Show pageOld revisionsBacklinksBack to top You've loaded an old revision of the document! If you save it, you will create a new version with this data. Media Files==== The Futures Of Everyday Life ==== [[http://futuryst.blogspot.com.au/|Stuart Candy]]'s disertation [[http://www.scribd.com/doc/68901075/Candy-2010-The-Futures-of-Everyday-Life|The Futures of Everyday Life]] with particular focus on [[Experiential Futures]] ==== Notes ==== (some [[:reading notes]] ) * page 4 The great existential challenges facing the human species can be traced, in part, to the fact that we have underdeveloped discursive practices for thinking possible worlds ‘out loud’, performatively and materially, in the register of experience. That needs to change. In this dissertation, a methodology for ‘experiential scenarios’, covering a range of interventions and media from immersive performance to stand-alone ‘artifacts from the future’, is offered as a partial corrective. The beginnings of aesthetic, political and ethical frameworks for ‘experiential futures’ are proposed, drawing on alternative futures methodology, the emerging anti- mediumist practice of ‘experience design’, and the theoretical perspective of a Rancièrian ‘politics of aesthetics’. The relationships between these three domains -- futures, design, and politics -- are explored to show how and why they are coming together, and what each has to offer the others. The upshot is that our apparent binary choice between unthinkable dystopia and unimaginable utopia is a false dilemma, because in fact, we can and should imagine ‘possibility space’ hyperdimensionally, and seek to flesh out worlds hitherto supposed unimaginable or unthinkable on a daily basis. Developed from early deployments across a range of settings in everyday life, from urban guerrilla-style activism to corporate consulting, experiential scenarios do not offer definitive answers as to how the future will look, or even how it should look, but they can contribute to a mental ecology within which these questions may be posed and discussed more effectively than ever before. * page 9 It is as if the slider of the probable future moves depending on how you tilt your mind. * page 9 However, as alarming as it is -- this weighty responsibility for how the future will turn out -- 1 Sterling 2006b. 1 more worrying still is the implication of a serious inbuilt shortfall in our capacity to meet that responsibility. * page 10 It is about developing the requisite tools to steer ourselves, and our communities, towards preferred futures. It is about furnishing the means intentionally to slide the probable future towards our preferred outcomes * page 11 At once an emerging form of foresight practice, design work and political action, an experiential scenario is the manifestation of one or more fragments of an ostensible future world in any medium or combination of media including image, artifact, and performance. It involves designing and staging interventions that exploit the continuum of human experience, the full array of sensory and semiotic vectors, in order to enable a different and deeper engagement in thought and discussion about one or more futures, than has traditionally been possible through textual and statistical means of representing scenarios. * page 12 My efforts are deliberately located at the next analytical level up from future content, looking at how we think about the future, and how we might approach it much more effectively than we currently do. This is about process, methodology. It is about 4 engaging the range of possibilities that the term ‘future’ encompasses at a given time and in a given domain; how to imagine those possibilities, and how to design and stage interventions that manifest them as vividly and usefully as we can * page 14 The claim is not, therefore, that we can will our way around an epistemological impasse -- absence of ‘information’ from the future -- but rather that we can and should pragmatically use our capacity for hypothetical exploration in a way that recasts this impasse as more of an opportunity than a problem. The opportunity lies precisely in the fact that action takes over where episteme fails, as our future becomes increasingly subject to active design over passive discovery. * page 15 It could be said that my interest in enabling widespread engagement with foresight as a practice does in fact push for a particular future; one in which that hope is fulfilled, and this I concede. * page 15 Jim Dator, who has been involved in the field since its inception: ‘Futures studies ... is interested not in itself furthering any particular view of the future, but rather in furthering both narrowly professional as well as broadly participative inquiry into the future--understanding the roots and consequences of each of the manifold images of the future which exist in people's minds and in support of people's actions. We are interested in identifying and understanding the many different images of the future which exist, understanding why certain people have certain images rather than others, how their different images of the future lead to specific actions, or inactions, in the present, and how present actions or inactions themselves create certain aspects of the future.’ * page 18 how to convey a variety of ideas about the future accessibly, meaningfully and impactfully to a wide group of participants? * page 18 Our answer to that question took the form of a set of experiential scenarios, a series of windows on alternative versions of the year 2050 in which people could spend a short period and then have a discussion based on their varying responses to the shared experience, a sort of theatrical hybrid of theme park ride and role playing exercise * page 19 In other words, an experiential, cross-media approach promised to maximise accessibility in two ways; not only making complex subject matter more welcoming, but also facilitating the logistics of reaching a big group at an in-person event. * page 19 Despite the exciting beginning to this rare state- sponsored futures process, the legislature reverted to (what one surmises struck them as) the comforts of a more conventional planning practice. * page 19 No longer was there a vehicle for Hawaiian residents to examine their assumptions about the future before embarking on ‘planning’ it. * page 19 The longer the time horizon in question, the more obvious it is that assumptions based on a smooth continuity of present arrangements are unlikely to hold throughout * page 21 This dissertation thus includes consideration of ‘wild’ settings, spaces less scripted than galleries and workshops, to help fill in our framework for understanding and designing experiential scenarios through the lens of ‘guerrilla futures’ interventions * page 22 the aim is to facilitate and enable futures- oriented interventions as a means, in turn, to explore and effect concrete changes actually desired in the world * page 24 The future, a purely virtual space, is a political frontier sorely in need of both decolonisation and democratisation * page 25 Breadth concerns the difference between considering a singular ‘future’ and examining ‘futures’ in the plural. Depth deals with engagement with the specificity, details and textures of one or more scenarios, particularly the emotional or internal (experiential) aspects * page 28 Scale, speed, and stakes of change: a self-reinforcing trinity of reasons to take the widespread, public improvement of futures thinking seriously, as a matter of urgency. If we don’t drastically and promply improve our ability to deal with future risk scenarios, we are virtually certain to succumb to one or more of them. Conversely, if, even half a century from now, humans have managed to avoid catastrophic social, economic and environmental collapse, we could deduce from that happy outcome that our ability to envision and act upon alternative futures must have greatly improved. * page 29 It will in some small measure help, I would hope, to make the unthinkable thinkable and the unimaginable imaginable, to enable the avoidance of disasters (where avoidable), to escape from narrow and hegemonic conceptions of the future, whether inherited or imposed, and not least, to invent, elaborate and pursue continuously our preferred futures, whatever those may be. * page 32 The factors describing any given exercise in futures thinking / narrative / imagery include not only the obvious temporal dimension, but also geographic and cultural ones -- including epistemic and axiological assumptions and commitments. * page 34 The start of a corrective to monofuturism as well as to binary futurism consists in entertaining a broader range of potential outcomes. * page 36 the study of futures is recognised as being based primarily on ‘images of the future’, which we all have in our heads, and which circulate in our cultures. * page 36 Polak discerned as implicit in all human societies an orientation to the future, analogous, although not equivalent, to the ubiquitous capacity for foresight that, as we have already noted, belongs to each individual * page 37 the generation of renewed and inspiring images of the future was revealed as ‘the actual challenge of our times’, according to Polak. ‘The future that we see mirrored in the negativistic and nihilistic images of the future of our day is paralyzing us into an inability to respond by forging more positive and constructive images of the future. * page 37 in this dissertation the future is regarded less as being ‘out there’ than as ‘in here’, inside our minds, moving in our communities, and affecting, in all sorts of ways both monumental and subtle, how we live * page 38 futures is ultimately about becoming aware of, and then improving in the present, the range, robustness and rigour of our own images of the future. * page 39 American futurist Roy Amara made famous a simple three-part framework for the futures field, ‘possible’, ‘probable’, and ‘preferable’,46 which he saw as capturing the three distinct roles or approaches to the subject matter that futurists had begun to adopt. These were, respectively ‘image-driven’, ‘analytically-driven’, and ‘value-driven’. * page 40 What ‘is’ or ‘seems’ possible, probable and preferable; all are very changeable over time, depending not only on when you are, but also on where and who; what you want; and what you’re looking at, and even, as suggested in the Introduction, what your mood happens to be. We should bear this in mind, for no futures exercise produces results once and for all. * page 41 There is a common image of change, a visual or diagrammatic metaphor, if you will, that envisages all future scenarios as points inside a cone of possibilities radiating from the present moment * page 41 we make our way ‘forward’ through thickets of possible worlds, carving a particular path, which by definition is only one of many possible paths. In this conception, you are at the apex of the cone, in the moment of pure presence and of zero potential; all possibilities expand off from this point of origin into the future * page 44 With each moment that passes, whole swaths of previously viable possibility space die off like withering segments of a temporal vine, but at the same time new, previously unimagined branches spring to life * page 44 The cone is also a funnel, channeling the temporal process into an ever- narrowing chute until it crystallises in the realised present and becomes history, disappearing in our wake. Hence, the future is as dynamic a domain as it is possible to imagine * page 45 from any organisational or broader cultural point of view, to devote only the odd burst of attention to the future against a day-to-day backdrop of presentism is a very poor foresight strategy. Constant updating is required, otherwise possibilities that at one time may have seemed viable but that no longer are, linger confusingly, further obscuring an already murky view of options currently available * page 48 Particular sets of futures belong and correspond to particular ‘I’s and particular ‘we’s. But even to absorb and begin to use these futures terms changes the conditions of possibility for our perceptions themselves, and how we may go on to operate as (suddenly more futures- oriented) political actors. * page 52 The ultimate reason to engage in futures work, then, and especially to create scenarios -- which are merely tools to help us think -- is to enrich our perceptions and options in the evolving present. * page 55 The key insight is that there exist a finite number of basic types of story that people tell each other about the future: four of them, in fact * page 55 First, there are stories of a future of continued growth, in all the key social, and especially economic, indicators. These are traditionally dominant in Western society, closely associated with the historical myth and metanarrative of indefinite linear progress. Then, as counterpoint to the anthem of continuation, and coming from the growing numbers of those who discern that indefinite continued growth within a finite system is impossible, there are stories of collapse; a tear in the fabric which brings ‘progress’ to a standstill, or sends society reeling ‘backwards’. Third, since continuation is not possible, and collapse is not desirable, there are exhortations to adhere to certain standards, or values, or constraints: this is the disciplined or ‘conserver society’ future. Finally, there are stories about future society in which something drastic and unprecedented happens to shift our * page 56 historic trajectory, a game-changing alteration, at the level of one or more of our fundamental assumptions: a transformational image of the future. * page 56 in recognition of their function as processes, as opposed to steady states, here we name them after verbs rather than nouns: Continue, Collapse, Discipline, and Transform. * page 66 our sense of both ‘probable’ and ‘preferable’ futures is invisibly hemmed in by an underdeveloped sense of the possible * page 73 Inaction in the face of known risks is undoubtedly, to borrow a phrase from architect William McDonough, a ‘strategy of tragedy’.1 * page 73 a weak epistemic and psychological infrastructure for taking the future seriously and preparing for its challenges. This is an aspect of our unfolding future which we seem to be having enormous trouble wrapping our heads around * page 73 a failure to reckon properly with the unthinkable -- the future we don’t want -- is bound to make it even worse. So both it and the unimaginable -- the future we barely dare to hope for -- are not problems at a personal scale, but collective ones * page 77 Both breadth and depth of anticipation are needed, however, and to strike the right balance between them -- clearly a built-in tension exists here -- is part of the art of deploying futures wisely * page 78 scenarios relating to relatively slow, systemic issues are less readily mediated, and more likely to be overlooked * page 81 I found myself thinking about the difference between the way we represent possibilities to ourselves, and the way those things feel when they actually happen. ‘What’s the gap?’ I wondered to myself, in my lecture notes. I have come to call this gap the ‘experiential gulf’. It is the difference between how we imagine or expect something to seem in advance, and what it’s actually like being there. * page 81 It is the difference between scenario as represented and scenario as experienced. * page 82 This helps clarify the nature of our challenge in thinking and feeling through possible futures; for to narrow the experiential gulf implies simulating possibilities in such a way that the sense of possibility comes closer to the sense of actuality. * page 83 that there is a great distance between the judicious, intellectually careful (often, no doubt, for good political reasons) framing of this research and the sort of qualitative, felt insight that might make a real difference. Climate change scenarios, temporally distant and complex as they are, provide a prime example of the experiential gulf as a serious conundrum. * page 84 all ideas, stories, narratives, and images can be regarded as experiences, that is, as events occurring on a common bodymind substrate * page 84 The challenge of imagining and confronting climate change is thus, I would argue, emblematic of the issue facing humanity’s futures-oriented thought as a whole: our current strategies are puny and inadequate. * page 85 Damasio’s ‘somatic marker hypothesis’ suggests that gut feelings, whether positive or negative, help mark out certain possibilities as worthy of our attention, such that the otherwise painstaking (indeed, potentially interminable) logical sifting of options prior to deciding is given a vital boost. Thus they ‘provide an automated detection of the scenario components which are more likely to be relevant’. * page 87 When the affective (experiential, bodily) side is neglected, as may be the case in more traditional approaches to futures, the felt, gut-level concern necessary to motivate an appropriate response may be not be activated. * page 88 We are beginning to understand the what a bridge across the experiential gulf might look like; the stuff it needs to be made of. The insights of neurologists like Damasio, and of psychologists like Epstein and Weber, echo our intuition that addressing futures properly requires an integrative strategy, working on both sides at once. * page 88 Daniel Gilbert is an expert in the field of affective forecasting: how we think we'll feel in response to certain things happening to us. The main argument of his 2006 book Stumbling on Happiness is that when it comes to these kinds of forecasts -- matters as basic as what will make us happy or sad -- we're frequently wrong. * page 89 Things we expect to be devastating turn out not to be so bad. Events we expect to transform our lives for the better might not do any such thing. And on top of it all, our recollections of what we expected are distorted in hindsight, with the effect of hiding from our own view how wrong we were. * page 89 Yet another pattern, and the key point in this context, is the divergence between the personal and social imaginaries. The world they imagine living in 30 years later may be going to hell in a handbasket, with bus strikes and terrorist attacks as far as the eye can see, but in the essay about themselves, there tends to be no sign of society’s challenges, their lives are mysteriously insulated. To recognise this mismatch, and begin reconciling personal expectations with those at the community level, is among the first signs of increased futures literacy. * page 91 It is not always possible to fully compensate for the lack of these four features -- personal, moral, immediate, and observable -- from future scenarios * page 91 The most promising avenue for addressing this problem seems to be making otherwise absent, hard- to-imagine possibilities immediate and observable. As Gilbert suggests, an actual experience of the long-term effects of climate change would instantly change minds. * page 91 Construal Level Theory.188 CLT tries to account for differences between how we imagine near and far futures, and has found that exactly the same future prospects, with exactly the same profile of advantages and disadvantages, are considered in abstract or concrete terms depending, respectively, on whether they are further away or closer in time. The more distant in time something is, the greater the psychological distance, and the more abstract are the terms in which we represent it to ourselves -- quite different from the terms in which we think about the texture of near-term, everyday life * page 92 As the event swims into view, you engage it in more concrete detail. * page 92 The tendency to construe things that seem further away in time and in likelihood at a low-fi resolution is not surprising. Especially in view of our earlier cone image of expanding possibilities, where more remote futures are bound to be more numerous, uncertain, and spare of detail, our conception of far futures is accordingly more sketchlike, in contrast to the comparative oil painting of the very near-term. The reason for the tradeoff between breadth and depth of scenarios becomes clear in this context. * page 94 An experiential scenario, then, would help bridge the experiential gulf by enabling the construal of otherwise distant, seemingly improbable events in a format to render them richer, more accessible, and immediate. * page 94 The more detail is provided about a scenario, the more subjectively probable it may be rated. * page 94 the paradox that a more detailed story may be rated subjectively as being more likely to happen, even if the added detail reduces objective probability; this is called the ‘conjunction fallacy’. * page 95 Another pattern, observed over years of running futures workshops, is that often when people are assigned to focus on one particular future, initial scepticism is gradually replaced by acceptance.196 Indeed, acceptance of the scenario may increase to the point where people who have spent time in different scenarios may become passionately attached to ‘their’ assigned future, even if at first they were quite unconvinced. * page 96 ‘The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking. ... [O]nce an uncertain situation has been perceived or interpreted in a particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it any other way. Thus, the generation of a specific scenario may inhibit the emergence of other scenarios, particularly those that lead to different outcomes. * page 97 Reasoned consideration of the likelihood of certain scenarios or details within them are not, in this approach, tossed out the window, but remain in the discourse alongside more experiential explorations. * page 97 It is one thing to be swayed by an experience that represents a single theory as to the future’s trajectory, but it is quite another to be exposed to a series of compelling experiences that express mutually exclusive logics of alternative futures. In either case one will, at least, have a richer vocabulary of possibility, in the form of real memories (albeit of virtual experience) to draw upon from that point forward. * page 98 a balancing act ‘between particularisation and generalisation -- between literal and abstract representation’, which ‘comes with the territory... when you’re transmitting vicarious experience’ * page 98 high-level scenarios, which lack human scale -- the detail of a 1:1 scale representation of life, and the experiential or affective impact that could accompany it * page 99 The futurist, having broad-brush ‘trends’ or possible ‘emerging issues’ in the past and present to draw on for ‘evidence’, must take more risk, or draw to a greater extent on imagination, the more she ventures to say anything in concrete terms. * page 101 The best strategy for addressing the general/particular dilemma, then, may be to alternate the two, in ‘a constant back and forth between micro- and macrohistory, between close-ups and extreme long-shots, so as to continually thrust back into discussion the comprehensive vision of the historical process through apparent exceptions and cases of brief duration.’ * page 101 alternative approach to depth, a less travelled road to the ‘internal’ dimension of futures for which he and others have argued elsewhere under the banner of ‘integral futures’. Thus our turn to the mundane, our ‘microfutures’, or futures of everyday life, would be, for reasons already examined, explored and expressed mainly experientially. * page 102 Such experiences ‘instantiate’ an example from the relevant segment of possibility space, in a way which cannot fully replace the comprehension available through macro-level abstraction, but which can complement it by mediating possibility space on a human scale. * page 103 It is common in futures work to create a series of alternative scenarios, expressed as narrative text, and then to have clients explore and discuss these stories in a report or in a workshop setting.217 This approach works well, much of the time, but not everyone is equally adept at or interested in reading text and statistics about the future. * page 104 Possibly in line with variations in thinking and learning style, such speculations on the page invariably spark certain people’s imaginations, while striking others as abstract, dry, or worst of all, irrelevant. * page 104 The approach we adopted sought to reach beyond the purely verbal and cognitive offer of a written scenario, to address participants in a more affective mode. * page 104 Participants would not simply be handed a text about how things could unfold between 2006 and 2050: rather, they would be invited to live it. Each room was designed and staged, with the help of a number of graphic designers, two improvisational theatre troupes, and a dedicated group of volunteers associated with HRCFS, to afford those in attendance (up to 150 participants at a time, per room) a half-hour experience of a different version of Hawaii’s future. * page 110 They were not predictions, nor even forecasts, of Hawaii’s future. Each was based on its own carefully researched and constructed narrative and historical logic. And the four experiences deliberately pushed the bounds of credibility, each in a different direction, stretching imaginations and inviting expanded perceptions of Hawaiian history’s multidimensional potential. * page 111 Some 530 people were thus divided into four groups, each one experiencing a different future, followed by a facilitated discussion in smaller discussion groups, and then another half hour in a second experiential scenario. The experiences were used by facilitators as a catalyst for exploration of participants’ perceptions of the possible, probable, and preferable paths that change could take in Hawaii between 2006 and 2050. * page 111 The purpose was to provide material to think with, which is to say, shared reference points for conversation among the participants. * page 111 The intention was not to drive the audience towards any particular conclusions, but rather, as we often put it, to ʻhand their assumptions back to themʼ in a thought-provoking way. * page 112 Given that future scenarios have no factual, ‘evidentiary’ referents per se, experiential scenarios and artifacts afford people the rudiments of a common vocabulary, a virtual shared experience, however basic, around which their contributions can cohere, and push off in discussion. * page 112 Of course, a scenario in any medium can directly refer to only the most minute fragment of the world that it means to represent. The same is true of an experiential scenario, which will manifest only some tiny portion of the stupendous array of conceivable objects that populate, and moments that comprise, the future at hand. From a design perspective, there is an art to alighting on the most evocative of these that can be staged within the constraints of the exercise * page 112 From the reception side, the mechanism by which this arrangement functions could be seen as an experiential synecdoche,226 where the part of the scenario that is visible stands in for the whole. This may appear complicated but it isn’t especially; we are all very used to being able to infer what a ‘world’ is like from some glimpsed part of it. * page 114 by vividly manifesting multiple, competing scenario logics in parallel, it aimed to offset the potential for increasingly specific narrative elements to increasingly mislead, instead forcing a more comprehensive reckoning with the legitimate theories of change underlying each one * page 114 it has become increasingly clear to us that one of the useful ways of enframing and enabling this avenue of exploration is experience design * page 115 experience as the basic working material for the futurist (as well as the designer and political actor) * page 116 Experience can be, and in a whole range of human activities, most certainly is, designed. * page 118 The idea of avoiding a pre-emptive choice of media to address the underlying goal of engagement is enormously helpful here. In this approach, then, one might start by identifying the kind of impression, sensation, or insight you would like to create, and so to begin with, it makes sense to treat all conceivable strategies and media as fair game * page 119 There is not necessarily an intrinsic reason to prefer any particular medium or strategy -- you should choose what is most likely to work the kind of magic you have in mind. * page 119 Experience as a vector for ideas and explorations casts the body-mind as a sort of blank screen or empty stage on which anything imaginable may be played out. It is thus conceptually an interior mirror to our external notion of possibility space, the notional platform on which any future configuration of the world can be placed. * page 120 This design process -- part deductive, part generative -- proceeds backwards from an understanding of the type of impact you would like to have. That means beginning with a sense of one’s desired quality of attention, or ‘engagement’, as Garrett has it. And the upshot of bringing an ‘experience design’ frame to futures is that it can be untethered from limiting assumptions and traditions around how to engage people in contemplating possible futures. * page 121 if we wanted to give people anything like an immersive glimpse of these futures, there was a logistical requirement around duration. Performance would afford a choreographed unfolding of scenario content so everyone could absorb the core narrative elements, and scheduled sessions would enable a series of different (and smaller) groups to see the same thing. The arrangement consisting of separate rooms for each scenario, playing out in parallel during a specified window, with shades of theatrical experience, theme park ride, and role playing exercise, was progressively ‘deduced’ from the desired intellectual, emotional and community outcomes, together with the day-long format of the kick-off event, the attributes and layout of the venue, and the resources and time available * page 122 With experiential futures, then, we are paradoxically creating real memories of hypothetical experiences, the point of these strategic memories of course being that they will leave us better prepared for life’s actual challenges. * page 124 To begin the design process at the end, so to speak, with a statement of desired impact, and to use the whole experiential continuum as a canvas, is a liberating way to approach facilitating futures, both from an exploration standpoint (such as Hawaii 2050) and a persuasion one. * page 125 As things are remade, when lines are redrawn, on however large or small a scale, the political is activated. * page 126 Politics, as approached here, provides a theoretical perspective in which to locate experiential futures as an emerging form of thought-into-action. * page 130 Rather, with Rancière, we can posit a unity of politics and aesthetics which greatly expands the scope of politics so the nature and scale of the political stakes in world-making may be better understood. * page 130 the ‘political’ dimension has two characteristics: first, it configures and performs power so as to elevate, privilege, and reward certain interests, perspectives, behaviours and agendas, and to suppress others, and second, it is mutable. Both conditions are necessary. Something that can change but that has no implications for human relations is not political. Something that has implications for relations but that is fixed and unchangable is not political either. * page 131 The things that shape our lives are not resident solely, or even mainly, in the blunt tools of legislation and courtroom, but are deeply embedded in our patterns of perception, habits, and behaviours. This may be why revolutions rarely, if ever, succeed in their stated aims: even if the control of ‘power’ structures is transferred, changing the faces in government is a relatively superficial adjustment. * page 132 I am saying that to this traditional conception of the political may be added a complementary ‘aesthetic’ perspective, which, like a superior toothbrush, reaches places that the other ones don’t. * page 132 My work on politics was an attempt to show politics as an ‘aesthetic affair’ because politics is not the exercise of power or the struggle for power. It is the configuration of a specific world, a specific form of experience in which some things appear to be political objects, some questions political issues or argumentations, and some agents political subjects. I was attempting to redefine this ‘aesthetic’ nature of politics by setting politics not as a specific single world but as a conflictive world: not a world of competing interests or values but a world of competing worlds.262 * page 136 Whether one adopts the programmatic, declarative Situationist approach, or the more orthogonal, performative Prankster approach, to intervene in the politics of aesthetics means to effect a change at the level of perception -- the playing field of the aesthetic. To couch our approach in terms of the triad of politics, design and futures, the relevant task could now be characterised less as the design of political systems per se, and more as the design of interventions in systems that are thereby rendered political; their inequalities exposed, suddenly contingent, mutable. * page 137 this more capillary, distributed definition of politics, whose complexity we have already noted, paradoxically lends itself to simplified consequences for action. This is partly due to the fact that it relocates our focus from the the lofty bird’s-eye-view of whole-system implementation, down to a level that acknowledges embeddedness in something larger, engaging it on a scale we can handle. * page 138 The central implication for engaging politics in this form is that, rather than trying to change everything at once, you can act politically by beginning with a modest intervention in the aesthetic register. You can try to make some way of seeing or doing visible, thinkable, or otherwise available in a way that it previously was not. * page 140 The elaboration of alternative worlds calls for a distinct set of intellectual and creative skills, and indeed it is the failure of these to propagate through our culture with sufficient urgency that motivates the experiential futures work on which this dissertation is based. In other words, it is one thing to claim that alternatives are available, but it is another thing to elaborate them specifically and convincingly. * page 141 Our ability to imagine difference is undoubtedly imperfect, and limited, but we do have one, and it can be cultivated: indeed design, futures, and critical politics are all approaches to accomplishing just that. * page 142 I am suggesting that futures is inherently pluralising, as well as defamiliarising, simultaneously bringing closer the potentially radical Otherness of worlds to come, and rendering the present strange. * page 143 in principle the insights afforded by the examination of alternative futures can just as readily be deployed in the service of prevailing powers, ideologies and interests as against them; just as readily towards perpetuation of a (perhaps) repressive, unjust, exploitative, morally reprehensible program, as towards an emancipatory, progressive, humane one. The difference is simply in the framing: ‘What alternative futures must we guard against?’ versus ‘How can we escape the imposition of a single future?’ * page 145 The sense in which futures can be taken to be critical, then, is that -- when carried out publicly, and towards the project of multiplying rather than diminishing or foreclosing possibilities -- it serves as a constant reminder of the contingency of today, provides a series of alternative standpoints from which to reperceive (and so critique) the present moment, and affirms implicitly, if not expressly, the responsibility of each of us in pursuing preferred possibilities, while forgoing or avoiding others. * page 146 people can and should indeed cultivate a habit of ‘thinking the unthinkable’. The difference is one of rationale -- constantly to expand horizons, generate new possibilities, and pursue preferred worlds, rather than to prop up existing ways of ordering things. * page 152 Given that our ideas about the future do ultimately need to map on to a shared, global, physical space, and given that vast differences of worldview (against all odds, perhaps) persist; paradoxically, when it comes to the future, decolonisation can be best found in plurality. * page 153 If colonisation is the inscription of patterns of domination, then decolonisation of the future entails identifying and challenging these patterns, and providing multiple viable alternatives. I repeat, pluralisation of the range of plausible futures is the key to decolonisation. * page 155 ‘what could eventuate’ is offset against the observed present, such that the present may be ‘read’ -- or better, ‘experienced’ -- not just contrapuntally but polyvocally; with each voice adding to a sense of possibility and action that is at all times, multidimensional. * page 155 What we can affirm with certainty is what it does for the person practising it. As this form of foresight-plural is cultivated, whether by an aspiring or self-labelled ‘futurist’, or by anyone else, it begins to produce a markedly different political subjectivity. * page 157 We designed our way into this mess, we must design our way out. * page 158 Alternative possibilities exist, and failure to act is also a choice, in effect, for the momentum of the status quo * page 159 Then let me add: design is foremost a practice, or process, to which what is said and written about it serves a supporting function. * page 160 Design and politics may or may not be ‘everything’, but anything political can surely be seen as a matter of design, and vice versa. Ideas of ‘intent’ and ‘optimisation’ are as politically loaded as it is possible to imagine, implying pursuit of a normative agenda -- which comes from somewhere -- and a set of underlying values. * page 161 we consider a view that discourse is not something that happens in mind and language alone, swarming and circulating around inert matter, but that it is in part figured, congealed, reflected and embodied in materiality * page 161 We should begin by acknowledging that our ‘problem’ of reuniting these opposites is one native to the tradition of Cartesian dualism, rather than inherent in the nature of things themselves. * page 165 The mutual dependence, interpenetration -- and ultimately, indissolubility -- of the material or technical, and symbolic or social, or communicative planes, is the point I wish to emphasise here. * page 167 Every design decision, from the largest scale to the smallest, is riddled with political implications -- consequences for power relations between people. * page 169 Things, in their physicality, have what designers call affordances, simultaneously enabling some actions and prohibiting others. * page 171 The upshot of this part of our investigation is that the political, and with it the theoretical, can not only be interpreted, but also enacted, through material and aesthetic forms. Putting the three together, then -- politics, futures, and design -- ideas about the future can (but do not necessarily for all who encounter them) reorder the ‘distribution of the sensible’ by the design of interventions and perform future narratives experientially. There is at this three-way intersection a potential for a critical and politically charged hybrid political practice. * page 174 Futures studies is basically ideational in character. It is about images, narratives and perceptions -- the contents of our minds, insofar as they have a bearing on the future. Ultimately, of course, these influence our actions and inactions, thus making their way into the phenomenal world and into materiality, which effects ultimately motivate our interest in them. But the starting point in any case for futures inquiry is decidedly internal. Design, by contrast, can be seen as primarily a matter of, well, matter; the external environment, the material domain. * page 179 it seems to me that at the macro-level of the practices overall, futures and design can be regarded as isomorphic enterprises; they have the same basic shape. Both are iterative processes, with alternating divergent (generative/exploratory) and convergent (visioning/implementation) phases. In this first, intrinsically exploratory phase, alternative and diverging paths are generated and tested. In the second phase, they lead to a convergent phase, culminating in decision and execution. Thus, both futures and design prove to be ultimately interested in praxis, effecting desired change in the world, and so require explicit acknowledgment of values and normative commitments. * page 182 ‘discursive design’, which ‘refers to the creation of utilitarian objects whose primary purpose is to communicate ideas—they encourage discourse. These are tools for thinking; they raise awareness and perhaps understanding of substantive and often debatable issues of psychological, sociological, and ideological consequence. * page 182 ‘Critical design’ is a practice pioneered by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby of the Design Interactions Department at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London. * page 183 Dunne says: ‘Design approaches are needed that focus on the interaction between the portrayed reality of alternative scenarios, which so often appear didactic or utopian, and the everyday reality in which they are encountered.’ * page 184 Hertrich’s ‘hypothetical prosthetic’, an ingenious and provocative concept design in its own right, also suggests a useful frame for our agenda with experiential scenarios generally. The discursive and design technology developed here could be considered instances of ‘prosthetic foresight’ * page 185 critical design typically addresses or portrays the future more directly, while interrogative practice may be more of an activist intervention * page 187 Design brings rigour to sci-fi, sci-fi returns the favour by bringing greater imagination to design. * page 187 Exploration of what lies past the currently achievable, where prototyping and speculative storytelling meet -- hypothetical invention -- is a long tradition. (Leonardo Da Vinci may have been the prototypical design fictioneer, five centuries ago.) But since the practice is directly (if not self-consciously) concerned with the mediation of possibility space, and since the means for doing so have recently exploded -- consider access to, fluency in, and audiences for a range of media -- design fiction is an idea whose time has come * page 191 A first example of conceptual design fiction is the ‘Clock of the Long Now’, a ten thousand-year, architectural-scale timepiece, the design of which began in the mid-1990s, and which eventually will be built inside a mountain in the Nevada desert. * page 193 as a conceptual ‘design fiction’, the spime promises to unleash a working over of our relationship to materiality as thoroughly as the Long Now Clock ultimately hopes to do for our attitudes to temporality. * page 193 Design fiction is a new analytical category, retrospectively applied to a whole range of cultural outputs at the intersection of design/media production and forward thinking, including concept videos, advertising spots, and other speculative imagery. It incorporates artifacts ranging from ‘critical design’ to segments of Hollywood sci-fi movies that portray possible technologies in compelling detail. * page 194 the skill of the artist, or of the political activist, or of the futurist, in wading into an ecology of ideas about the future will consist in their ability to create and contribute to it those theory objects which are the most likely to elicit engagement, and to nudge attention and concern in desired directions. This represents one measure of political ‘effectiveness’: successfully guiding conversation and attention in a culture’s discursive ecology. * page 196 Futures in support of design describes work in which the exploration of one or more future scenarios is finally subservient to a bounded design task -- the creation of products, services, or whatever. Design in support of futures, by contrast, describes that type of practice where the design ‘output’ is not the end in itself, but rather is used as a means to discover, suggest, and provoke. When futures and design dance, they move very differently depending on which one takes the lead. * page 196 To be sure, some of the largest challenges that humans presently face could be said to result from insufficient ‘futurity’ being built into the designed world (this is one way to restate the argument of Cradle to Cradle, for instance) and so, using alternative futures to produce things more wisely, in a more future-proof fashion, as it were, would be a way to address this. * page 196 Another gloss on this complementary pair is that futures in support of design is driven by the development of applications, while design in support of futures is driven by the exploration of implications. (I am grateful to Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby for drawing this valuable distinction, in the context of design, to my attention.) It follows, then, that design is primarily a search for killer apps, while the futurist hunts killer imps. * page 198 1. Don’t break the universe This phrase, offered by our frequent design partner Matthew Jensen, became something of a master principle for developing experiential scenarios. It means that a scenario or artifact should ideally be presented on its own terms, as if transplanted from a fully realised, coherent, concretely existing alternate (or rather, future) universe. * page 199 This is a principle of realism in representation, similar to the actor’s commitment never to ‘break character’ or ‘break scene’ during a performance.405 It also invokes the theatre’s invisible ‘fourth wall’ through which the audience supposedly watches the world of a play, although rather than being an argument against breaking that wall (a traditional imperative aimed at preserving the audience’s suspension of disbelief), our conception of preserving the ‘universe’ entails the exact opposite. That is, if an experiential scenario is literally performed with an audience present, this principle argues for removing the fourth wall from the beginning, treating them not as a separate ‘audience’ but rather as an organic, diegetic part of the scenario, internal to the narrative. * page 199 the aim was to draw them in to the logic as well as the affect of the narrative, their comprehension and participation in the given universe requiring active engagement. * page 200 the scenario is better not being so literal, instead drawing the audience in.406 There is in this an echo of what performance theorist Richard Schechner calls ‘dark play’. (‘Playing in the dark means that some of the players don’t know they are playing.’407) However, the art of it is to generate a hook, a moment of intrigue, and a path of discovery into the material, rather than to create a persistent state of confusion. Intrigue is tantalising, confusion is irritating, and it can be a fine line separating the two. At one level, the difference may simply be duration: confusion is intrigue that doesn’t pay off soon enough. Generally, though, the encounter is more effective if unannounced. * page 200 The reason to refrain from providing more explicit context for the story, but instead, to drop people into the middle of things (in medias res, as the Roman poet Horace put it), is to encourage a different quality of attention during the encounter. But it also behooves the experience designer to unfold the scenario’s content artfully, so the narrative can be sniffed out without the reek of clumsy exposition. * page 201 ‘Don’t break the universe’ is thus a strategy to produce heightened engagement, one which also credits the intelligence of an audience with being able to work out the difference between ‘scenario’ and ‘reality’. * page 203 If there is a reason to take care to build coherent future universes that can, as it were, stand on their own, it is to lend them sufficient authority to withstand their encounter with the default movie in which people live. An important consequence of insisting on an internal coherence to the scenario is that it holds the work itself to a higher standard, and forces the designers to maintain a high degree of rigour about the story being told. It can require considerable work to ensure that the experiential scenario makes sense on both its own terms (internally) as well as to an audience (externally), but the payoff is considerable, literally. * page 207 a kind of thinking which helps put this notion into practice, selecting and producing the most evocative manifestations of a particular scenario, is what we have called -- here comes another metaphor -- ‘reverse archaeology’. * page 207 In designing future artifacts, we almost always start from a written scenario of the future in question, the drafting of which provides the opportunity to consider its internal cohesion, its coherence with the present and with history, and so on. Whereas the archaeologist tries to deduce the ‘world’ from the ‘fragment’, we as multimedia futurists attempt to distill and then manifest in tangible form the most potent fragments expressing the world of the scenario. * page 208 Evidencing, or the making of evidence from the future, can be used as a rapid way to prototype future service experiences. You can use the evidence as a stimulus with users or in Roleplay to test the ideas. This type of ‘archaeology of the future’ enables service providers to make early qualitative judgments about the implications of a design. Ultimately it allows customers and collaborators to ‘play back’ their own assumptions as concrete experiences rather [than] abstract evaluations. * page 209 We have come to recognise that the iceberg principle, like ‘evidencing’, is a variant of prototyping, a practice long used by designers to loop their exploration process through materiality. * page 209 Rapid prototyping helps people to experience a possible future in tangible ways. These include rough physical prototypes of products or environments, or enactments of processes and service experiences, as well as the internal infrastructure and business plans that will be required to deliver them. It allows a very low-risk way of quickly exploring multiple directions before committing resources to the best one.429 * page 210 As prototypes become ever more powerful and persuasive, they will compel new intensities of introspection. To paraphrase philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, they will become conceptual machine tools for postindustrial innovation -- not because we are now gifted with finer imaginations but because we have better instruments for imagining and rehearsing the future.430 * page 210 3. The art of the double take The third principle for designing and staging experiential scenarios is what we have called ‘the art of the double take’. The basic idea springs from an playful, exploratory, ‘decolonising’ ethos best captured by Dator’s so-called ‘Second Law of the Future’, which holds that ‘Any useful statement about the future should at first appear to be ridiculous’.432 In this view, a key contribution of futures thinking is specifically to encourage the examination, as opposed to the automatic reinforcement, of expectations and assumptions. * page 211 all four of the Hawaii 2050 experiences were designed to walk the fine line at the edge of plausibility; to seem ridiculous at first, and yet eerily possible on reflection. * page 213 Depending on how an experiential scenario is set up, one may be struck in the encounter by ridiculousness first, or by ordinariness and plausibility. Both routes can work. * page 213 Either way, the principle of the ‘double take’ is that one comes to the scenario twice; the first time fast, a snap judgment, and the second time slow, a rethinking of the initial impression. What is important is the journey from one to the other -- from acceptance at first towards questioning, or from questioning to acceptance. The point is that the ‘double take’ entails raising a fundamental tension, and allowing the audience to arrive at its own response, and reconcile or negotiate this tensions (in whatever manner) is essential. * page 215 So, futures can lend design a richer temporal context and big-picture meaning- making -- a framework within which to process the stupendous question of, to use Mau’s phrase, the ‘design of the world’. Design lends futures solidity, communicative as well as exploratory effectiveness (as Sterling noted regarding his own writing process); a direct interface to materiality, a place to begin pursuit of preferred futures in the concrete. * page 217 Guerrilla futures is the uninvited critique and pluralisation of futures scenarios -- often, although not necessarily, via experiential intervention. Its aim as a practice is to introduce scenaric possibilities to publics that otherwise may not be exposed to them, or that, while perhaps aware of the possibilities in question, are unable or unwilling to give them proper consideration. It’s the tactical, activist strand of futures practice. * page 217 It is about enabling people to become aware of and to question their assumptions about futures -- possible, probable or preferable -- by rendering one or more potentials concrete in the present, whether or not they have asked for it. * page 217 The particulars of the media used, and the subject matter in question, can vary enormously. One example could be giving out an ostensible ‘future artifact’ to urban commuters * page 217 In another case, it could be drawing a line in blue chalk on the sidewalk, * page 218 Or it could entail putting up a bronze plaque, ‘memorialising’ a hypothetical community tragedy that, in the world of the scenario, isn’t going to happen for another ten years * page 218 Or it could entail putting up a bronze plaque, ‘memorialising’ a hypothetical community tragedy that, in the world of the scenario, isn’t going to happen for another ten years. What these examples all have in common is the deliberate, concrete intrusion of future possibilities into the present to encourage as well as enable deeper engagement with those possibilities. * page 218 There is is an overlap between experiential and guerrilla futures, but they are non-identical. Not all experiential scenarios can claim the guerrilla activist’s level of direct engagement with the Rancièrian ‘political’. * page 219 Life in futures work entails constant labour on the frontier of acceptability. Those whose thinking would benefit most from a plural futures perspective are sceptical or uninterested, while those predisposed to be aware and interested for that reason do not need it as much. * page 219 In any case the principal feature that distinguishes guerrilla handiwork from other futures work is the fact that it is uninvited and unexpected on the part of its audience. * page 220 Guerrilla work may be accomplished in highly scripted, unscripted or only semi-scripted situations -- this form of futures ‘in the wild’447 is perhaps most obvious when it takes place in city streets, subways, or personal mailboxes, rather than in relatively controlled environments like classrooms, galleries, museums, and theme parks. * page 222 Guerrilla futures, then, has more to do with the possibilities afforded by the element of surprise, which would usually come from the setting and circumstances of an intervention, while future jamming focuses on the sensibility and semiotic techniques deployed. * page 222 The practice of culture jamming (which precedes both future jamming and guerrilla futures) aims to subvert the authority and messaging strategies of dominant cultural institutions. * page 223 While there are multiple lineages of art, humour, performance and activism that can be traced into this form of political provocation,455 among the most important forerunners to culture jamming is the Situationist International,456 and in particular the strategy first elaborated by Situationist-in-Chief Guy Debord, of détournement. * page 225 Culture jamming can be regarded as a sort of propagation-by-performance of critical theory, with similar thematic preoccupations to its academic cousin -- alienation, capitalism, the mass media -- but revealing abusive techniques and technologies of domination not through commentary from outside, but through appropriating and undermining them. * page 226 I don’t want to pour cold water on the nascent concept of future jamming, which may be the single closest conceptual offering in the futures literature to ‘guerrilla futures’, our tactical counterpart of experiential futures. Still, the question arises as to whether the notion of future jamming contains potential for much more than a future-themed version of culture jamming. * page 227 The actual illumination of future possibilities, both broader and deeper, is afforded neither by general cultural critique, nor by mocking the inadequacy, narrowness, foolishness or other shortcomings of a given image of the future. A ‘jamming’ strategy may disrupt the hegemony of monofuturism (similarly to how a teenager’s snide remarks to her father might ‘disrupt’ his household hegemony) but they stop short of actually providing viable alternative ways forward. * page 228 As best we can, we must go beyond ‘jamming’ existing futures communications, and actively elaborate alternatives. * page 228 the disruption of hegemonic futures (default patterns of thought), which we have previously described as decolonising, requires also generating and exposing unseen options (or, unseen aspects of existing options) implies a critical ingredient about guerrilla futures interventions: the element of surprise. * page 228 Next we consider experiential futures in light of a second form of activism, ‘prefigurative politics’. The term denotes a mode of action which seeks actually to promote a desired future state of affairs by enacting or embodying it in the present. * page 229 guerrilla futures interventions are only sometimes about promoting a specific preferred future, whereas prefigurative politics always is * page 230 Social movements historian Barbara Epstein, describing prefigurative politics, has written: ‘To most [direct action] movement activists, a vision of the future is meaningful only if it is acted upon in the present, even if doing so disrupts daily life and produces organizations that often do not function smoothly within a political structure based on different values.’ * page 231 While the virtual terrain of the future is, as we have seen, quintessentially one of ideas, signs, and symbols, the ideal for our guerrilla futures intervention is to reach out from the play of the semiotic toward the register of lived experience. The productive tension at the heart of our strategic oxymoron, ‘experiential futures’, finds its apotheosis in the guerrilla futures intervention that strives to render the always-already virtual future momentarily real. * page 232 Nevertheless, it does remain a largely ‘expert’ enterprise, whereas even to contemplate decolonisation of the future (as described in Chapter 3) to my mind implies a widespread, distributed, ideally culture-wide exercise. * page 238 In the comparative analysis that follows, the three interventions outlined above -- the Yes Men’s Times Special Edition, the Sierra Club’s Blue Line project, and FoundFutures: Chinatown -- our attention will be trained mainly on the external elements of these guerrilla ‘performances’; space, time, media, narrative, and audience involvement. * page 242 the general rule of thumb that emerges is that the more easily a space is accessed, the more readily its use is either ignored or overturned. The more visible it is, the more valuable, but also vulnerable: impact = attention × duration. Impact and expected lifespan stand in inverse proportion to one another. Hundreds, even thousands of flyers can be generously distributed, but such ephemera disappear overnight. Posters mounted in a location designated for advertising upcoming events may be safer, but also stand out less. * page 242 The main lesson here, in terms of physical media, militates for simplicity. A single element -- a mock newspaper reproduced 80,000 times; a simple blue line traced in the street -- may be enough for an intervention to evoke effectively and memorably a specific array of political ‘future’ concerns, and thus to ‘redistribute the sensible’ of an urban scene. * page 244 for certain purposes, the very proposal of a public futures intervention, if accompanied by vivid visualisations, may be enough to generate significant attention, and could even make the actual performance redundant * page 244 the ‘performance’ of the intervention begins before a drop of paint has been spilled or a projector switched on. The guerrilla futures intervention is not just for the ‘here and now’ of the performance, but for the absent, though potentially much larger, audience reached later and at leisure, especially via the web. * page 245 This secondary impact is what we have come to refer to as the ‘afterlife’ of a project, and we have learned that thorough documentation of the design and installation processes -- through photographs, video, notes of conversations, changing impressions, and decisions made -- are usually at least as important * page 249 Secrecy beforehand was of the essence; had information about it been known publicly ahead of time, its impact would have been much diminished. * page 249 Blue Line project was also calculated to attract media attention, and with careful timing, but with the difference that public knowledge was sought beforehand, to maximise participation. * page 250 We noted above that a dimension of ‘time’ would be dealt with as an aspect of narrative; the chronological or historic timeframe of the scenario being extruded into the present in the given intervention. * page 251 The fact is that these interventions avoid offering internal narrative (that of the future depicted or evoked), instead focusing on promoting or enabling an external narrative (the story about community members taking action on climate change). * page 251 The Times Special Edition, rather than presenting a utopian master narrative of ‘how the unimaginable could happen’ used the newspaper medium to offer a constellation of realised ideals. * page 252 The ‘internal’ layer is the scenario; that is, the story told, or implied, about the future. The ‘external’ layer is the story about the staged encounter with the future. * page 253 One particular risk in this vein is that a controversial approach to staging the intervention may generate plenty of attention, but risks sending the resulting discussion off the intended course, if it focuses too much on the intervention tactics rather than the substantive issues sought to be raised. * page 253 Primary audiences, those who see the intervention directly at the time; and secondary audiences, those who hear or read about it later. * page 254 intervention should be approached with a sensitivity to both primary and secondary audiences -- the first-hand experience, and its ‘afterlife’. A third element also warrants mention in this setting; the involvement of and impact on the ‘performers’ or activists themselves. * page 254 The Blue Line project in Hawaii attempted to maximise public participation in staging the intervention. * page 254 The mode of engagement was the staging of a public spectacle, a mildly ‘artistic’ demonstration, pointing experientially and symbolically to the climate issue. * page 255 I would surmise that the greatest impact was probably on those who took part in the project, spending one or two hours actively mapping potential climate change onto their neighbourhood -- the effects of such participatory ‘futuring’ would be worthy of further research. * page 255 The Times newspaper intervention was a beautiful example of what Douglas Rushkoff has called a ‘media virus’ (a successfully self-replicating meme). It reached a primary audience of tens of thousands, and a secondary one of many millions. It did not ask any particular action of its audience, but was framed as a sort of guerrilla futurist spectacle. * page 255 It may be that the most effective of the three scenarios staged was so because of the element of direct, personal engagement (the ‘Save Chinatown’ protest in ‘McChinatown’). * other Ambient foresight networks Ambient foresight nodes To create an enduring society, we will need a system of commerce and production where each and every act is inherently sustainable and restorative. Business will need to integrate economic, biologic, and human systems to create a sustainable method of commerce. As hard as we may try to become sustainable on a company-by-company level, we cannot fully succeed until the institutions surrounding commerce are redesigned. Just as every act in an industrial society leads to environmental degradation, regardless of intention, we must design a system where the opposite is true, where doing good is like falling off a log, where the natural, everyday acts of work and life accumulate into a better world as a matter of course, not a matter of conscious altruism Paul Hawken in his book The Ecology of Commerce It is the business of the future to be dangerous... ~ Alfred North Whitehead rather than a simple binary Logic of Truth (‘is’ vs ‘is not’), when it comes to human thought and experience, it’s better thought of as a continuum. 528 There are those propositions that we take to be true, there are those that we treat as if they were true (however sound, or not, our basis may be for believing that they are), and there is the domain of speculation, where we let ourselves off the ontological hook a little, and allow ourselves to explore possibilities or imaginings of various kinds, even if we don’t necessarily have evidence for them. spectrum of representations ranging from completely real to completely imaginary. The three key markers to plot are the reality bedrock ‘ is ’ at one end, the pure supposition of ‘ what if ’, at the other end, and the mimetic ‘ as if ’ in between. We’ll call this the ontological spectrum . None of this is intended to lament the hard fact that hard facts are so hard to come by. Quite the opposite: in the pragmatist tradition, 531 or that of the Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger, 532 I am suggesting that we can afford to be much less hung up on the distinction between certified truths on the one hand, and fictive possibilities on the other. The attitude suggested here is to drop both unreflectiveness and embarrassment about our situation, to deliberately embrace and exploit the quirks of our human processing system instead. Where we have to resort to workarounds or ‘mind hacks’ to deal with the future more effectively than we have in the past, so be it. Whatever it takes . to become adept hackers of the historical process we must first master hacks of the mind, at first our own, and then those of others whom we may wish to engage in conversation. The ‘creative leaps’ Eagleman mentions were captured under the heading of ‘abduction’ (as opposed to the traditional logical operations of deduction and induction) by the American pragmatist C.S. Peirce. In Peirce’s philosophy of science abduction is the first phase in the scientific method, the formulation of an hypothesis as to what is going on. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2001.) Indeed, brain science has revealed that most of the time , our thoughts are not carefully attending to the present moment, but are instead time-travelling into recalled past and fantasised future states, plumbing what psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls ‘the dark network’. 536 Any futurist should cultivate an awareness of these categories so they may be put to good use, and the guerrilla futurist in particular is bound to become an expert on charting new reaches of her own, as well as our collective, dark network. Simulation is an activity which belongs in as if , between the abstract what if of the scenario and the concrete is of supposed reality. A simulation may be thought of as an enacted scenario. When a building’s inhabitants are evacuated in a fire drill; when a pilot learns to fly a complex aircraft using a mockup that never leaves the ground; or when a trainee surgeon operates on a dummy; when actors rehearse a play in an empty theatre; or when a complex model of weather systems is run inside a computer to produce next week’s forecast -- all these things involve using a representation or simplified version of a ‘real’ situation or system, in order to produce insight as to the workings of that system, or to use a low-risk test run to found confidence in preparing for the ‘real’ version of it. A hoax is a deliberate deception, which belongs at the is end of the spectrum. The defining characteristic of a hoax is the way it bifurcates actuality and perception. It engineers a false sense of what is . The thing that links it to scenarios ( what if ) and simulations ( as if ) is that it can be seen as a hypothetical that the audience does not know is a hypothetical. To watch a film about war, or a love affair, or a death in the family, is obviously still a very long way from experiencing those things yourself. But it is closer to an evocation of those experiences than a mere mention of them, or a sketch outline, or nothing at all. Here’s that pragmatic ‘hacker’ sensibility again: no one is arguing that perfect simulation is available (even in principle, let alone in practice); the argument is that we can do better, and entertain scenarios at deeper levels unreached by purely cognitive exercises, by turning up the experiential concreteness. However, it is shallow, moralising, and ultimately, intellectually indefensible to see all deception as equivalent. An optical illusion or trompe l'oeil , or magic trick may involve ‘deception’, but of a purely trivial kind. A great deal of humour is ambiguous as to what’s really going on, or sets things up to appear one way as a backdrop or precondition for the delight of seeing in another way To recap our two candidate categories where this form of mimesis may be indispensable and yet its audience unaware: the first situation is where it may afford the subject herself with an insight or understanding that otherwise would have been unavailable to them (what Phoebe did for Rachel, concerning her pregnancy). The second is where it may serve a greater good to know how people really feel, think or behave in certain situations (an argument in support of Milgram’s investigation). We now see how the ‘is’ end of the spectrum may be vital to certain forms of inquiry, and its ethical status is not so black and white. Hell Houses are an outreach tool, a way to change hearts and minds, aimed at advancing the theological mission of believers. This intense commitment, and its embeddedness in a wider ideological program, is reflected in the growth of Hell Houses into something of a national phenomenon. They have been staged and locally adapted over the past two decades across hundreds of communities in the US. 562 ‘It is not unusual for Hell House productions to average attendance figures of over 3,000 people per production night.’ 563 And they have become enough of a national phenomenon to be satirised in the 2007 Halloween edition of The Simpsons. 564 ‘Enormous amounts of time, money, energy, and emotion go into each dramatic production.’ 565 Evidently, as a strategy for evangelical Christians, this is a highly successful ‘media virus’. Hell House dramas are designed to be intense and shocking, staging realistic incarnations of death. Many of the tactics employed are graphic, violent, and deeply disturbing—audiences bear witness to horrors not normally experienced up-close and first-hand. Spectators weep, faint, and become physically ill, ironically all indicative of a positive aesthetic response. Because Hell Houses strive for realism, role-players are often just as moved and affected as the audience by the event, especially the youth cast as the victims. 567 Neither WOTW nor Hell House are experiential scenarios per se, but their examples help to shed light on experiential futures. Intentions in the two cases are very different. WOTW was for entertainment, and Hell Houses are for evangelism. In both, however an important threshold comes into the picture as the scenarios portrayed begin to venture from the relative safety of what if and as if into claims, explicit or implicit, about how the world is , or how the future ‘will’ be. When this happens, two primary ethical considerations for those staging an experiential scenario may arise; that it is distressing , or misleading . Merely to assert or assume good intentions in any given case is not enough, of course, in the same way that an artist’s declared political agenda does not establish that their art actually has the desired impact. As framed so far, we have considered only the ethical risks of futures intervention, neglecting the other side of the story. The exploration is incomplete without asking what are the ethical reasons for elaborating alternatives in this way? Or, to put it another way, what are the ethical risks of not exploring alternative futures, or of doing so with insufficient imagination and daring? In probing alternative futures, then, and in encouraging others to do likewise, it is certainly possible to be reckless. It is also possible to be too careful. One cannot defend against all conceivable misunderstandings. And in the past our future projections have often been too narrow, shallow, and timid. Desperate times, sometimes, call for desperate measures. This has some unsettling implications. ‘The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking. ... [O]nce an uncertain situation has been perceived or interpreted in a particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it any other way. Thus, the generation of a specific scenario may inhibit the emergence of other scenarios, particularly those that lead to different outcomes.’ 200 (Note that here, ‘scenario’ has a specific meaning; ‘stories that lead from the present situation to the target event’, 201 and that target events in this research were temporally much closer than the longerterm ‘futures’ of interest to us.) ‘Where’s my jetpack?’ with an intellectual veneer Success for futures is surely more than being recognised as a legitimate field of inquiry that is not too often or too grievously misunderstood. There are, as the spectres of the ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unimaginable’ remind us, bigger fish to fry. Futures may be ‘losing’ the battle of disciplinary recognition, 581 but the war for a wider shift in culture is still on. The veteran Canadian futurist Ruben Nelson makes the important point that futures, the field as such, is not ‘the work’; changing the world for the better is ‘the work’, and futures is a set of instruments to try to do this. To my knowledge, the most comprehensive effort to articulate such a vision, in terms of an ideal for the eventual impact of the futures field, comes from a 1996 essay by (then Professor of Foresight, now full-time consultant) Richard Slaughter, in which he describes the potential emergence of a social capacity for foresight (later shortened to ‘social foresight’, the term we will use hereinafter) We turn now to the theoretical side of Slaughter’s argument. He proposes that all forward-thinking efforts, however formal or informal, can be situated in a conceptual framework comprising five layers or levels of ascending sophistication. 586 At base, level one, lie the ‘raw capacities and perceptions of the human brain-mind system’. Level two is where ‘futures concepts and ideas enable a futures discourse’. At level three, ‘futures tools and methodologies increase analytic power’. Level four is marked by futures processes, projects and structures being ‘embodied in a variety of applications’. The fifth and final level imagines a ‘social capacity for foresight as an emergent property’ One is ‘future shock therapy’, the other is ‘ambient foresight' Please fill all the letters into the box to prove you're human. 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