Could Should Might Don't: How We Think About the Future

An invaluable guide to how to think—and not to think—about the world to come, 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 companies that have surely shaped 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 endless 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 it, and how we might be able to imagine, shape, and make the future better for ourselves. He shows what futurists have gotten wrong and what they’ve done right, and synthesizes 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 identifies 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.

Above all, Could Should Might Don’t is a no-nonsense, practiced, and practical 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.

About the Author

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. 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 at colleges and universities across Europe, Asia, and the United States.