Nick Foster: Could, Should, Might, Don't—a new way to think about designing for the future

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Aug 20, 2025

Nick Foster, a Futures Designer and former Head of Design at Google X, shares his insights on designing for an uncertain future. He discusses the challenges of creating for technologies and users that don’t yet exist, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations in design. Foster critiques conventional methods of futures thinking, introducing the concepts of 'could, should, might, and don't' to reframe our approach. He highlights the dangers of overly relying on data and advocates for interdisciplinary collaboration and the importance of storytelling in shaping our future.

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ANECDOTE

From Dyson Vacuum To Google X

Nick Foster traced his path from industrial design at Dyson to advanced futures teams at Sony, Nokia, and Google X.
He used hands-on engineering and an RCA MA to pivot from product engineering to futures-focused design work.

ADVICE

Get Comfortable With Ambiguity

Be comfortable with ambiguity when doing long-term futures work because many investigations end in dead ends.
Know what you don't know and hold uncertainties instead of forcing premature certainty.

ANECDOTE

Design Team As Early Translators

At Google X his small design team worked with raw science to find the "grain" of a technology and prototype possible products.
Once a direction emerged, they helped projects hire designers and then moved to the next exploration.

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Most designers are comfortable in the world of known problems—we talk to users, gather insights, iterate based on feedback. But what happens when you're designing for a future that doesn't exist yet? When you're creating products for people who haven't been born, or technologies that might not emerge for years?

Today's guest has spent decades designing for the future, a space where design specs are ambiguous at best. Nick Foster led design at Google X where he worked on over 200 moonshot projects, from flying machines to nuclear fusion.

Nick has written a provocative new book that provides helpful guidance on how we might approach designing for the unknown. In Could, Should, Might, Don't: How We Think About the Future, he argues that we've fallen into predictable patterns of thinking that are actually making us worse at anticipating what's coming next.

We chat with Nick about why most futures thinking falls into one of four problematic categories, and the importance of ethics in designing for the future. We also talk about the hidden dangers of "numeric fiction" and data-driven predictions, what he learned working with PhD scientists who had never met a designer, and why Silicon Valley's obsession with KPIs is killing long-term thinking.

Bio

Nick Foster RDI is a Futures Designer based in Oakland, California.

He has spent his career exploring the future for globally renowned technology companies including Apple, Google, Nokia, Sony and Dyson. As Head of Design at Google X, he led a team of designers, researchers and prototypers developing nascent technologies such as brain-controlled computer interfaces, intelligent robotics, stratospheric internet balloons and neighborhood-scale nuclear fusion.

Despite the ambitious nature of much of Nick’s work, he’s well known for his down-to-earth and occasionally irreverent approach to the future, and in 2013 he coined the term Future Mundane. In 2018, Fortune magazine described him as ‘one of the world’s foremost leaders in speculative design’ and in 2021 he was awarded the title Royal Designer for Industry - the highest accolade for a British designer - in recognition of his significant contributions to the discipline. He’s also an accomplished writer and public speaker, producing multiple books and sharing his thinking about the future with audiences across the globe.

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