Thinking About the Future:
One way that people thought about the future in the past brought up in “Make It So” is by connecting it to what already exists. The first two chapters have many examples of this, but one of the most notable is the connection between science fiction and the future. In the past, science fiction has been used as a starting point for futuristic designs because the genre cements certain expectations and ideas in the general public of how things should look. The popularity of science fiction causes people to be more comfortable with the new technology and ideas proposed. As mentioned in the reading, people this comfort results in a certain expectation of how things should look which in turn drives how people think about design problems. Another example of this looking for comfort can be found in how people dreamed about and pursued space travel. Similar to how ships and the sea were seen as the new way of the future a while ago, space was beginning to emerge as this new frontier. Since people already had an association between nautical references and exploring the unknown, this became a large inspiration for things like the word astronaut or the way space ships were designed. Both of these examples from the reading demonstrate the search for familiarity in designing for the future which resulted in expansion of what already existed.
In addition to this expansion on the present, people also thought about the future as having to do with interaction of some sort. As mentioned throughout the reading, the future consisted of products that had to have human interaction of some sort in order to function requiring some sort of interface to work. As mentioned previously, the connection between design and science fiction is also important here because a lot of science fiction has to do with how people interact with futuristic devices.