Anticipatory Infrastructures for Circular Design Futures

Speakers

Sarah Pink

Laureate Professor Director of the FUTURES Hub and the Emerging Technologies Research Lab Faculty of Art Design and Architecture Monash University

In an era in which emerging technologies, including AI, powerfully orient our images of the future, how might we collectively imagine possible futures and bring multiple futures into being? In this keynote, anthropologist Sarah Pink (Monash University) proposed the concept of Anticipatory Infrastructures as a grounding from which to “feel” and experience the future, stepping back from dominant narratives centered on efficiency and optimization. She offered a point of departure for envisioning futures that encompass nonlinear temporalities rooted in diverse beings and relationships, as well as transformation and potentiality.

Whose Future, and How Is It Felt?

Sarah Pink’s keynote began with an Acknowledgement of Country, expressing respect for ancestral lands and Indigenous peoples of Australia, and established the premise that any future we speak of must be “for everyone.” The future is neither singular nor exclusively human. This perspective repositions the future not as an object of planning or prediction, but as something that emerges within relationships among diverse beings and temporalities.
This stance is deeply intertwined with Pink’s anthropological inquiry. At the center of her research lies the question: How can we feel and experience possible futures? Imagining—or creating—the future is not merely an intellectual exercise conducted in abstraction; it is accompanied by sensation and affect. Yet imagining an unknown future directly is difficult; we inevitably rely on clues drawn from past and present experiences. For this reason, the “infrastructures” that enable us to feel and imagine futures become crucial.

Anticipatory Infrastructures and Circular Temporalities

In response to this question, Pink proposes the concept of Anticipatory Infrastructures. These are not mechanisms for reaching a predetermined destination. Rather, they are foundations—composed of narratives, relationships, practices, and technologies—that allow us to sense the future as uncertain, messy possibilities.
As a concrete example, Pink referred to her fieldwork experience in Nagahama during CDW2025, focusing on the act of unpicking a kimono. Undoing the seams of a kimono is not merely material processing; it directly connects to the bodies, lives, and temporalities of the women who once stitched it, calling the past into the present. At the same time, it invites anticipation and imagination of what new garment the fabric might become and whose body it might touch in the future.
Crucially, the kimono is never fixed in a single completed form. It is dismantled, reassembled, and transformed into other garments, yet its relationship to the past does not disappear. Circularity here does not indicate a linear transition from one static state to another; rather, it refers to an ongoing state of movement that retains relationships with multiple temporalities. Such circular practices themselves function as anticipatory infrastructures through which futures can be felt.

Thinking with Technology: Nonlinear Futures

In contemporary society, emerging technologies—particularly AI—already function as powerful anticipatory infrastructures. Yet they often operate in ways that promote linear and simplified visions of the future premised on problem-solving and efficiency. Narratives in which autonomous vehicles eliminate accidents and advance society are emblematic of this tendency.
Pink’s proposal is not to follow these technology-driven dominant narratives, but to “think with technology.” To enable the imagination of possible circular futures, we must neither allow technology to determine the future nor seek to exclude it. Rather, we need to reposition technology as part of the sensory worlds we already inhabit, and as one element among others through which futures are collectively considered.

“Quantum Society” as Anticipatory Infrastructure

As a speculative gesture, Pink introduced the potential of quantum technologies. Just as a qubit exists in a state that is not definitively 0 or 1, the kimono described earlier does not possess a fixed final form; through processes of dismantling and reconfiguration, it always holds the potential to become something else. Moreover, as “quantum entanglement” suggests, once entities are connected, their relationship persists across time and space. This resonates with the way a kimono, even as it changes form, continues to carry memories, meanings, and relationships associated with its makers and wearers.
Such a quantum worldview offers a way of understanding nonlinear temporality and transformation central to circular design. The keynote concluded with this hypothesis: that shifting the very worldview embedded in technology could contribute to infrastructural grounds for imagining circular futures.

Afterthoughts

Written by

Hinako Takita

RE:PUBLIC Inc.

For Futures That Do Not Yield to a Single Narrative

If we can imagine “possible futures” only through past and present practices and relationships, then the question becomes how we might collectively weave the infrastructures that make such imagination possible, and what qualities those infrastructures might embody.
As Pink pointed out, emerging technologies, including AI, make futures oriented toward efficiency and growth appear as if they were the only possible trajectory. Yet such futures do not necessarily lead to outcomes desirable for society or the planet. At the same time, these technologies already shape our lived experiences and imaginative capacities. Pink’s speculative engagement with a quantum worldview was suggestive of shifting the worldview of technology itself toward infrastructural support for circular societies in which multiple temporalities and relations intertwine.
Another key may lie in attending to the intermingling of modern technological narratives with worldviews rooted in climate, place, and everyday practice. If modern technologies will neither disappear nor be reducible to simple binaries of good and bad, then we are called to weave them into anticipatory infrastructures while continuing practices that resist absorption into dominant narratives.
In Nagahama, the group known as “Hakkō Okan” (発酵おかん, Fermentation Mothers), operating as “Scrum,” utilized smartphones and open chat tools—products of modernity—to record fermentation recipes created in daily life, report on activities, and share and consult about ways of tasting and eating. In doing so, they cultivated a community that included distant supporters and fostered an archive of lived knowledge. These practices demonstrate how a single technology, when intertwined with local climates and worldviews, can be transformed into something different.
This discussion also resonates with Masahiro Terada’s notion of “Future Fūdo,” presented in Session 6. By recognizing and nurturing the plurality of technologies, might we generate multiple futures—not merely the singular, modern technology-driven future—and the anticipatory infrastructures that sustain them?