Conoscere il futuro: invenzioni, programmi e progetti

Future Studies are a field of research which has expanded over the last few years; their goal is to extend to social reality the possibility of making previsions. Future studies investigate the manifold images of the future in order to promote present actions. In the field of architectural design, the problem of the future is nested in the activity of all architects’ practices: they design something that does not yet exist, and maybe never will. Architects produce new conditions which will affect the future, so they need both to predict and to promise future effects through their projects. Parallelly, philosophers have explored the future – its ontological consistencies, for instance – in the philosophy of time, and future as a ‘prevision of state of affairs’ is a recurring theme in the philosophy of economics. Furthermore, philosophers usually aim to describe and possibly predict the future, rather than constructing it.