The future is here. Or so it has often been proclaimed by futurologists, scientists and engineers, as the fruits of science labs and cutting-edge technological gadgets are showcased, promising to make our lives more productive and more enjoyable. The public facade of design shows grand visions of future possibilities, yet every imperfect Now is also the concrete instantiation of what was once a vision of a bright future. Envisioned futures, as Bell and Dourish (2007) remind us, tend to differ radically from how they eventually unfold in the situatedness of people's lives. The future is not an empty space awaiting projected visions from an incomplete present; neither is it a predefined destination that we can simply foresee and arrive at in due time (Yelavich and Adams 2014; Mazé, this volume). Rather than seeing the future as a separate space or time, design anthropologists in this book engage with the future as a multiplicity of ideas, critiques and potentialities that are embedded in the narratives, objects and practices of our daily lives. In this sense, multiple, often conflicting, futures are always already here as part of a continuously unfolding present and past.Design Anthropological Futures explores futures and future-making from a design anthropological perspective. Here futures are not understood as striking visions created and implemented by scientists or designers, but rather as collaborative explorations of situated possibilities, formations and actions at the intersection of design and everyday life. The term futures relates both to the theoretical and practical engagement of design anthropology with futures and future-making as a subject -futures in design anthropology -and to the exploration of possible future directions for the discipline itself through such engagements -futures of design anthropology. Through various design anthropological investigations at specific sites -from care homes to corporate organizations, eco-homes to museums, Rio de Janeiro to Italy -this book critically addresses a number of dominant perspectives on, and approaches to, futures, including implied assumptions of singularity, linearity, locality and novelty. In the following we briefly elaborate on these themes and propose alternative perspectives for a design anthropological approach to futures.First, 'The future' is often referred to in the singular, using the definite article to 9781474280624_txt_print.indd 1 20/05/2016 16:16imply that there is only one version. Assuming eventual singularity of 'the future', futurologists, for example, tend to look at patterns of historical continuation and change, seeking to determine the probability of distinct future events. Although the established likelihood of a particular future does not rule out the realization of alternatives, it does foreground and authorize one dominant version of the future over alternative, subaltern ones (Mazé, this volume; Drazin, this volume). This idea of a singular future has political implications. As pointed out by Watts, 'telling stories of the...

In recent years, social innovation has received attention as a promising solution to societal challenges, not least because of its claims to create a symbiosis between social purposes and economic benefits. The often uneasy relation between social values and economic values is, however, not easily resolved in practice. Based on ethnographic research in the field of social innovation in Denmark, we argue that the relation between “the social” and “the economic,” representing different value logics, is essentially one of reversibility. The two each encompass their apparent opposite within themselves. This reversible relation elicits a number of challenging oscillations when social innovation is enacted in practice. We term this the hygienic problem of social innovation work. Too much or too little of either the social or the economic contaminates and obfuscates the endeavor of social innovation. As a result, people who do social innovation work seek to enact the “right” or “pure” relation between social and economic concerns. We suggest, however, that the potential of social innovation lies not in this search for purity. Rather, the instability of these categories prompts a continual exploration and creative rethinking of how the intersection of society and business may unfold.

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