working notes of Future Fabulators

“Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous” Dator’s 2nd Law of the Future (Dator 1995)

• prediction_markets
• can we use predictions to help separate/isolate important, predictable events within a “A Nonpredictive View of the World”? (cf. fragility → robustness → antifragility)
• what is the question? can it be answered decisively at a particular point in the future? what is at stake? what are the consequences or impacts?

• divination / invocation

• Christine Wilks talking about text as a way for developing character depth; http://www.riders-project.net/research/videos/christine-wilks-taking-text-out-of-the-box.html (This probably belongs elsewhere, but…)
  • performing text on screen
  • Varytale http://varytale.com
  • “Text becomes the equivalent of subtitles” - is this a good thing?
  • Very based around computer games.
  • “Character is a black box” - in PNs, we can only be based on interpretation based on behaviour and its artefacts, not on explicit exposure, unless we have things like “Dear Diary…”
  • Note: Prehearsals are first person narratives, PNs are third person. Thus a Prehearsal can have “more” introspection in some sense.

A lot of the scenario planning process has to do with Formalised Decision Making and how this is done in groups.

20140206 Having done several scenario workshops, it seems that the most powerful aspect of the process is the realisation that people usually live in multiple scenarios today - which makes them laugh in recognition, but also helps distill the issues very quickly. How 'futuristic' or accurate the scenario narratives end up being doesn't seem to matter so much. The realisation about their present situation already gives a sense of awareness what's going on and where they'd like to be. It makes the future more open or malleable in a way. So for us the question is how do we emphasise and support this renewed sense of agency? Prehearsals, scenario testing, 'how do we get from here to there' excercises are a good start, but more research is needed.

Here are a few possible research questions and directions (some quite broad, others very specific), collected from various debriefs

How to improve the prehearsal pocket guide? (notes from February 2014)

General questions:

• 'but why…' (experiential futurism)?
• how do we encourage a sense of agency amongst the participants when discussing and developing 'possible futures'?
• how do we clarify that what we’re doing is not about predicting the future, but about empowering people to be more aware of their present situation and clarify what they could do today to shape their actions to encourage a preferred possible future?
• what other forms can 'experiencing possible futures' take?
  • what is the shortest and/or longest time in which we can complete meaningful scenario workshops and/or prehearsals to come up with interesting results while keeping the process enjoyable for the participants?
  • what other methods, aside from scenario building, are used to discuss possible futures?
  • what can we borrow from other fields, such as; improv,