciousness than ever, rendering it to be, as Rosenberg and Harding
points out (2005: 9), “a placeholder, a placebo, a no-place, but […] also a
commonplace that we need to investigate in all its cultural and historical
density.”
Far from from being a particularly neutral space ready to be
instilled with meanings, the future is a commodity in its entirety,
distributed beyond geographies and physical realms of the present times.
This almost automatically indicates a neglect of context. If aspiration is a
contested capacity walled by class and specific cultural and societal
conditions, must not futurity also fuse with what is local rather than the

19
ostensible all-encompassing universal (Appadurai 2013)? Again we can
connect this back to Suchman, particularly in the spirit of being critical
towards the technological ‘new’ or innovation and the dissolving locality
that are plaguing many global sites of knowledge making (2011). She and
her colleagues Danyi and Watts (2009) argues that locality determines
‘inventiveness’ (cf. Barry 2001) and the ‘practice of future-making’, since it
is impregnated with not only spatial, but also rich historical, cultural, and
political arrangements. This forges what Haraway (1991) has referred to
as the production of a situated knowledge, when the iteration of valuable
knowledge can benefit from a ‘larger vision’ by firstly acknowledging its
particularity. Such context is important, they argue, particularly due to
today’s pervasiveness of cultural and technological production on everyday
practices.
Context in knowledge is stretchable to our futural concerns. Watts’s
ethnographic account on mobile telecom industry (2008) suggests that
visions of future are more often than not suffused in the process of
knowledge making. Referring to Haraway’s subsequent theory of situated
futures (1997), she deduces that future-making is also “situated, particular
to the place where it is made” (2008: 187). Lanzeni (2016) connects this
idea with the way practical knowledge and social ‘facts’ form imaginaries,
which in turn establish futural visions. In this sense, knowledge
materialises into these two latter notions as practice. Ehn, Nilsson,
Topgaard (2014) claims similar proposition in their book Making Futures.
Future-making is a richly-situated practice that is becoming more
important locally than ever, despite the fact that we now live in the midst
of global heterogeneous communities.
Although we, more often than not, take the commodification of
future for granted, it veritably fortifies the value assigned in the practice
of future-making. This is particularly true should we seek relevance to
Simmel’s philosophical explication on money, where what sets the
parameter for the establishment of value is the act of exchange itself
(Simmel 1978). Holding that the distribution of “material-semiotics”
(Haraway 1994) among humans across geographies is enacted through
comparable logic, we can assert that knowledge transaction establishes its
economic value through reciprocal dialogue with growing practice.

20
Design and the Practice of Future-making
…[after 1900] to design is to design for the future,
it is to bring the future into being as a contemporary
possibility. (Dilnot 2005: 185)
Design came into the frame of futural speculation when, supposedly
by the turn of the previous century (as one can trace the movement even
as far back as William Morris’s writings), the dialectic of past and present
enabled us methodically to prescribe rather than merely predict future
times (Margolin 2007). Future is indispensable in design practice. This is
of course not to say that the two terms are intrinsically causal to each
other; however, the two have shown to be proportioned out of deep
entanglements to each other. Design has made “the future less as an
abstract topology and more as an embedded property of the life of
things…thus [design] emerges as a mediator of the relationship between
space and time and not just a manipulator of the temporality of things”
(Appadurai 2014: 10). We tell stories about the future by means of design.
Henceforth, the two notions will be presented in equal gravity although
not interchangeably, maintaining future as a temporal dimension (as well
as being a reservoir of imaginaries and aspirations), and design as the
practical measures that effectively engage with the former.
As has been briefly mentioned, design theorist Tony Fry discusses
numerous themes within the intersection of design and temporality in his
book Design and the Question of History (2015). One of the points he
observed was that our everyday practice has been ineluctably saturated
with design—in the sense of the word rather as an ideology, beyond any
practical definitions that partition different acts of designing—so greatly
that we are now “…on [the situation] wherein the future with a future for
“us” can only be reached by design” (p. 8), and we are in fact transforming
ourselves as much as our surroundings through the practice. In his view,
this assigns design to the role of ‘futuring’, which one of the consequences
is the creation of a ‘world-within-the-world’ that entwines human beings
with objects and materials. What is vital about this ‘ontological design’ is
that we reflexively assess our identities and the meanings of being human
through such an act of ‘world-making’, and thus it challenges us to be able
to “act futurally” (p. 62).

21
As the growing cohort of design theorists in the second half of the
past century demonstrated, practice in design is moving from questions of
aesthetic and commerce towards a broader consciousness of psychosocial,
technological, and geoenvironmental concerns (Bonsiepe & Cullars 1991;
Margolin 2005; Mau 2004). This consequently expands to numerous in-
depth explorations of the implication of design practice in the social
sciences sphere. Kimbell (2009) examined the widespread presence of
design research and design thinking that transfigures the term from
‘merely’ fiddling with artefacts and materials to the unearthing of
knowledge that can be derived from the expansion of modus operandi. As
design is imbued with tacit knowledge, (Castillo 2002), one might suggest
that the formalization of practice within design, up to the point of
establishing it as subject of exchange, is rather problematic in the first
place. What Kimbell proposes is the utility in thinking of peripheral design
practice as enhancing design itself as a discipline:
By looking at practices, rather than individuals and
norms… [we] benefit from analysis that considers how
knowledge that is required to practice become formalised,
routinised or mundane; and how institutions take shape
and authorize some kinds of knowledge, and not others,
and some kinds of discourses, and not others. (2009: 9)
The creative propensity in design predominantly, and possibly
fundamentally, forces the discipline to produce knowledge through
practical means. In the words of Tim Ingold: “we know as we go, not before
we go” (2000: 239, emphasis on original). Studies on workplaces associated
with design practice affirmed this by highlighting the process of
distributing knowledge through embodied practice and routines, proposing
keywords such as situated learning (Amin and Roberts 2008) or community
of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). Likewise, in relation to
design, Kimbell (ibid.) proposed two concepts that can serve as analytical
tools to conceive design activity, namely design-as-practice that
acknowledges the diffusion of design knowhow through abstract resources,
e.g. methods, languages, people and their behavioural manifestations; and
designs-in-practice that sees the establishment of knowledge through
dialogues prompted by design tools (between designers and clients or other

22
stakeholders) and the designed object itself (between designers and
consumers, or the broad public).
Kimbell’s proposition is particularly fruitful when we visualise the
different extents of design activity in professional settings. Marshall (2014:
244) observed that today designers “no longer have a guild-like ownership
of design”. The capability to think through design, and accordingly to
envisage and craft futural conditions can no longer be hegemonic to design
actors as it has “travel[led] across myriad boundaries, and thus with a
diversity of meanings, understandings, actions, and critical implications”
(ibid: 243). The professionalisation of design, which evolved and stretched
from its traditional association with objects and artefacts to services,
researches, and other tacit expertise, has influenced a wider sphere of
industries: many regard design as a key precondition to innovation
(Bertola and Teixeira 2003; Julier 2007).
Another aspect that is indispensable in the design-future
intersection is uncertainty. Tsing and Pollman, in a comparatively playful
chapter in Histories of the Future, proved this by demonstrating the
creation of contingent futures that are forged through “strange
connections” (2005: 107) by means of a board game that builds nexus
between objects from DNA helices and African elephants to events from
football matches to World War II. Today’s consciousness-laden world
weaves out endless canals of futural imaginations both superfluous of and
lacking in meanings, which creates layers of contingent networks that both
utopic and dystopic3. This equally demonstrates the disconcerting state of
which Giddens (1998) forewarns us, when the accumulation of stories and
knowledge “makes the future more rather than less opaque”. Of course,
this does not always have to be fathomed as a negative byproduct. For
example, in creative undertakings, uncertainty raises questions needed to
think forward and thus fuels the process, as its constructive qualities
allows serendipitous collaborations that can be fruitful especially for
design (Pink and Akama (2015).
3 Although in essence Tsing was not alluding to either the practice or ideology of design, the parallel
between the two arcs demonstrates the breadth of area of discussion in which design may now assume
responsibility. For discourses on the role of design in geopolitics and international security, see
Margolin (2007) and Dilnot (2005).

23
Situating Design and Consumer Research within Cultural
Production
The promulgation of design culture, as has been discussed, is
observable across expertise borders in the professional sector. Among the
many contributing aspects are that design approaches are associated with
the acceleration of innovation (Vinodrai et al. 2007), and help to develop
sets of vantage points needed for problem solving (Cross 2006). However
reluctant a great amount of design and neighbouring scholars in endorsing
the influence of the overly celebrated term ‘design thinking’4, it has indeed
metamorphosed the preceding decades of mass production and culture. We
can infer from above that design activity is liquid in its ubiquity. It
incentivises wider reconstruction of approaches across different fields of
expertise. This grants the idea a deeper relationship with the construction
of culture, as it is argued that the latter serves as a preponderant
background to design practice (Julier 2008). Wright (2005) aptly states
that in the late-modernity, “the making of things is replaced with the
making of meaning about things” (110, my emphasis); and although we
still interact with the physicality of commodities, its embeddedness in our
everyday sociality also internalises subtler values that build consumer
culture (Miller 1998). Correspondingly, design can be seen as a significant
part of the movements toward interpreting the production as well as
alteration of many forms of culture (Verganti 2009).
Pierre Bourdieu, an intellectual behemoth in sociology, first coined
the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ in his formative account of class friction
to describe groups of people working on providing symbolic goods and
services (1984). In societies that have advanced the play in value and
knowledge creation and distribution (which Gouldner (1979) referred to as
the ‘knowledge society’), he implied that the contestation of symbols and
meanings is the stimulant for the larger ‘fields of cultural production’.
While the development of studies in cultural production between Euro-
American sociologists has been criticised with questions of
commodification and its failure to establish focus on power exertion and
4 Kimbell (2011; 2012) summarise the historical and analytical implication of the term in a two-series
article; according to her, what design thinking means strictly depends on whom we are asking: it can
(at least) be either a style of cognition, a theoretical basis for design as a discipline, or an organizational
resource. Elsewhere, Nussbaum (2011) audaciously referred to design thinking as a ‘failed experiment’.
For the purpose of terminology, I will henceforth interchangeably use ‘design’ and ‘design practice’ to
imply the particular endorsement of designerly approaches outside the discipline.

24
politics, the framework provides a conceptual toolbox beneficial for social
scientists to scrutinise the creation and adaption of cultural influence in
mass society (Hesmondhalgh 2002; Klinenberg and Benzecry 2005).
It is first and foremost important to note that the breadth of
expansion of the very term of cultural intermediaries has been a subject of
debates. Bourdieu specifically assigned the phrase to define the new petit
bourgeoisie that engages with
all the occupations involving presentation and
representation (sales, marketing, advertising, public
relations, fashion, decoration and so forth) and in all the
institutions providing symbolic goods and services…and
in cultural production and organization which have
expanded considerably in recent years. (1984: 359)
Here we can presume the value in bracketing the synthesis of
design knowledge and commercial research as such. Elsewhere, du Gay
and Pryke (2002) advance the argument in their edited volume that, since
Bourdieu’s ‘culture’ has intricately seeped through many, if not all, aspects
in modern society, there is a growing interest among sociologists in
delineating the ‘cultural turn’ in organisational work, and it is
counterproductive to ignore this in an increasingly globalised, knowledge-
laden economy.
Following this, we can say that even economic practice is cultural
by default (see also Lash and Urry 1994), and hence the shifting focus to
practices of cultural intermediation. The circulation and amplification of
symbols in goods and services is then operated through the new cultural
intermediaries that “occup[ies] a position between the producer and
consumer and operating across and exerting influence within a nexus of
social relationships” (Negus 2002: 119, emphasis original). On the other
hand, the institutionalisation of such works also plays a significant part in
enhancing the production cycle, as shown by McRobbie’s (2002) chronicle
about the valorisation of entrepreneurship and cultural works that has
resulted in the flexible economy to highly praise, among all, the attention
to niche markets and innovative opportunities. The weight of consumer
culture is veritably the case when we expand our futural concerns to power
in corporations. Previous efforts to theorise and edify human’s
organisational capacity through anthropology show the pervasive sway of

25
corporations in shaping culture through the exercise of politics, resources,
and ‘global assemblages’ (Ong and Collier 2005).
Cultural production indeed stands at the heart of these affairs.
Some authors even noted a similarity between the emerging cultural
intermediaries and distinctive sociological figures that positing themselves
within act of generating meanings: the intellectuals, again in Bourdieusian
sense (Karabel 1996; Wright 2005). Anthropology itself developed its
prominence within corporate application, both in the attempt to decipher
sociocultural codes in and for businesses (Cefkin 2009), which frequently
debated as ethically barren (Clarke 2010) or unduly commercialised
(Suchman 2007). Yet the practice flourished even more, especially in the
past decade. A similar occurrence is also comparably significant in the
service industry: Antonelli (1999) analysed how this fact concurs with the
growing value of tacit service in the ‘market for knowledge’, which is
propelled by, inter alia, the increase in specialised, independent firms that
generate tacit knowledge as their expertise. It should be acknowledged,
however, that there has not been a precise consensus between literature
across disciplines on how to pigeonhole such practice. Terms such as
intermediaries (Howells 2006; Katzy et al. 2013), consultancy (Wennberg
et al. 2010), or technology broker (Hargadon and Sutton 1997) are used in
business and innovation management studies to describe the type of
‘middlemen’ that disseminate knowledge transfer between businesses;
elsewhere, design studio (Vyas et al. 2013), consultancy or agency are
usually assigned for practices that provide services without being involved
in manufacturing processes (Sunley et al. 2008).
Framework for Analysis
This dissertation will take on these parallel themes to specify the
practice of intermediating knowledge between industries and their
markets and generating futural value through design-driven practices. I
knowingly use term design-led consumer research, which aptly illustrates
the hybrid nature of such practice while retaining the sources from which
it derives conventional methods. In marketing science, this marks the ‘turn
towards culture’ along with the shift in the knowledge economy (Moisander
and Valtonen 2006; Thompson and Troester 2002). Endorsed by paradigms

26
derived from poststructuralism and cultural studies, this approach views
the marketplace as a resource for investigation where both producers,
consumers and marketers (or intermediaries) negotiate values and
meanings in goods and services (Peñaloza 2001). As is the case with other
‘theorised’ practices, consumer research comes in a broad array of
specifications, and each might noticeably appear to be lacking of coherent
academic debate (although marketing is a flourishing subject in itself: see
for instance, Journal of Consumer Culture, Consumption Market and
Culture, or International Journal of Market Research). Among the many
commensurable labels that practitioners and scholars have tried to assign
on such practice are, qualitative market research, ‘interpretive’ marketing
and value co-creation (Vargo & Akaka 2012).
It is essential to understand that the tendency to apply cross
discipline methods to the already established practices of commercial
research forces the study to maintain a jargonistic attitude, similar to
Moor’s (2008) reflection about designers who, even while talking to
academic audiences, tend to bring in an ‘evangelical tone’ when discussing
their works in branding. I argue that it is best to think of this as natural
proclivity. As marketers (and also other bordering roles in the
intermediary milieu) are associated with the effort of inducing, as opposed
to only obtaining, the motives that mobilise a mass audience, they also
proactively shape and inflict new wants and needs; hence the professional
authority.
The ensuing question is, how then are different typologies of futures
exercised with such practice? Severson (2014) describes the ever-changing
state of renewing and reintroducing future-making as both an expertise
and a company philosophy among key players in the Scandinavian creative
industry as a constant tension. Taking on the different languages that
managers use to portray their quotidian affairs, she notably ties this
tension with the complex exertion of methodological experimentations to
meet expectations for commercial revenue. Thus, future-making is a “self-
governing act” that needs specific roles to be able to “bridge the picturing
of the future” (p. 259), not only in outward direction to the companies’ sets
of clients, but also as importantly internally.
Other significant concept that contributes to this relationship is
innovation. We have established above that innovation mutually
complements design practices by means of inciting perennial disruptions

27
in, for instance, organisational and technological systems. Both can also be
visualised as ‘embedded knowledge’ in ongoing practices (Dougherty 2004).
Rogers’s (1983 [1962]) diffusion theory, for instance, inspires the
widespread presence of innovation intermediaries and helps businesses to
accelerate technology transfer and manage a systemised innovation. More
often than not, the innovation consultancy sector grows in conjunction with
demands for cultural mediation, creating a ‘combinatorial role of
intermediaries’ (Howells 2006: 719) that can be found in all-encompassing
‘broker’, such as the US-based consultancy IDEO. I argue, along wih
Sunley et al., that the extent of such practices can be seen as “a
manifestation of the workings of a community or a collectivity” (2010: 378),
thus maintaining the postulation that both future-related outcomes and
designerly approaches such practices take on are a result of situated
learning and complex contextual adjustments.

28
Ethnography & Analysis
“…the future is boring; it’s already here!”
In their study of practice in professional design settings, Vyas,
Nijholt and van der Veer (2013) laments the fact that, even among the
proliferation of design insights in businesses and workplaces, “’design as a
profession’ is largely untouched as a subject of empirical study…[and] may
not be easily formalized or rationalized to a specific set of activities, tasks
or other kind of stereotypes” (p. 416). They further the argument by
positing that the particular fluidity of practice in design-related
workplaces is, in fact, what impedes thorough scholarly observations. I
share this concern of the authors: while there is a growing body of
substantive work of reflexively situated and contextually informed
designers that contemplate on practices and theories, observations made
of designers at the necessary distance are still limited. Indeed, the design
milieu is observably built upon many protean fields, which renders the
discipline as undergoing constant remaking as well as suppresses the
obviousness of a connecting pattern (Tonkinwise 2010). However, I
contrastingly utilise the increasingly pertinent axiom of ‘generalist’
orientation of design as my point of departure to explain the ramification
of design knowledge, which rather bodes the indefinite boundaries and
allows the development of a larger creative innovative milieu in turn. One
certain benefit from this path is that it advances even richer ways of seeing
the phenomena, as now one does not need to confine her research on design
only to design studios and workshops.
A certain field of design culture has also found a place in market
research practices, as apparent in their contemporary business models,
where discoveries of new knowledge associated with design methods are
endorsed in the effort of capturing values among markets or linking
strategy to innovation (Verganti 2009). This section will report on my

29
ethnographic research, which maintains a particular focus on detailing the
practices and attitudes of my informants from whom I gathered formal
interviews and informal conversations at workplaces across London. As is
evident in other forward-looking cities serving as a global ‘locale’, the
mushrooming of user-focused research practice can be notably observed
from the first decade of the millennium (Nielsen and Loranger 2006).
Given the multifaceted features that can be attributed to otherwise similar
endeavours of consumer research, it seemed almost unsurprising that the
professionals to whom I spoke came up with very disparate ways of
describing each company’s specific expertise, whether in relation to
futurity or not. In spite of this, there are still perceivable bonds that glue
each practice close as a community, from professional and increasingly
collaborative connections, groups and societies to personal relationships.
The themes I chose to present in this section will be an interplay between
the empirically revealable ‘topical’ issues that protrude as readily
identified features from my fieldwork enquiry and the formal ‘generic’ ones
that are expandable through analytical engagement with conceptual
frames and preceding anthropological or sociological theories (Lofland
1976).
Future as Symbolic Good
Nat has been working in the design-cum-innovation research
sphere for three years, one year as a freelance consultant, and afterwards
as a creative strategist in an innovation agency in central London. She has
been promoted to be a senior design strategist within these two years. As
the agency’s director was on maternity leave for two months at the moment
I visited her, she was in charge of varying responsibilities and daily tasks
for the company, accompanied by an intern. The agency, a small-scaled
company with no more than four full time workers at a time, yet constantly
engaging with a long list of project-based partners and individual
collaborators, was juggling three concurrent projects with different clients.
I have previously corresponded with Nat through e-mails and a
video conference, and so she is quick in bypassing the introductory
attunement. Looking back, this is a particular treat I find persistent
among my informants when handing an interlocutor who has a certain

30
degree of interest, knowledge, or background in their practice. While
designers have indeed gone far from the restrain of esotericism and
familiarised their language and ways of thinking to broad public, it is not
difficult to discern the nuanced identification one designer gives to another
to allow more straightforward exchange of information, be it discussing
methods or slyly complaining about relationships with clients (Sunley et
al. 2010).
Nat overtly laid her cards on the table when asked about the
company’s main expertise. “What we are depends on who we’re talking to,”
she told me. For these kinds of borderline practices, the challenge started
from as early as the kick-off phase where they had to earn the attention
and trust of potential clients through the wide-ranging services. The
company’s website, for instance, mentions more than a dozen specific
methods in which it specialises on its ‘What We Do’ section. In a way, this
gives them the beneficial flexibility to adapt according to demands, and to
craft specific frames to engage with the problems of their clientele.
Resolving the problem of why a certain selling strategy did not work would
be invariably different for a lager brewery and a baby food distributor. It
transpires that the strategy is indeed not to narrow down the expertise to
a stringent set of expected outputs, but rather to maintain a receptive tone
to possibilities of ‘collaborations’ with clients. As she put it:
Many times people don’t know what they don’t know. I
think that is where our expertise come to use, where even
when we don’t know what we don’t know, we know that
you should do these steps to find out about what all of us
have not known yet…If we knew everything exactly before
we start the project, there will be no point in doing it. (Nat)
In this respect, often what is first and foremost deployed on projects with
clients is the keen experimental attitude that orientates toward methods
instead of outputs. The agency’s intern that works four days a week, Lee,
was busy finishing a working proposal for a European toy company by the
time I was there, and even then she told me that they have not seen the
need to sort out what kind of outcome they could project from the pitch.
Most of the time, it takes two to three meetings of interchanging ideas with
clients before they can set out to formulate their research queries.

31
Stewart, a research director in a design research agency in south-
east London, similarly expressed the inclination of the company for which
he has been working almost seven years towards ‘measured serendipity’ in
projects:
Clients rarely came with a specific idea of problem solving
in mind. Some were surprised when we said we don’t do
design at all, even backed out, only to contact us again
when they find a situation. (Stewart)
The research agency focuses its endeavour to tackling questions in specific
stages of product development of brands, but diversifies themselves from
competing rivals through the infusion of visual research mainly for graphic
or product design. Nonetheless, the company also boasts the conflation of
the latter two with foundational knowledge in business dynamics and
glimpses of quantitative marketing. His colleague, Reece, who tackles
innovation-related researches in the agency, simpered and affirmed
Stewart’s remark: “what we want people to know is that it feels more
powerful, the role of design, because you get to validate your work with
data.”
The demonstration of these commercial researchers’ practices as
liquid thus attributes more to aspiration than mere hesitancy.
Consequentially, this builds new strings of client-agency relationships
often regarded concomitant with the burgeoning market for design and
‘insight’ services, where mutual respect and regard are required to assure
the transference of knowledge and paradigms. This has been the subject in
preceding researches (Lawson 2004; Utterback et al. 2010) that found,
among all, the intensity of knowledge transacted, the constant persuasion
of design work values, or the exponential increase in the agencies’ portfolio
that leads to leverage as the factors at play. Moreover, the development of
these relationships is institutional (Sunley et al. 2010), as it systemically
paves ways for improved possibilities for a ‘co-creation’ approach on larger
and more sustainable scale. Nat’s office, as an example, is more likely to
earn more from returning clients, as the pre-established trust allows her
to go past the bargaining process for the value of her service, and could
also expect to finish projects swimmingly as they would start from where
they previously left off. This, she contended, links directly to a perceivable

32
raise in the price the clients are willing to pay for the agency’s work and in
the extensiveness of engagement between the two:
I guess it’s also kind of, you know…so the first project is
often about what was the question actually, what is it that
we needed to know, and the next question is what do we
do with it. It is easier afterwards since we agreed on
pricing, timelines…I think in many ways they do want us
to experiment with our methodologies. (Nat)
This helps them to carry out trials and probe into the many alterable
elements in their client’s operation, albeit under thorough supervision and
tight deadlines. For Nat, this can be finalised in broad courses of actions,
from instilling design knowledge and working methods through workshop
and “teach the staff new methods” to presenting blue-sky imagination by
means of their research evidences.
Amid these diverse methods negotiated with the clients, future
projections are necessarily, and also purposefully, interpolated. In such act
of enticement, visualisations of the probable are garrisoned to enhance
performances, or in these cases, to administer the ‘rites’ brands have to go
through to perform satisfactorily in the market. In other words, future, or
certain sets of futural visions to be exact, work as a symbolic capital, in an
unapologetically broad extrapolation of the Bourdieusian term, that are
interchanged to aspire others and to reassure that failure and negligence
can be forestalled. Miller’s interest in the theory of abstract objectification
of money in the ‘world of goods’, first postulated by Georg Simmel, may
help illustrate this: to Simmel, money helped modern societies to devolve,
delegate and depersonalise various obligations, and as a result allowed us
to achieve freedom and equality and to pursue economic development
(1987: 75). In an analogous line of thinking, I suggest that there is also
gratifying value in possessing future as a symbolic abstraction. However
practical or bland, the strategies Nat and her team devised transfer not
only material prescriptions, but also a sense of confidence and
versatileness. This befits the ‘new economy’ rhetoric where individuals
persistently seek balance between risk and stability (Newfield 2005):
holding a vision of future close and thus manoeuvring prudently towards
it allows us to own a degree of certitude. Partly, it is what insurance

33
companies aim to do. By this logic, future is an authentically transacted –
both consumed and produced – good in itself.
Of course we must acknowledge that design methodology is not at
all comparable to the way insurance brokers work. Futures in which
designers (and subsequently commercial researchers informed by design
knowledge) gaze upon for themselves and other people are futures of open
possibilities (Severson 2014; Yelavich and Adams 2013). For instance,
when explaining how innovation as a notion is inherently incorporated in
the broader practice and remit of design research, Reece exemplifies the
scenario making method, indeed another technique the company
frequently employed in their projects, as “to seek evidence from the past to
sort out what’s not applicable in the future.” Scenarios of the future
function to illuminate the present and to offer a proper birds-eye view that
allows appraisal (Wallman 1992). What can count is that, through
methodical assessment of these futures, aspiration can be prescribed to
orientate towards ‘good uncertainties’ and circumvent the bad ones,
rendering these ‘future proofers’ with credence from the forward-looking
commercial practice as individuals rich with symbolic values.
Bourdieu’s Fields and Practice of Cultural Intermediation
I have knowingly borrowed vocabularies relevant to those of Pierre
Bourdieu above and in the previous chapter, and thus will expand the
discussion here by propounding the context of field in reading further the
practice of my informants. Bourdieu’s notion of field, as made succinct by
Thompson (1991), is “a structured space of positions in which the positions
and their interrelations are determined by the distribution of different
kinds of resources or ‘capital’” (p. 14). Fields are autonomous, regulating
and upholding a particular social space while interconnecting with each
other, which together constitute a ‘society’. In sustaining this frame of
reference, we can obtain insights on the play of power exercised by
dominant individuals and involved in the exchange and conversion of
‘capitals’ (in this case, values held in future as symbol) along with the
endorsement of consumption that in turn promotes wider social mobility.
Here I should hope that the use of the phrase ‘social mobility’ does not
bestow this interpretation an accusation of overstatement. Bourdieu’s logic

34
encompasses a safely broad understanding of culture for us to place the
consumer culture as a sub-culture and, following that, consumer research
as a sub-field (Hesmondhalgh 2002: 211). In fact, should we follow this
reasoning, we can swiftly proceed to reading the multiple interchanges
that take place in the consulting industry as a subordinate form of field
within the larger cultural production scope.
To delve more into this, we should first learn how commercial
researchers position themselves in the face of emergent communities
within contemporary societies. In the ever-transient consumer world of the
postmodern society, mainstream categories are corroding in the face of
emerging self-subsistent yet fleeting ‘microcultures’ (Belk and Sherry
2007: 80). In response to this, and I argue also with the confidence of being
informed about the cultural trajectories of their clients’ costumers (and
adequately their cultural ‘past’ and ‘future’), the researchers exert a
certain power within their field not only to decipher, but also to mobilise
culture – or microcultures. There are at least two particular attestations
from my fieldwork encounters that can exemplify this proposition. The first
is that, regardless of it being done purposefully or not, these design-led
researchers are also pursuing a role as cultural influencers. Stewart
implied this tendency when discussing with Reece about the company’s
increasingly digital methods in researching:
S: We take it that we know how the Gen-Z works – you
know, the digital natives, people who born with laptops
and iPads. We are slightly older than them, but we made
a good study about how they perceive brands, think about
life, and a quite broad range of things and relate the
findings with design.
R: Right, like in one study we give people with smartphone
[an] app to record a specific part of their routine…more
like an auto-ethnography thing. It’s a new thing for
everyone, that app. But I think we captured it well.
S: Yes, we have to be there first, in a sense, in order to
know what’s next for our client. [my emphasis]
By taking a middle ground between upholding a bird’s-eye view and
having a hand in their observation and analysis process, they are also
positioning themselves inside the progression of the observed
communities. As also suggested by Reece’s surprise of the success of the

35
new technique, experimental approaches are as important for the
‘mobilisation’ to come into effect: in the case of the digital auto-
ethnography, its perceived effectiveness makes way for new methods that
can eventually affect both their clients (who can later implement this ‘way
of knowing’ into various operations) and their informants, i.e. the brand’s
consumers (who can behave differently in the presence of it).
Secondly, there has also been a ubiquitous ‘trend’ among the
market research consultancies (or rather much broader to any commercial
research undertakings) to conduct self-initiated projects, whether to
pragmatically enhance the company’s portfolio and attract clients or to
stimulate new methodological comprehensions. Sam, working as a
researcher in a design-led consumer research company in east London,
pointed out the boon in establishing research practice beyond “commercial
graveness”. As her company is also inclined towards the implementation
of research for innovation in and for service design, Sam and her colleagues
regularly conduct experimental collaboration with designers, artists,
government bodies, academics and other across Europe and take
proportionate amount of time to craft and publish the report. To her this
helps the company to promote their “current and recent endeavours” and
exhibit a sketch of the way they work to potential clients, while at the same
time expanding their professional and academic presence through
networking:
I don’t think there’s a direct financial payoff…I think it is
an investment in our image, in sort of being more
academic as having more time to reflect about our work.
When there’s period of more down time, we do things—not
as much as an R&D project, I think we could do more of
that. (Sam)
Sam spends a fair amount of time in working hands-on to publish
these consistently updated ‘think pieces’ on the company’s website, which
can cover broad topics from organisation management, art, education,
migration, urban issues, to reviews of innovation in a range of industries
from food, health, to technology. Robert, a director and founder of a
strategy and innovation studio in south London, considers the weight of
the agency’s writing piece as significant as their commercial projects. His
studio’s website allocates a specific page for a weekly-updated list of

36
“interesting reads” that links to articles from across the internet the
agency deemed relevant to either clients, other creative enterprises, or
merely interested individuals that stumble upon the page. These pages are
treated as if the visitors are reading a professionally curated digest of
current affairs, complete with critical commentaries. Likewise, Stewart
and Reece’s office engages with a wider audience by publishing webinars
addressing issues that are relevant to potential clients, and
simultaneously, microcultures that might identify themselves with the
topic. In this sense, the effort goes hand in hand with Stewart’s idea of
advancing the position of both the company and individual staff on the
frontline of both cultural production and intermediation.
Practice and Future-making
Practice has often been promoted, particularly in the fields of
design and social sciences, as a notion to interpret the movements of both
individuals and institutions in the shaping of knowledge. Researching the
transference and establishment of knowledge among London design
agencies, Sunley et al. (2010) argues that the fuzzy nature of his subjects’
practices contributes to the development of different levels of social ties in
the communities. First, there are ‘strong-tie networks’, following Lave and
Wenger’s oft-quoted community of practice theory (1991), where both
formal and informal participations in the discipline’s collective ‘industrial
spirit’ give rise to a dense interchange of shared practice; second, a looser
form of context emphasising on highly dispersed, individualised, and
autonomous knowledge, particularly attributable to the divisive contrast
between knowing in epistemic and professional communities, where the
latter predominantly focus on collectively accumulate knowledge for
pragmatic grounds (Lindkvist 2005).
My ethnographic research informs me that the two frameworks are
equally germane among the broad communities of commercial research,
even to the point of being convolutedly united in a diffusion of channels.
Jenny, whose agency she works for exert practical methods from the study
of semiotics, thus devising what they put forward as ‘commercial
semiotics’, admitted the lack of definition of the hybrid methodology within
the company. More than half of the staff in her office came from

37
backgrounds that were not directly studying cultural symbols, all the more
utilising it to analyse their clients’ consumer culture. However, she
stressed that that was “exactly the point”:
I think we are among the first cohort of commercial
semioticians in the UK, we have been around for 15 years
for now…we have people from design, history, linguistics
working together. I think the diversity of backgrounds of
the people here gives more shape to what we can actually
know about using semiotics for market research. (Jenny)
This indicates the exertion of intra-community relationships where the
situatedness of context encourages layers of social relations to orientate
practice towards the realisation of relevantly contextual objectives5. In
Jenny’s workplace, the context is mainly, albeit not exclusively, semiotics
and its commercial use; in Sam’s, service design; Stewart and Reece’s,
design research and branding; and so on. However, we must be reminded
that the professional organisations constituting the wider ‘creative
economy’ will always work within specific, more often than not predictable,
economic imperatives, even in the ‘disruptive’ attempt of future-making
(Severson 2014). Even though the quality of exposedness commonly found
in such agencies incentivise ‘fresh’ approaches on solving problems, these
networks of creative collectives are nevertheless dictated by an “industrial
logic [that] prevails as norm” (2014: 260), thus reserving what I regard as
framed creativity.
Accordingly, every company I have conducted interviews with and
observed employs no more than 20 people, but regularly recruits
temporary workforces through internship programmes and project-based
contracts and maintains connection with other agencies for occasional
collaborations. This is one important fact to learn, as the outward-looking
attitude allows these actors to ‘acclimatise’ systematically their daily
practice through social processes:
5 Banks et al. (2012)’s study about new media practice argues that we can benefit from this framework
particularly because it makes possible the investigation of ‘elements’ such as social exchange in micro
level or cognitive creativity that are often overlooked in organisational studies. My comparative
approach in collecting ethnographic data lamentably obstructs me in bringing these detailed themes
forward; however, I hold close this understanding if only for examining it from wider scale.

38
[We] actually do a good job in giving an extra space for
evaluating our frame of working…we actually have a
quite fast turnover here, which is of course normal for a
design agency, as we’re always opening our doors to new
bright minds. (Jenny)
A body of theoretical work on creative enterprises argues such orientation
as resembling bricolage (Louridas 1999; Scott and Weiskopf, 2009). Made
protuberant as an anthropological concept through Lévi-Strauss’s
analysis, the working of bricolage in principal can be contrasted with that
of, say, technical engineering that starts from a premeditated means for
their operation, and instead characterised by “[creating] structures, in the
form of its artefacts, by means of contingent events” (Louridas 1999: 520).
Both the external and internal worlds that mutually and concomitantly
produce serendipities and adversities are processed proportionately by the
bricoleur to arrive at anticipated results.
Spatial configuration of the workplaces is also found to be saliently
informative for an anthropological observation. Engeström (2001)
proclaimed that creativity does not stem simply from neuron impulses
inside one’s head, but rather emerges from the constant interaction
between the person and his socio-cultural configurations. This is typically
pertinent to corporations that adopt ‘studio culture’ to support open and
collaborative practice in their day-to-day problem solving. Visually
enticing arrays of objects and artefacts, although not put for simple
practical purpose of ongoing projects, are developed to incite breakthrough
and conceptualised thinking (Blevis et al. 2007). Drazin (2013) has made a
simple description of what can arguably be regarded as an archetypal
space for design research:
Usually the room is oblong. At the center is a table or set
of tables. At the periphery are whiteboards, flip charts,
and supplies of assorted stationary. Various colors of
markers are available, as well as Post-it notes. There are
ways of sticking paper to the walls—sticky pads or
magnets or white-tack…outside are small offices or open-
plan areas where people work individually, together;
inside, groups work together away from other people.
(2013: 33-4)

39
The necessity of these sundries to manifest collectively as concept aids
either the production or contestation of knowledge in such a creative
endeavour. Moreover, such configuration embodies the liminal property
assigned to concepts, where they are “soaked with anticipation” (p. 41).
Concerns and issues are made available for constant review and revisiting
through their very materiality. Robert expressed his aspiration for a yet to
be actualised project when I drew attention to a set of bright pink Post-its
mentioning the boom of augmented reality (AR) mobile game Pokémon Go
on his office’s glass divider. “That is our current distraction. [The game] is
only around for a fortnight now but the coverage is immense…I think it
would come out as useful for us to analyse the implications before anybody
else does,” he muttered.
It is also relevant to think of other physical arrangements as
orientating to the construction of the coming times. Watts (2009) adeptly
captures this profusion of materialised expectation in British telecom
industry, where the cold landscape of a suburb in Heathrow, “the trimmed
grass or the disused pavement that began and led nowhere …offering
almost no resistance to either the embodied or electronic movement of the
industry” (p. 190), is saturated with infrastructural prophesies of mobile
connection. Although perching under a far more approachable banner, my
observed workplaces too are moving to a certain visualised temporal
prospect. This has much to do with the speculative, nonlinear nature of
knowledge discovery among design researchers that mandates the use of
indicative evidences as cognitive signposts. On larger scale, the emergence
of design or creative ‘districts’ can be either read as an organic
juxtaposition of professional vanguards in the effort of revamping (or
urbanising) a particular area, or maintaining the proximity needed to
‘keep tabs’ on their peers and to monitor innovation (Sunley et al. 2010).
At a closer look, even the interior of a workplace is often mythicised as a
port for transacting abstracts that break from conventional ways of
compartmentalising works, either in artistic (Hoffmann 2012) or
transdisciplinary (Coles 2012) contexts. Getting accustomed to having
their work space shared with other companies alike, Lee, for instance, does
not station herself in the same spot every time she is at work and would
rather have the control to alter her surroundings, however small, and to
make use of the serendipitous encounters to befriend whoever sits next to

40
her. Jenny succinctly suggested the open-plan configuration of her office
as partly relinquishing the often lofty ego of creative workers:
Our desks are adjoined, and on the whole it’s still a pretty
squeezed space. People would come around and go and
have meetings there [pointing out at nearby sofa set]. You
don’t expect privacy is needed in this place…I don’t know
if it’s good or not, but this definitely helps us solve
problems faster by not facing it in solitary. (Jenny)
The fluid design workspace is laid out to accommodate space for
probability (Drazin 2009). Through representative methods such as
brainstorming or sketching, the aspirational designers are programmed to
seize abstraction amid these moments of creation. Yet I must argue that
in the looming view of a humdrum work routine, these arrangements can
be ostensibly aggrandised. The growing exoticisation of new knowledge
(Suchman 2000) obliterates the otherwise inescapable mundane landscape
of corporate life. Ross (2003) links the emergence of the so-called “no-collar”
workers with countercultural movements found among late baby boomers,
which rigged out today’s generation with uniform aim of choosing
nontraditional but ‘humane’ ways of working.
Accompanying the internal social ties are inter-communities
relationships. Tensions between the applicability of theories and
formalisation of practice are seemingly sustained in the higher purpose of
mining new knowledge, thus require these practitioners to build networks
that concatenate as much on neighbouring disciplines and practitioners as
well as accommodate knowledge sharing. We have discussed Kimbell’s
examination of ‘design-as-practice’ in the previous section. Elsewhere, the
evident gestures to break from the confines of producing “knowledge for
the sake of knowledge” (Hunt 2011: 36) in post-structural discourses has
brought forward approaches that impel us to seek critical apprehension
from practice. Anthropologists can indeed benefit from a perspective that
advocates ‘critical appraisals’ of practice as long as the interdependency of
that and theory-making is sustained (Baba & Hill 1997). This is
particularly salient in my informants’ extensive engagement with
academia. Robert, a PhD in anthropology, bears a name that is equally
prominent among both academics and practitioners, and regularly
contributes to forwarding the practical use of anthropology through

41
reflection on his work in the agency. To these cultural enterprises,
managing knowledge that can be derived from unconventional
methodologies means also managing expectations about other people’s
future, that is their clients’ and occasionally their research subjects, as well
as their own. Sam, for instance, pinpointed her daily jitter in formulating
practice that can be both creatively and commercially rewarding; yet, she
added, the ties her agency has established with epistemic undertakings
provide this perpetual lurch with a sense of ‘validation’ over their practice.
External Futures
Here I will also discuss the social consequences of external futures
that overhang my individual informants and their relationship with the
ones that are practiced. Such readings can supply us with a ground to
consider the construction of self among these professional future-proofers,
which is suggested to be often interceded and undermined in the face of
the collective selves and the institutional (Scott and Weiskopf 2009)6.
Interestingly enough, the courses of the two can on many occasions
contradict each other. To follow our previous discussion, the rather
optimistic slant among designers, which can be traced back to perception
of control over a certain type of future that bears direct, reciprocal
correspondence with those of their societies, is protuberant; you could say
even innately contagious. Yet as will be made clear below, I argue that
there are separate faculties to pigeonhole different typologies of future, all
of which are dealt discretely. First, there are the ‘designable’ futures that
connects with the practice, competence, and themes relevant to the role
and responsibility assigned to designers, as is explained in the first two
subsections, and second, the external, ‘other’ futures that are characterised
as bigger and immanent, and going beyond the control of designers or even
design itself.
In the hope of providing a befitting platform to unravel this thesis,
I alluded to the ad rem topic of Brexit to elicit futural reflections in my
6 Scott and Weiskopf (2009) further explained the entangling webs between enterprise culture and the
enactment of ‘enterprise discourse’ within the neo-liberal regime of self. The positioning and
structuring of self in relation and contrast to this configuration, moreover with the invasion of self-
entrepreneurial credo, thus encompass a vast subject for discourse in the increasingly professionalised
life, which Foucault (2010) also argued for.

42
conversation with my informants, with a held assumption that these views
of anticipation are processed independently from the daily practice of
future-making. The surprising, yet foreseeable to some, result of the
referendum had just come about for no more than a month as I conducted
my ethnography, and the talk of it looms above almost all variety of
conversation across the country. To put into perspective, the post-Brexit
talk fuelled by both abundant access to and lack of coherence in media has
divisively amplified debates in either class chasm, political distrust, age
and generation disparity, or economic and financial turnaround. A survey
conducted by NatCen Social Research in the months leading up to the
voting day shows that 69% UK residents were unsure about the
implications of Brexit, and remained so afterwards7. However, when
restricting our view only to London, the global capital that is left with a
largely disjointed view from (and a vote result clashing with) nearly all the
rest of the nation, a particular idiosyncratic sets of mood emerges: among
those are rage, distrust, and insecurity, but also bigger discontent with the
loss of control over a future that was only yesterday seemed still forever
accessible. This adversity posed immediate repercussions to businesses
and industries, and thus also to those of my informants, an industry that
is steadily unchaining itself from geographical bounds and profiting from
correspondences with clients from overseas. Some clients would “certainly
consider different arrangements with our business”, Jenny remarked, as
her company fetches more clients from Europe and the U.S. than from
home, and Sam, whose workplace straddles between London and
Amsterdam, thought about the additional settlement works the company
will have to go through following the Brexit deal.
What I want to focus on first is how my informants identify
themselves with the recognisable posture of young, metropolitan workers
profusely abreast of the facts and constantly exchanging and equipping
themselves with opinion over the subject. The first adjective needs further
highlighting: while the consulting industry has been around for decades,
its acquaintanceship with design practice is relatively recent, and thus
attracts younger people. Apart from one who founded his own company,
none of my set of informants exceeds 40 years of age. Clearly this is not an
absolute portrayal, and at best this only indicates the range of roles in the
7 http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39041/brexit-what-will-it-mean-for-britain-report.pdf, accessed
August 4, 2016

43
industry that is easier to obtain access to within my limited research time.
However, albeit never perfectly, this may reflect the general propensity for
a certain type of temporal projection within the practices when confronted
with external futures. A reference to McRobbie’s (2002) description of the
‘speeded up’ creative world may illustrate this shifting notion of
professionalism among the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’:
…the expansion of these sectors of employment also
brings about a decisive break with past expectations of
work…the flamboyantly auteur relation to creative work
that has long been the mark of being a writer, artist, film
director or fashion designer is now being extended to a
much wider section of a highly individuated work force. (p.
517, my emphasis)
McRobbie promotes the emerging new expectations among this
inventive cohort of workers that advocate a repositioning of self within the
machinery of today’s professionalism. The role of designers has also been
for long entwined with the notion of democracy, and hence also in
workplaces. As Jenny described her open-plan workspace as allowing
experiments of communication, she also intimated the dissipating of
conventional pecking order in her office. In design works, the exploratory
nature of solving problems through uncommon frameworks necessitates
the practitioners to work by setting aside hierarchical restraints. This is
also deducible from Sam’s description of her company’s typical work order:
We don’t necessarily report to anyone in particular in our
work…of course the agency’s directors made the final
decision in executive matters, and many times also
projects, but never in an authoritarian manner.
Additionally, she related this fact with the omission of complicated
positional strata in her workplace:
Apart from the two directors and associates, everyone is
mostly assigned as design researcher, or, you know, other
equal roles. Although we don’t have that much workmates
right now [laughing].

44
While naturally this new discourse dictates other distinct
prescriptions and constraints vis-à-vis the past constructions, the point
that should be made focal for our discussion is that my informants’ visions
for the impending future will inevitably abide by this particular outlook on
the meaning of work. What I found curious is that although the prevailing
turmoil amassed by Brexit and its reverberations precipitates a
readjustment of ego that identifies with the foregoing oneness of middle-
class Londoners (an immensely oversimplified labeling for a particularly
delicate issue, I confess), it does not penetrate the deeper consciousness of
the ‘enterprising self’. To borrow Heidegger’s concept of care, the
supposedly arising time of distress does not culminate to a moment of sorge
(1962: 56), or the deepened care towards oneself out of apprehensions for a
disruption to the future. On the contrary, these external uncertainties
resulted in an enhanced confidence towards the role of design all the more;
in this manner, the motivating force attached to the notion surpasses any
of its pragmatic function. Nat’s rather cheeky aplomb exemplifies this
singular disposition:
We’re designers, we prototype. We prototype until we find
the prototype that works. And that stretches to many
other aspects of life too!
We can reflect this back to the act of compartmentalising futures
apparent in my set of informants: it matters more to know which future is
at their disposal, and to make use of their designerly, open-to-change
approach to embrace the coming times when facing the ungovernable ones,
rather than to wallow in disquietude. As we can see, the finite foreseen
futures are again atomised to contrastingly infinite pockets for different
‘aspects of life’. On a more serious stance, for instance, Nat pondered on
the agile quality often associated with start-up businesses, which is linked
with the adeptness of being flexible towards change:
I think there has never been any industry who has not
been scared of the future. We are constantly in the process
of reinventing ourselves to fit in the environment…if it’s
called for, we hire someone new; if we haven’t got projects,
then unfortunately I guess our jobs would go. I think any
small business would always have that feeling.

45
Conclusion
Future as Global Fact
I would like to close by going back to the wider implication that can
be assumed when broaching cultures of future. We have covered in many
parts of the writing Appadurai’s call for advancement in anthropology to
actualise the potential in seeing futurity as a cultural capacity. With
regard to the human-consumer research industries with which my
informants associate their expertise, I posit that this has in fact been
exercised in the interrelationships between their practices and
professional communities, clients, as well as their consumer subjects,
albeit anthropology being a part of a broader methodical agglomeration.
Should we follow my position of such practice as bearing agency in the
cultural production spectrum, then we can agree on it as also exerting
influence as a shaper of culture, and subsequently, of future.
This can be furthered still: what is consistently accentuated by my
informants is the idea that being forward-looking increasingly means
being also outward-looking. This applies not only to the applications of
practice that partly aim to orientate clients in layers of contexts, e.g.
cultural and geographical, but also to the bearings of these practitioners
themselves. Needless to say, the circumstances of the former are connected
with the fact that companies are growingly becoming borderless in the face
of global capitalism, and racing with each other for the ‘new frontier’ of a
loosely interconnected tangle of cultures. Researching consumer culture
deals greatly with this objective of assisting clients in instilling locality
into their brands and products. My informants also appeared to equate the
bid in contextualising culture in order to project one with the effort of
developing simultaneous accesses to eyes around the globe. Pulling this
back to the aspiration of future-making in the frame, one comment from
Nat puts context to this: “as we become more global, we affect each other

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