If time and space are indeed tightly bound, then our present holds the gravitational pull of a black hole. Ecological threats, technological acceleration, and radical social transformations make the future impossible to predict and the past impossible to sustain. Every gaze forward has become uncertain, and every gaze backwards – amoral. The emergence of Covid-19 plays the role of Deus Ex Machina, framing and accelerating this ongoing phenomenon, this time loop we are locked in.

While the cloud of an ecological calamity casts an ever growing shadow on the future, the dynamics of this temporal trap are not reserved solely to environmental issues. The future is shrouded with fog not only due to the sense of emergency it resonates, but also, for example, in the way it is used as a marketing tool by tech companies fighting to define it – from the way we will mobilize on earth to the way we will live outside of it. 

Meanwhile, identity politics demand a re-edit of the past in an unprecedented scope, one that undertstands the past through the prism of current morals and values. The terror of a climatic catastrophe and the actions that generated it act as further proof that the past is not to be maintained, but rather contradicted.

In between, a ‘thick present’ emerges – one which is not a singular point connecting past to future, but a wide layer in which we operate. In this present, where past and future are short and near, efficiency and measurable time become exceedingly pertinent, and proper use of exercise and meditation minutes, of screen and travel time, become a life mission.

As if lost in a fog, unable to see what lies ahead or behind, the time loop we are locked in generates plans that can be nothing but short-term. it paralyses the possibility of facing any deep future, constantly reconstructs of the past, and creates an addiction to the immediate and measurable. 

In Israel, this is a constant state of affairs. Since its founding, the narratives of its past have been constantly negotiated to fit leading cultural, political, or social agendas, while its future has been marketed as always facing the existential threat of imminent war. Therefore Israel’s present persists in constant motion, and the idea of ‘long-term’ is all but non-existent. 

For design, which fundamentally echoes, acts in, and serves the Zeitgeist, this persistent present and its short term applications demand a new approach from designers, especially when mated with no longer-deniable responsibilities. Because while ephemerality is at its core, it is also the source of criticism towards design – in gender-related, ecological, technological, social and economical terms.

Jerusalem Design Week 2022 aims to explore the ephemerality of design and the design of ephemerality, and asks how time can be harnessed for a positive effect in uncertain times.