Diagrams of Uncertainty or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Visual Rhetoric

Design is concerned with uncertain futures. There are a number of methodologies and toolkits for thinking about future possibilities and ways of dealing with uncertainty. Many of these approaches adapt diagrams that were developed in the nineteen fifties by military strategists and futurologists. This provocation critiques the scientistic rhetoric of such diagrams and explores alternate representations of uncertainty, drawing on absurdist art to present a more undisciplined and messier but possibly more realistic representation of uncertainty.