Yes, it’s true, designers tell the future. At least that’s what people employ a designer to do when they take them on.
Design takes existing situations and turns them into better ones. Given a design brief, a designer can say this is what the future can be like. This is what we could do here.
Now you may think I’ve let myself off the hook here, by shifting from will to could. So let’s clarify. Designers are usually very discerning in saying what the future is for, say, a piece of land under development, or a product innovation.
Why? Because they are professionals and their reputation rests on how accurately they can predict what is and isn’t the future of a particular project.
So how do designers get this superpower? By using lead and lag indicators.
The gothic cathedral designers of northern France didn’t use finite element analysis calculations to work out how to construct ever taller cathedrals. Instead they looked at what worked on the last one, and said: we can probably go a bit taller, a bit narrower.
And so starting with Noyon cathedral in 1150 to Beauvais cathedral in 1225, a sequence of six increasingly ambitious cathedrals were built, all in the same region of France.
For each cathedral, is the structure standing is a lag indicator that it was a sound design. For the next cathedral design, does the design look like the previous one that worked is a lead indicator that the next one will stand up too.
In this way, designers use precedents of the past as predictors of the future. Each one acted as a lag indicator for the next—a tangible proof of what was possbile.
But there are limits to this approach. At Beauvais, the builders reached the edge of possibility at that time. The tower collapsed several times before construction was abandoned. Today, it remains a fascinating half-finished monument—the tallest Gothic nave in the world, abruptly stopping where the tower should have been.
Using lag indicators as predictors of the future can only take us so far. They show us what has been achieved. But they can’t tell us what’s next, especially if the next step reaches too far, or if the conditions are changing.
That’s where we need a different kind of lead indicator.