An invaluable guide to how to think—and not to think—about the future, by one of the premier futurists of our time.

You may not know the name Nick Foster. But after just a moment of googling you’ll realize that he’s been shaping the missions of some of the companies that have surely been shaping the world you live in —Sony; Nokia; Dyson; Google itself, where he was the head of design at Google X, the search giant’s “moonshot factory”; and the Near Future Laboratory. His insights are unfamiliar because they have been locked behind an endless series of NDAs.

Could Should Might Don’t is Foster’s public debut, the first time a much sought-after explainer of the future is able to tell us how he thinks about the future, how he sees others think about the future, and how we might be able to imagine, shape, and make the future better for ourselves. He is able to show what futurists have gotten wrong and what they’ve done right, and to synthesize years of experience into a clear and inspiring vision not of what to do next but of how to best figure out what to do next.

Foster has identified Could, Should, Might, and Don’t as the four primary attitudes his futurist colleagues take toward envisioning the future. He does not advocate any one of them. Instead, he uses them as lenses to show us where things might have gone if we had been able to think about things differently. The book is, in some ways, about the history of the future, and the history of the different futures that we have imagined, designed, or projected for ourselves.

But most of all, Could Should Might Don’t is a no-nonsense, practiced, and practical (but not especially self-serious) guide to how to think about the future for ourselves—giving us an advantage or two for use in our own lives—and how to make it so.

Nick Foster is a designer and futurist based in California. He has worked at the intersection of technology and design within globally recognized organizations, including Google, Sony, Nokia, and Dyson, and has established himself as a pioneering figure in the field of futures design. In 2021, he was awarded the title Royal Designer for Industry in recognition of his significant contributions to this field—the highest accolade for a British designer. For more than a decade he was a partner at the Near Future Laboratory, the seminal futures collective that developed the practice of design fiction. Foster is a visiting professor at London’s Royal College of Art, of which he is a fellow, and he frequently lectures and tutors students at colleges and universities across Europe, Asia, and the United States.