What might the future look like and what will the role of the designer be in this new context?

4 November, 5.30pm, Performing Arts Lab, RCA Kensington

On a dark evening in November three speakers gathered in the Performing Arts Lab in the Stevens Building to talk about the future. Christopher Sanderson, 'commercial practitioner', Leila Johnston, 'writer and hacker' and Jonathan Haskel, professor of economics at Imperial College, all gazed into their crystal balls to come up with wildly different predictions about what's to come – some more incendiary than the rest. Bill Thompson, founder of theGuardian's New Media Lab, chaired the event with good humour, by turns deflecting or stoking the more controversial statements from the panel.

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Christopher Sanderson, of consultancy firm The Future Laboratory, was the first to take the stage. He showed a video, XX v XY, produced by his firm. Short but inflammatory, the film was a confusing mash-up of brand-speak, montaged sports advertisements, and sloppy gender-thinking set to nineties trance. Big white letters against a black background: LET THE BATTLE BEGIN. Laughing faces of women stamped with the words OPTIMISTIC, AFFLUENT, CONFIDENT. Images of brightly coloured female-orientated consumer goods, followed by a dizzying succession of stills showing men looking harried, carrying kids on shoulders, doing breathing exercises or multi-tasking. The questions MEN IN CRISIS? and WOMEN LEANING IN? were followed by irritating neologisms, each as problematic as the last: 'fempreneurs', 'femthletes', 'ladiators', before the film ended on the vaguely threatening challenge to PICK YOUR SIDE.

To a baffled (and in some places bristling) audience, Sanderson announced that the world was changing, that this century would be 'the century of the woman' and that 'Men will have to adapt to survive.' At the apex of his speech Sanderson declared that 'in ten years there will be more female millionaires than male ones'. This statement was picked apart during the questions: never mind the millionaires, what about equality for the millions of others?

Leila Johnston's talk had a very different flavour. She described herself as a 'writer, disrupter, maker', and instead of showing a video, she chose to read an essay from her forthcoming magazine, Hack Circus. Introduced as a meditation on her hatred of time-capsules, her essay explored the problematic ways in which we think about the future. She posited that our understanding of it is limited and filtered by our current experience, and that it only distracts us from attending to the present. She's clear and direct: 'Really the only rule of time is that the things we do now will affect what's to come.' She called it the 'incremental future', the banal one, the one that will happen anyway.

Johnston is a combination of pragmatic and idealistic, both in her attitude to the future, and to the issue of employment. At one point during the discussion she mimes a graph showing the negative correlation between how much you enjoy something, and what you can expect to get paid for it. She still chooses enjoyment. In a talk about the future, Johnston champions the present: 'The present is smothered, and needs reviving. Its the place where our certainties must begin and end.' 

> via Royal College of Art