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future_fabulators:the_futures_of_everyday_life [2014-03-03 08:03] – nik | future_fabulators:the_futures_of_everyday_life [2019-04-11 17:33] (current) – [The Futures Of Everyday Life] maja | ||
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==== The Futures Of Everyday Life ==== | ==== The Futures Of Everyday Life ==== | ||
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(some [[:reading notes]] ) | (some [[:reading notes]] ) | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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It is as if the slider of the probable future moves depending on how you tilt your mind. | It is as if the slider of the probable future moves depending on how you tilt your mind. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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It is about developing the requisite tools to steer ourselves, and our communities, | It is about developing the requisite tools to steer ourselves, and our communities, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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' | 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' | ||
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how to convey a variety of ideas about the future accessibly, meaningfully and impactfully to a wide group of participants? | how to convey a variety of ideas about the future accessibly, meaningfully and impactfully to a wide group of participants? | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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In other words, an experiential, | In other words, an experiential, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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No longer was there a vehicle for Hawaiian residents to examine their assumptions about the future before embarking on ‘planning’ it. | No longer was there a vehicle for Hawaiian residents to examine their assumptions about the future before embarking on ‘planning’ it. | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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The future, a purely virtual space, is a political frontier sorely in need of both decolonisation and democratisation | The future, a purely virtual space, is a political frontier sorely in need of both decolonisation and democratisation | ||
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Breadth concerns the difference between considering a singular ‘future’ and examining ‘futures’ in the plural. Depth deals with engagement with the specificity, | Breadth concerns the difference between considering a singular ‘future’ and examining ‘futures’ in the plural. Depth deals with engagement with the specificity, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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The start of a corrective to monofuturism as well as to binary futurism consists in entertaining a broader range of potential outcomes. | The start of a corrective to monofuturism as well as to binary futurism consists in entertaining a broader range of potential outcomes. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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in this dissertation the future is regarded less as being ‘out there’ than as ‘in here’, inside our minds, moving in our communities, | in this dissertation the future is regarded less as being ‘out there’ than as ‘in here’, inside our minds, moving in our communities, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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American futurist Roy Amara made famous a simple three-part framework for the futures field, ‘possible’, | American futurist Roy Amara made famous a simple three-part framework for the futures field, ‘possible’, | ||
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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 ‘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, | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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historic trajectory, a game-changing alteration, at the level of one or more of our fundamental assumptions: | historic trajectory, a game-changing alteration, at the level of one or more of our fundamental assumptions: | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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our sense of both ‘probable’ and ‘preferable’ futures is invisibly hemmed in by an underdeveloped sense of the possible | our sense of both ‘probable’ and ‘preferable’ futures is invisibly hemmed in by an underdeveloped sense of the possible | ||
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Inaction in the face of known risks is undoubtedly, | Inaction in the face of known risks is undoubtedly, | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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scenarios relating to relatively slow, systemic issues are less readily mediated, and more likely to be overlooked | scenarios relating to relatively slow, systemic issues are less readily mediated, and more likely to be overlooked | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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It is the difference between scenario as represented and scenario as experienced. | It is the difference between scenario as represented and scenario as experienced. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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all ideas, stories, narratives, and images can be regarded as experiences, | all ideas, stories, narratives, and images can be regarded as experiences, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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’. | 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’. | ||
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When the affective (experiential, | When the affective (experiential, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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Daniel Gilbert is an expert in the field of affective forecasting: | Daniel Gilbert is an expert in the field of affective forecasting: | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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It is not always possible to fully compensate for the lack of these four features -- personal, moral, immediate, and observable -- from future scenarios | It is not always possible to fully compensate for the lack of these four features -- personal, moral, immediate, and observable -- from future scenarios | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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As the event swims into view, you engage it in more concrete detail. | As the event swims into view, you engage it in more concrete detail. | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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The more detail is provided about a scenario, the more subjectively probable it may be rated. | The more detail is provided about a scenario, the more subjectively probable it may be rated. | ||
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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; | 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; | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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‘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. | ‘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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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a balancing act ‘between particularisation and generalisation -- between literal and abstract representation’, | a balancing act ‘between particularisation and generalisation -- between literal and abstract representation’, | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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The futurist, having broad-brush ‘trends’ or possible ‘emerging issues’ in the past and present to draw on for ‘evidence’, | The futurist, having broad-brush ‘trends’ or possible ‘emerging issues’ in the past and present to draw on for ‘evidence’, | ||
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The best strategy for addressing the general/ | The best strategy for addressing the general/ | ||
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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’, | 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’, | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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Possibly in line with variations in thinking and learning style, such speculations on the page invariably spark certain people’s imaginations, | Possibly in line with variations in thinking and learning style, such speculations on the page invariably spark certain people’s imaginations, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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They were not predictions, | They were not predictions, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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The purpose was to provide material to think with, which is to say, shared reference points for conversation among the participants. | The purpose was to provide material to think with, which is to say, shared reference points for conversation among the participants. | ||
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The intention was not to drive the audience towards any particular conclusions, | The intention was not to drive the audience towards any particular conclusions, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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From the reception side, the mechanism by which this arrangement functions could be seen as an experiential synecdoche, | From the reception side, the mechanism by which this arrangement functions could be seen as an experiential synecdoche, | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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it has become increasingly clear to us that one of the useful ways of enframing and enabling this avenue of exploration is experience design | it has become increasingly clear to us that one of the useful ways of enframing and enabling this avenue of exploration is experience design | ||
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experience as the basic working material for the futurist (as well as the designer and political actor) | experience as the basic working material for the futurist (as well as the designer and political actor) | ||
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Experience can be, and in a whole range of human activities, most certainly is, designed. | Experience can be, and in a whole range of human activities, most certainly is, designed. | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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’, | 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’, | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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With experiential futures, then, we are paradoxically creating real memories of hypothetical experiences, | With experiential futures, then, we are paradoxically creating real memories of hypothetical experiences, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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As things are remade, when lines are redrawn, on however large or small a scale, the political is activated. | As things are remade, when lines are redrawn, on however large or small a scale, the political is activated. | ||
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Politics, as approached here, provides a theoretical perspective in which to locate experiential futures as an emerging form of thought-into-action. | Politics, as approached here, provides a theoretical perspective in which to locate experiential futures as an emerging form of thought-into-action. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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the ‘political’ dimension has two characteristics: | the ‘political’ dimension has two characteristics: | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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I am saying that to this traditional conception of the political may be added a complementary ‘aesthetic’ perspective, | I am saying that to this traditional conception of the political may be added a complementary ‘aesthetic’ perspective, | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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Whether one adopts the programmatic, | Whether one adopts the programmatic, | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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I am suggesting that futures is inherently pluralising, | I am suggesting that futures is inherently pluralising, | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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‘what could eventuate’ is offset against the observed present, such that the present may be ‘read’ -- or better, ‘experienced’ -- not just contrapuntally but polyvocally; | ‘what could eventuate’ is offset against the observed present, such that the present may be ‘read’ -- or better, ‘experienced’ -- not just contrapuntally but polyvocally; | ||
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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’, | 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’, | ||
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We designed our way into this mess, we must design our way out. | We designed our way into this mess, we must design our way out. | ||
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Alternative possibilities exist, and failure to act is also a choice, in effect, for the momentum of the status quo | Alternative possibilities exist, and failure to act is also a choice, in effect, for the momentum of the status quo | ||
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Then let me add: design is foremost a practice, or process, to which what is said and written about it serves a supporting function. | Then let me add: design is foremost a practice, or process, to which what is said and written about it serves a supporting function. | ||
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Design and politics may or may not be ‘everything’, | Design and politics may or may not be ‘everything’, | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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Every design decision, from the largest scale to the smallest, is riddled with political implications -- consequences for power relations between people. | Every design decision, from the largest scale to the smallest, is riddled with political implications -- consequences for power relations between people. | ||
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Things, in their physicality, | Things, in their physicality, | ||
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The upshot of this part of our investigation is that the political, and with it the theoretical, | The upshot of this part of our investigation is that the political, and with it the theoretical, | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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it seems to me that at the macro-level of the practices overall, futures and design can be regarded as isomorphic enterprises; | it seems to me that at the macro-level of the practices overall, futures and design can be regarded as isomorphic enterprises; | ||
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‘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, | ‘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, | ||
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‘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. | ‘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. | ||
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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.’ | 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.’ | ||
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Hertrich’s ‘hypothetical prosthetic’, | Hertrich’s ‘hypothetical prosthetic’, | ||
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critical design typically addresses or portrays the future more directly, while interrogative practice may be more of an activist intervention | critical design typically addresses or portrays the future more directly, while interrogative practice may be more of an activist intervention | ||
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Design brings rigour to sci-fi, sci-fi returns the favour by bringing greater imagination to design. | Design brings rigour to sci-fi, sci-fi returns the favour by bringing greater imagination to design. | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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A first example of conceptual design fiction is the ‘Clock of the Long Now’, a ten thousand-year, | A first example of conceptual design fiction is the ‘Clock of the Long Now’, a ten thousand-year, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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Design fiction is a new analytical category, retrospectively applied to a whole range of cultural outputs at the intersection of design/ | Design fiction is a new analytical category, retrospectively applied to a whole range of cultural outputs at the intersection of design/ | ||
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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’: | 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’: | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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Another gloss on this complementary pair is that futures in support of design is driven by the development of applications, | Another gloss on this complementary pair is that futures in support of design is driven by the development of applications, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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This is a principle of realism in representation, | This is a principle of realism in representation, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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‘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’. | ‘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’. | ||
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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), | 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), | ||
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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’. | 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’. | ||
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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’, | 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’, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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We have come to recognise that the iceberg principle, like ‘evidencing’, | We have come to recognise that the iceberg principle, like ‘evidencing’, | ||
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Rapid prototyping helps people to experience a possible future in tangible ways. These include rough physical prototypes of products or environments, | Rapid prototyping helps people to experience a possible future in tangible ways. These include rough physical prototypes of products or environments, | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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all four of the Hawaii 2050 experiences were designed to walk the fine line at the edge of plausibility; | all four of the Hawaii 2050 experiences were designed to walk the fine line at the edge of plausibility; | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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Guerrilla futures is the uninvited critique and pluralisation of futures scenarios -- often, although not necessarily, | Guerrilla futures is the uninvited critique and pluralisation of futures scenarios -- often, although not necessarily, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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In another case, it could be drawing a line in blue chalk on the sidewalk, | In another case, it could be drawing a line in blue chalk on the sidewalk, | ||
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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 | 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 | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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’. | 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’. | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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While there are multiple lineages of art, humour, performance and activism that can be traced into this form of political provocation, | While there are multiple lineages of art, humour, performance and activism that can be traced into this form of political provocation, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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The actual illumination of future possibilities, | The actual illumination of future possibilities, | ||
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As best we can, we must go beyond ‘jamming’ existing futures communications, | As best we can, we must go beyond ‘jamming’ existing futures communications, | ||
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the disruption of hegemonic futures (default patterns of thought), which we have previously described as decolonising, | the disruption of hegemonic futures (default patterns of thought), which we have previously described as decolonising, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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guerrilla futures interventions are only sometimes about promoting a specific preferred future, whereas prefigurative politics always is | guerrilla futures interventions are only sometimes about promoting a specific preferred future, whereas prefigurative politics always is | ||
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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.’ | 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.’ | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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Nevertheless, | Nevertheless, | ||
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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: | 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: | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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for certain purposes, the very proposal of a public futures intervention, | for certain purposes, the very proposal of a public futures intervention, | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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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, | 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, | ||
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Secrecy beforehand was of the essence; had information about it been known publicly ahead of time, its impact would have been much diminished. | Secrecy beforehand was of the essence; had information about it been known publicly ahead of time, its impact would have been much diminished. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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). | 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). | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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Primary audiences, those who see the intervention directly at the time; and secondary audiences, those who hear or read about it later. | Primary audiences, those who see the intervention directly at the time; and secondary audiences, those who hear or read about it later. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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The Blue Line project in Hawaii attempted to maximise public participation in staging the intervention. | The Blue Line project in Hawaii attempted to maximise public participation in staging the intervention. | ||
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The mode of engagement was the staging of a public spectacle, a mildly ‘artistic’ demonstration, | The mode of engagement was the staging of a public spectacle, a mildly ‘artistic’ demonstration, | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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. | 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. | ||
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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’). | 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’). | ||
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+ | when a possible future scenario is made available for consideration, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 256 | ||
+ | Strategy typifies the programmatic, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 257 | ||
+ | we also need to admit that sometimes an intervention that should work simply misses the mark, for whatever reasons | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 258 | ||
+ | How do you measure whether someone’s mind has been changed by a futures encounter? This is an instance of a broader problem of how one can know whether any ‘political’ art is actually having the desired impact. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 260 | ||
+ | Individual stories are not decisive evidence of the success or otherwise of an intervention or artwork, but only indications of the sorts of reactions that people may have. A valuable next step in the research agenda suggested by this would be to design and implement more systematic evaluations, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 261 | ||
+ | Had we been aiming specifically to elicit negative attitudes towards national chain stores, the business owner’s self-surprising reperception in favour of Starbucks would have been a disaster. As it turned out, however, that surprise was for us a small sign of success: the experiential scenario revealed something that mere hypothetical rumination had not. As Stephen Duncombe has pointed out, ‘if we shift persuasion from persuading people to think X, and instead simply persuading people to think, then it’s a whole different ballgame. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 262 | ||
+ | any successful experience is founded on engagement, the minimal condition for any kind of impact. A scenario offered for exploration purposes, dramatising a complex issue, will be impactful and useful not because its audience comes to share a particular (ideological) position and produce the same responses -- that is more like advertising, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 262 | ||
+ | a piecemeal, tactical checklist: 1) To which spaces of display and/or performance can we gain access, and what are the risks and potentials afforded by each? | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 263 | ||
+ | When is the most appropriate moment, in terms of scheduling, to stage the intervention? | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 263 | ||
+ | How long does the artifact need to stay as installed? | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 263 | ||
+ | What materials and media should be used? Can they be reused, moved around and redeployed, or must they necessarily be treated as ‘disposable’? | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 263 | ||
+ | What is the main point of the story? Who are the primary and secondary audiences, and is the real or most meaningful impact that of the encounter for the former, or does it really make sense only when seen in context later? | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 263 | ||
+ | Is a physical intervention, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 264 | ||
+ | The design of any experiential scenario in any setting requires one to take account of the same generic factors: Who are the audience members, and what kind of experience would you like them to have; what is the future narrative in question, and to what extent will it be a ‘static’ scenario (providing a snapshot of some future world) versus ‘dynamic’ (setting out the whole backstory from the actual-present to the future-present of the scenario); what are the spaces and media at one’s disposal; if it is a live experience, as opposed to a film or gallery artifact, whether it will be ‘immersive’ in the sense of incorporating the audience’s presence in the scene, or whether it will instead rely on the traditional ‘fourth wall’ of the theatre, and pretend that no one is watching. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 264 | ||
+ | The key difference is that a conventional experience is bound to be more or less replicable and regularised, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 264 | ||
+ | All too often, the ‘urgent’ (short-term, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 266 | ||
+ | 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, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 267 | ||
+ | We can treat what if speculations as if they were the case, or we may even endorse as fact a proposition which others would regard as the most unfounded, outlandish speculation. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 268 | ||
+ | the category of is should be regarded as the most tenuous of the three, because it constantly requires verification to shore it up | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 268 | ||
+ | whatever our declared membership or outlook may be philosophically, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 269 | ||
+ | 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. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 269 | ||
+ | Neuroscientist and fiction writer David Eagleman recently described the unsuspected similarity of his two jobs.534 ‘What’s written in the textbooks is completely untrue. Science never goes as a linear process of discovery, it’s always people making creative leaps. You go into the lab every day, and you make up the wackiest stories that you can, and you see [from] which ones you can build a bridge of evidence back to what we already know.’ This turns out to be logically identical to the process of ‘incasting’ by which the logics of alternative futures are tested and fleshed out. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 270 | ||
+ | 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. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 270 | ||
+ | A future scenario is a discursive technology at the what if end of the spectrum. It is first and foremost a thought experiment. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 271 | ||
+ | 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. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 271 | ||
+ | In this framework, role playing and gaming -- so long as you are aware that you are playing a role or a game -- would also be included under as if, this area of simulation. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 271 | ||
+ | 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. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 274 | ||
+ | strikes an intriguing balance between seriousness and mischief that anticipates the sensibility investigated in these pages (‘don’t break the universe’) | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 275 | ||
+ | The difference between as if and is resides in awareness of the ontological status of the thing. A hoax is not a hoax if no one is fooled. A simulation would move towards being a hoax if it included deception about the fact of it being a simulation. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 276 | ||
+ | not everything at the hypothetical is end of the spectrum, although deception may be involved, counts as a hoax, or is reprehensible. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 277 | ||
+ | Our understanding of what makes us tick is incomplete, and riddled with mixed motivations. We may like to believe that we think or do one thing, while in fact thinking or acting consistently in some other way. As a result, experiments intended to get at the real story may deploy ‘methodological deception’. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 279 | ||
+ | it is shallow, moralising, and ultimately, intellectually indefensible to see all deception as equivalent. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 281 | ||
+ | War of the Worlds (hereinafter WOTW) was adapted for radio from the eponymous science fiction novel, written by H.G. Wells, and based on the premise of an invasion of Earth by creatures from Mars.552 In the radio dramatisation, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 284 | ||
+ | A Hell House experience consists in audience members touring a building where each room stages a scene dramatising life’s evils, as defined by this variant of the Christian belief system -- suicide, gay marriage, abortion, rave parties -- and their eternally regrettable consequences for the wrongdoers. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 285 | ||
+ | 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. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 286 | ||
+ | In a nutshell, as ethnographer and Hell House expert Elizabeth Nixon puts it, ‘the ultimate goal of a Hell House is to save souls through fright. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 287 | ||
+ | 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, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 288 | ||
+ | one ethical question concerns whether people are distressed or even traumatised by what is presented to them | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 289 | ||
+ | to what extent one does or might be expected to foresee adverse consequences of an intervention. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 289 | ||
+ | The second key ethical question has to do with unwarranted assertions, or resulting interpretations, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 290 | ||
+ | this concern does go to the heart of ‘experiential futures’, a consciously contradictory term and practice, juxtaposing as it does the abstractness of future with the concreteness of experience. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 290 | ||
+ | If someone ‘resolves’ this tension by mistakenly embracing the scenario as factual, then the key questions must be more specific; to what extent, for how long, and with what consequences did this confusion occur, and was it a reasonable response on their part in the circumstances? | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 291 | ||
+ | Interestingly, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 292 | ||
+ | New Orleans’ experience of Hurricane Katrina, and Detroit’s experience of the collapse of the automobile industry. These were complex situations, but a failure to engage the future, to dare to foresee with sufficient breadth or depth, played a decisive part in each. Those cases are harbingers of the sort of collective and emergent failure -- whether by slow decline or knockout punch -- that we may expect to see if our ability to think and feel through alternative futures does not dramatically improve. 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. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 292 | ||
+ | generally our interest in experiential futures will concern longer-term potentials in possibility space, rather than something that could happen immediately, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 292 | ||
+ | the confusion around an is/ | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 293 | ||
+ | As Dunagan and I have said repeatedly in advocacy of experiential futures, sometimes it’s better to be surprised by a simulation than blindsided by reality. When this rationale applies, and when it does not, is a matter for would-be activists to weigh on a case by case basis. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 294 | ||
+ | Although it is a difficult art to execute (and also to prove) in any particular case, the general point here is that the value of enabling someone genuinely to contemplate a compelling alternative future universe -- if perhaps only for a moment or two -- may be profound. Everyone can recount instances in their own life where sudden, contingent insights have led to momentous changes in direction. The value of these interventions and futures perspectives should not necessarily be sought in their enabling a particular or permanent future orientation (although those are conceivable outcomes). Even small glimpses of other worlds may make the effort worthwhile. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 294 | ||
+ | As Whitehead reminds us, it is the business of the future to be dangerous -- which makes it our business to be able, at certain times, to conjure with that danger in order to navigate it more wisely. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 295 | ||
+ | the ‘safer’ settings of workshops, galleries and the like have great value, but bringing these lived modes of exploration to people who have not consciously opted into them may be the only way out of the ‘Futurist’s Catch-22’. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 295 | ||
+ | The Futurist’s Catch-22 is, in short, that those who most need futures work don’t ‘get it’, while those who ‘get it’ don’t need it so much. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 296 | ||
+ | Somewhere along the line the balance needs to shift from guerrilla futurist agitation, to a more mundane, ordinary, and embedded use of futures thinking. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 299 | ||
+ | To infuse futures thinking into wider culture is the agenda of interest here. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 300 | ||
+ | A foresight culture therefore emerges at the dawn of the 21st century. It is a culture that routinely thinks long-term, takes future generations seriously, learns its way towards sustainability and brings the whole earth back from the brink of catastrophe. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 300 | ||
+ | a different sensibility is abroad. It is one that sees each generation as a link in a chain, not only as inheritors of the past but also as guardians of the future. The species looks out on a newly enchanted world and universe. It grows beyond the primitive ego states and destructive technologies that drove so much of earlier history. Finally it grows toward maturity.585 | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 301 | ||
+ | Current futures practice is one of special occasions; here we are speaking of a futures of everyday life. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 301 | ||
+ | any society in which social foresight were properly implemented would thereby have addressed the fundamental conundrum of the unthinkable and the unimaginable. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 301 | ||
+ | here may still be communities whose way of life is transformed, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 302 | ||
+ | For Slaughter, the passage a community would take from raw, individualised foresight to a refined, social foresight is through increasingly widespread adoption of the components of futures studies discourse. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 302 | ||
+ | the application of high technology (neurological or genetic-level therapies) to intervene directly in the human foresight capacity | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 303 | ||
+ | the possibility of a foresight culture spreading from a tradition other than futures studies. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 303 | ||
+ | The much repeated item of lore concerning the tradition of the Haudenosaunee Confederation (League of the Iroquois) looking to the possible impacts of any major decision upon the next seven generations may qualify as an indigenous forerunner of and analog to futures | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 304 | ||
+ | cultivating new techniques of consciousness, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 307 | ||
+ | in a society where foresight is distributed and embedded, clearly many, if not all, institutions would have a foresight capacity also. So too would individual people, at any rate to a higher level than the untutored ‘level one’ capacity we all have by default. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 308 | ||
+ | ‘Future-shock therapy’593 is concerned with creating maximum impact, ideally triggering some sort of realisation that a particular future scenario, perhaps insufficiently considered up until that point, may be possible. This effect may be sought by a practitioner manifesting (creating and distributing) supposed ‘evidence’ of that future having come to pass. Future-shock therapy is the guerrilla futurist’s tactic of first resort. Among the principles articulated earlier it highlights the ‘art of the double take’, as well as a willingness to ‘break the universe’ of consensus and ordinary expectations with alternatives. It may be compared, though should not be confused, with the Poetic Terrorism described by anarcho-theorist Hakim Bey in his work on Temporary Autonomous Zones. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 308 | ||
+ | ‘Ambient foresight’ is a contrasting idea of building futures awareness subtly, into the mental environment. Rather than demanding attention with fireworks, an ‘ambient’ future awareness is gentle, or perhaps almost invisible. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 309 | ||
+ | They are, then, a pair of fundamentally different ways of choreographing attention, polar opposites in a sense. Both are valuable, but for different purposes; they both adjust how we experience time, but use different temporal strategies. The former optimises for impact now, the latter for sustainability. One is explicit, uninvited, disruptive, provocative; | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 309 | ||
+ | this kind of insistent activism suits matters of urgency -- desperate times call for desperate measures, and all that. But at some point along the road to social foresight, these sorts of aggressive tactical procedures need to give way to a gentler approach; a more strategic, built-in vector for futures awareness as a background condition. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 311 | ||
+ | It seems to me that the final aim, the noble end-game for the futures profession (albeit rarely articulated within the field), as being actually to make itself redundant. In a social foresight culture, the job description ‘futurist’ would probably be unnecessary. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 311 | ||
+ | In a society where futures are a reflexive, ordinary part of everyday life, we would be constantly envisioning, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 312 | ||
+ | provide information, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 312 | ||
+ | Ambient foresight contains the seed of an idea for gentle suggestions and decisional inputs, relating especially to you, right now, that may help. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 312 | ||
+ | The mechanism and usefulness of ambient foresight ‘nodes’ may be illuminated with the recent concept of the nudge, based in behavioural economics, which helps describe this genre of informational shift. A nudge is ‘any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people' | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 314 | ||
+ | A second embryonic element of ambient foresight can be seen in networks that collect and synthesise futures-related insight. These, too, may eventually feed into realisation of our social foresight scenario. They are also rather more complex on the face of it than nodes, which are the crystallisation points for a system;604 with networks by contrast we are forced to consider the whole system, rather than just a visible point of it. We’ll touch on two emerging examples of ambient foresight networks: prediction markets and futures-themed alternate reality games. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 315 | ||
+ | James Surowiecki has famously dubbed the underlying principle for this kind of information aggregation ‘the wisdom of crowds’.608 The key limitation of this mechanism, of course, comes with the built in problem that there is no source of information ‘from the future’, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 315 | ||
+ | In some ways prediction markets seem to be a sort of next-generation, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 316 | ||
+ | as a real- time index of uncertainty, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 316 | ||
+ | driven more by an ethos of community-building and participation than by the competitive and mechanical synthesis characterising prediction markets. The emerging genre of the Alternate Reality Game (ARG), a form of interactive storytelling, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 317 | ||
+ | Superstruct was based on a scenario set in 2019, in which an extraordinarily sophisticated computer simulation called GEAS (the Global Extinction Awareness System) had determined that a combination of five existential ‘superthreats’ was on a catastrophic course to end the human race by 2042, then just 23 years away. The game was open to anyone, and invited players in 2008 to imagine their lives a decade forward, sharing stories set in that particular future, discussing their concerns and insights, and above all, proposing ‘superstructures’ -- new organisations and initiatives that could be developed to ward off the superthreats and extend humanity’s collective life expectancy. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 318 | ||
+ | Superstruct represents an early foray into a form of collaborative foresight, the contours of which are only just becoming visible. At the level of process, it demonstrated that an appropriately designed platform could enable a semi self- organising process by which the efforts of many people could draw on the insights and creativity of the group, resulting in a sort of mosaic storytelling within a given scenario. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 318 | ||
+ | understated cues are offered through nodes, sites where foresight-relevant information is made available, enabling context-determined nudges towards more future-aware behaviour. And, in an ambient foresight network, insights of players or participants are extracted to provide a crowdsourced estimate of the probable future (prediction markets), or to enable collective storytelling and problem- solving (alternate reality games). All these could be said to exemplify an embryonic ambient foresight, perhaps feeding into an eventual social foresight scenario. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 319 | ||
+ | It's an acknowledgement of the need for collaborative, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 319 | ||
+ | The need for ‘democratisation’ and ‘experientialisation’ of futures is rising alongside the means for meeting it: they have the same root cause, the increasing speed and reach of technosocial communications and changes. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 319 | ||
+ | . A more participatory, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 320 | ||
+ | the actual process of qualitatively engaging longer-term futures is in principle, it seems to me, not subject to automation. It is not subject to being made ‘as easy as falling off a log’, it requires time to either produce or absorb narrative logics, a deeply creative process. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 321 | ||
+ | Creativity requires periodic, temporary ‘encapsulation’ as opposed to the kind of constant global openness suggested by the slogan ‘information wants to be free.’ Biological cells have walls, academics employ temporary secrecy before they publish, and real authors with real voices might want to polish a text before releasing it. In all these cases, encapsulation is what allows for the possibility of testing and feedback that enables a quest for excellence. To be constantly diffused in a global mush is to embrace mundanity.625 | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 322 | ||
+ | It is certain that visions and storytelling can to some extent be crowdsourced, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 323 | ||
+ | The challenge for Hawaii 2050, as for futures studies generally, was not best thought of as being one of conveying pre-conceived futures from party A to party B; getting scenarios from one set of heads (ours), into those of others. The broader challenge, rather, was and is to facilitate the development in society of a richer mental ecology (to use a Batesonian phrase) of futures-oriented thought and action. Rather than simply producing concepts about what the future could or should be, and broadcasting these to people (although, we should acknowledge, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 323 | ||
+ | What it means more specifically is that the futures experiences described here (and others) can be seen as providing scaffolding for new thoughts and discussions. They provide things to think with,628 as well as shared reference points, a common vocabulary of lived experience (however brief) for those exposed to it -- real memories of virtual events, which can be used for increased understanding, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 324 | ||
+ | Experiential futures practice as set out in these pages may not be the True North of social foresight, but it is surely movement in a northerly direction. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 326 | ||
+ | We find we are visionary enough to have created challenges for ourselves that are truly mind-boggling, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 327 | ||
+ | the design and staging of experiential scenarios is a political, practical and perceptual-level intervention. It is praxis oriented and more than a little messy; a tactical attempt to manipulate the quirks of the human information processing system, especially our evolved preference for the immediate and tangible over the remote and abstract, to give those quirks a better chance of operating in our collective long-term interest, rather than against it. In that respect, ours must be a highly pragmatic, heuristic, ‘hacker’ activity, not a neatly enfolded, modular, and academically respectable program ready to be implemented in the schools and colleges of the world. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 327 | ||
+ | Both sides of the most lively current debate in academic futures -- between ‘integral futures’ and ‘causal layered analysis’633 -- miss the element of engagement of a wider public in the futures conversation. We would do well to be systematic about making the ingredients of a foresight ecology more widely available, finding more and better ways to share the excellent tools that the decades of conversation have already yielded. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 328 | ||
+ | First we pluralised ‘future’, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 328 | ||
+ | Neuroscience and psychology pointed us to the promising, so far little explored country of ‘experiential scenarios’ which include the register of experience (affect, emotion, intuition) alongside analysis (logic, reason, judgment) in the human processing system. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 328 | ||
+ | the experiential gulf becomes narrower, futures conversation can become more vibrant, by providing a shared vocabulary and reference point in memory for those involved. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 328 | ||
+ | Futures plural was revealed as fundamentally ‘critical’ as well as ‘decolonising’ of dominant social narratives, yet also going beyond bare critique and decolonisation by continually affirming the viability of specific, alternative paths forward. Design was shown to be a profoundly political domain, both in the enactment of power relations that we can ‘read’ in existing material arrangements, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 329 | ||
+ | This gave us a theoretical basis for the idea that futures and design together could comprise a politically potent hybrid practice around ‘redistributing the sensible‘ to make futures narratives vividly available. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 329 | ||
+ | To design, futures brings a holistic and systematic view of the range of longer-term impacts of today’s decisions; and design brings a concrete, communicatively potent form of exploration and an ethos of pragmatic efficacy to futures. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 329 | ||
+ | ‘Guerrillas in the wild’ considered the intentionally ‘political’ deployment of futures thinking, via experience design, in unexpected contexts. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 329 | ||
+ | the range of discursive technologies for manifesting future possibilities and located these on an ‘ontological spectrum’ from what if, to as if, to is. As the experiential gulf narrows, we noted, the impacts become stronger, but so too do the ethical risks. We must be prepared to reckon with the complexities and hazards attending the development of this practice. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 329 | ||
+ | my vision of what a futurist can and should be does not primarily entail telling people what the future can or should be, but consists in encouraging and enabling as many as possible to make such discoveries for themselves. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 330 | ||
+ | development and spread of futures tools rather than the outcomes of their application | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 330 | ||
+ | the most potent political tool, to enable people to systematically redistribute the sensible at will and on their own behalf. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 330 | ||
+ | The conundrum of the Unthinkable and the Unimaginable is everyone’s issue -- certainly not just ‘futurists’, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 331 | ||
+ | The general purpose of futures studies could be regarded as the provision of tools for the invention and pursuit of preferred futures; that is, the reconciliation of hopes and expectations. But it begins and ends, finally, with what any individual does in relation to those things. | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 331 | ||
+ | At the end of his study ‘From Individual to Social Foresight’, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 332 | ||
+ | Becoming with futures is a process of nudging ourselves, and each other, towards an ever greater, and yet more grounded, ‘influence optimism’, | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 333 | ||
+ | Jim Dator: ‘Should I be optimistic or pessimistic about the future? I believe the answer is: neither. I should be aware and active.’638 Bruce Sterling: ‘The best attitude for a serious futurist is not pessimism or optimism, but a deep sense of engagement.’639 | ||
+ | |||
+ | * Highlight, page 334 | ||
+ | The psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna wrote in 1991, ‘Perhaps a human language is possible in which the intent of meaning is actually beheld in three- dimensional space.’641 Given the fast-emerging ingredients of ubiquitous and instantaneous information access, ‘lifelogging’, | ||