Nostalgic for the future

We’re throwing a time travel party at Caltech tomorrow night.

Here’s the slightly crazy story of how that came to be.

Back in October, at the very start of the academic year, I ran a weekend-long event at the university, leading a group of students, faculty, JPL folks, and community members in co-creating experiential scenarios; immersive futures set 30 years from now, to bring to life possibilities that they (the participants) would like to see come to fruition in reality.

The Immersive Futures Jam – IFjam for short – was great fun, and there seemed to be a number of ways it might be built upon later in the year, as my artist residency at Caltech Theater (TACIT) unfolded. It remained to be seen what, specifically, those next steps ought to be.

The very next weekend I was at a friend’s 50th birthday party in Pennsylvania, in a dark-sky area of the state (he’s into astronomy) a couple of hours’ drive from Pittsburgh. And after a weekend spent with a group of us looking at stars and chatting, he and I were driving back towards the city and listening to (birthday man’s choice) what else but the most recent podcast episode from astrophysicist and science communicator par excellence Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Towards the end of the episode, Tyson, answering a listener’s question, said something like, “Stephen Hawking or his people hosted a party at Caltech, and the announcement was made to all time travelers, come back in time and meet us here, and we will greet you. Nobody showed up.”

I could hardly believe my ears. I’d never listened to this podcast before; what a mad coincidence to stumble across this arcane yet eerily relevant bit of Caltech lore at that moment. And how strange that it had never come up during our forays with time machines at the university.

When I tried to look up the details of the story, I realized why. Tyson had misremembered and transposed to sunny California either or both of two events – a time travelers’ convention held at MIT in 02005, and a demonstration by Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University a few years later (an ingenious bit of scientific performance art from the late Professor Hawking which regularly, and deservingly, goes viral again).

I figured, well, evidently Caltech hasn’t done something like this... but it should. And both those earlier events, although intended to attract actual time travelers, had apparently come up empty, in terms of actual visitors from other times. So I thought, one way or another, that we might be able to go one better.

Having pitched the idea to TACIT director Brian Brophy, who was wonderfully game, I then enlisted as a co-conspirator and co-producer the LA-based improv theatre luminary Kari Coleman, who had taken part in IFjam and whose deep experience in character creation and improvisational work seemed a perfect complement to my own work in translating worlds/scenarios into 1:1 scale situations.

But at this point we were still thinking on quite a modest scale.

Then a few weeks back, the event began to take on a momentum and life of its own. A mutual friend at NASA introduced me to physicist Spiros Michalakis from Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. Among other things, Spiros is known for advising Hollywood productions with quantum and time-travel storylines like the Marvel movies Ant Man, Doctor Strange, and Avengers: Endgame.

Spiros took on the event as an opportunity to explore and promote public engagement with non-linear and quantum perspectives on time. These, it turns out, are highly intriguing and generative, but not terribly well represented in collective imagination.

So now the Caltech Time Travel Gathering is happening – has already happened? – tomorrow evening, Friday May 29th. Our little experiment has been coalescing and scaling at speed over the past few weeks.

I won’t go into all the elements that are coming together, as we can talk about that later, but I will say it’s getting a bit exciting.

A piece about the project appeared today in IFLScience. I particularly love Spiros’s answer to the journalist here:

Experiential futurist Stuart Candy, actor Kari Coleman, and physicist Spiros Michalakis have approached it in a new way, thanks to insights into quantum mechanics that weren’t available two decades ago.

When I questioned them about how they plan to succeed where MIT and Hawking failed, it was clear we were going to have a great time: the answers are in a superposition of being both very silly and very serious. Which is an ethos we are 100 percent on board with!

“The weather is just better over here,” Michalakis told IFLScience. “Plus, if a time machine is ever invented, it will be at Caltech.”

That IFLScience piece includes a bit more than I have space to share here about what we’re doing, and how, and why. (In a future post I would also like to say more about the many indispensable, wondrous people who have contributed to making this thing possible – and maybe also a word about what this thing will have turned out to be).

But I should add, that article follows on the heels a highly remarkable report that appeared in the most recent edition of Caltech's campus newspaper, The California Tech – apparently from the year 02046?? – written by its editor Damian Wilson, another of last October's IFjam participants. See below.

Strange, indeed.

Now, whether the more cosmic, time- and mind-bending ambitions of the event tomorrow eventuate or not remains to be seen – for me on this timeline at least.

Here’s what we know: since yesterday, the event has been sold out. Unfortunately tickets are essential for entry and the venue can’t accommodate walk-ups (but if any last minute public spots open up, they will be found here).

And as this academic year and my artist residency at the university come to a close, the attentions, energies and imaginations of scientists and artists from across campus at Caltech and from across Los Angeles have begun to be activated, and to converge on tomorrow evening.

I would like to think of these as marking, in themselves. a kind of success that in the end might matter even more.

As Spiros says, “We want to build bridges of trust between creative minds across the sciences and the arts so that, if we ever do build a time machine to the past, we won’t need to activate it. Let’s be nostalgic for the future, instead.”

Related:
> Building Time Machines at California Institute of Technology
> Songs from visionary futures – with Brian Eno
> Library of Possibilities – for NASA JPL
> Journalism from the future
> A Time Traveller’s Story – video
> What happens when 200 architects visit the year 02099?
> Growing imagination and worldbuilding capabilities at the BBC
> Lost futures – featuring “aiglatson”
> Imagining alternative pathways for Bristol
> Bringing futures to Stanford d.School

What happens when 200 architects visit the year 02099?

Spoiler alert: more music and dancing than I expected.

Mithun, an architecture firm known for beautiful, environmentally thoughtful design, turned 75 in 02024. They might easily have contented themselves with the most obvious way to mark the moment; looking back on three generations of proud achievements. There was, after all, plenty to celebrate in their past, including recently winning the AIA (American Institute of Architects) Award for Architecture Firm of the Year.

But as a dedicated community of systemic thinkers and creatives, they resolved to use the occasion to focus less on times gone by, and more on times to come. How might the celebrations be tilted 75 years forward instead of 75 years back?

That’s when they reached out.

I offered some initial ideas, and we soon landed on an approach. Summoning everyone from across the firm to their Seattle headquarters, we would spend a day thinking, feeling, and ultimately, physically making our way 75 years into the future. But we would not confine ourselves to a singular theory or vision of change; we would make room for the whole vast, messy possibility space of future pathways.

The result was an initiative, a gathering, a celebration, a collective hallucination – a time-travel party of sorts? – called Design 2099.

On a Thursday evening, a presentation by Leonard Forsman, Chairman of the Suquamish Tribe, set the stage, by providing a historical context delving into the deep time of First Nations lifeways in the region; followed by me introducing some of the foundations of foresight and experiential futures practice, and foreshadowing, just a little, what we were about to get up to.

As it turns out, even I wasn’t fully prepared for the glorious madness that would unfold next.

On Friday, we had most of the day. Supported by a great in-house project team, I led on the order of 200 folks through the process: scaffolding people playfully into experiential futures practices for concretely imagining; then forming small groups to dive deeper into particular “what ifs”. Each group received an envelope containing two divergent kinds of future, capsule scenarios to choose between; from a collection developed with the Mithun team which in aggregate spanned a terrific variety of worlds. (Sample: an ETHICAL A.I. future; a CARBON-NEGATIVE future; a MEGA-CITIES future; a PEDAL-POWERED future; a SURVEILLANCE STATE future; an ELDERLY-CENTRED future; a GRAVITY PLAYGROUND future; a WATER WARS future; a SPACE RENAISSANCE future; a CORPORATE future; a POST-GENDER future; a RADICALLY CREATIVE future; and on and on.)

Every group was then tasked to create a stall, a participatory encounter with their chosen scenario, by thinking through its implications and distilling these into an interaction, making use of any and all materials at hand, including junk brought in from home as well as other bits and pieces found lying around the office.

The result was a sort of worldbuilding extravaganza; an explosion – or collision – of what-ifs, comprising dozens of conceptually parallel yet physically co-present versions of 02099, dreamt up and manifested by each group of participants for others to step into.

In truth, the resulting experience is a bit challenging to describe, for the best possible reason: it was among the most joyously unhinged and surprising unleashings of human energy I’ve ever had the good fortune to witness in daylight.

With all hands on deck – architects, designers and staff from all three Mithun offices; Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle – the gorgeous open-plan office space of historic Pier 56 on the Seattle waterfront was filled to bursting, with weird, wonderful, and unexpected future experiences from end to end.

Those of you familiar with past work shared here at The Sceptical Futuryst might sense a resemblance to what we did several years ago to introduce futures practices to designers across the British Broadcasting Corporation. If so, you’re right on track.

From my side “Design 2099” drew on experiences I’ve had co-designing processes for high-speed co-creation which include the trio of “Futurematic” events that we at Situation Lab ran with our friends from the Extrapolation Factory a decade ago (in Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles); supplemented with countless deployments of The Thing From The Future with imaginers from around the world; and not least, the wonderful Futures Bazaar project with the BBC, originating in collaboration with Filippo Cuttica and colleagues in Manchester, England, then adapted for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and more recently, held in half a dozen cities across Mexico simultaneously.

I’m sharing this project now for two reasons.

First, what happened at Mithun HQ was one of the most narratively and experientially diverse explorations of alternative futures I’ve seen at this scale. By “narratively and experientially diverse”, I mean that the process design/brief was geared toward producing not only a wide array of future narratives, or ideas about what could happen by the end of the 21st century, but also an equally wide array of experiences, or vernaculars or genres of interaction that would make sense for a big face-to-face gathering, happening all at once within a single giant space.

The former dimension of narrative diversity is probably self-explanatory, but the latter, experiential diversity, might not be so intuitive. To put it another way; at a bazaar or market, filled with objects for sale, the commercial transaction is the coin of the realm. In this case though, rather than translating or funnelling each future premise into an object-oriented, satirically sales-based interaction, the brief was aimed at opening things up. The more encompassing format or metaphor of a “futures fair” was employed to invite as many types of face-to-face encounter as folks could conceive of. So the interpersonal aspects of the event, by design, were able to emerge as more central than the future artifacts.

The resulting interactions ran the gamut from fortune-telling booths to investment pitches, from educational institution showcases to community gatherings, and from product demos to dance lessons. Accordingly, the forms of social energy expressed in these interactions was just as diverse.

When we all had a debrief chat about everyone’s experience at the end of the day, the very first reflection that anyone offered was a remark on the impressive speed with which people had come up with ideas, and on how so many of the interactions produced had been “non-transactional”.

In terms of the Experiential Futures Ladder, you could say that participants wound up staging situations – containing but not confined to stuff – as diverse as the scenarios they were thinking about.

(The relationship between this sort of work and the nearly 100 immersive scenarios / situation designs or Time Machines that I’ve visited at this point, we’ll save to explore in due course. I also plan to share more at some point about other variants we’ve explored in the design space of participatory futures.)

Second, although I’ve been delayed in finding time to write about it, this remains a vivid, notable example of an organisation “using the future” – as my friend Riel Miller might say – in a really fun and inspiring way.

Mithun deserves to celebrate, and be celebrated for, their many years of contributions to architecture of course, but also for taking some of the effort and resources associated with that anniversary milestone, and doing more than just patting themselves on the back about it. By investing in imaginative capacity, they did something unusual and generative and worthwhile; something that ought to be normal, but isn’t yet.

My experience has been that even brief bursts of emancipation from our current everyday, via entertaining potential everydays-to-come (see the “mundane turn” in The Futures of Everyday Life p. 89), are a great way to expand an organization’s horizons of the imaginable. And they offer something essential in the present, too; a way of strengthening bonds of connection and community between participants. Making space for joyful co-imagining is a kind of prefigurative politics in its own right (see TFOEL p. 220), which I think we should want to see a lot more of in these fractured, often alarming times.

As I noted in relation to the BBC’s pioneering use of a co-imagining process that later spawned THE FUTURES BAZAAR toolkit:

Am I saying that this is “the right way” to introduce futures thinking into organisations? No. It was, however, a great way to do it here, partly because this specific organisation is full of creatives, makers, and storytellers. Also, the context of an away day made a bit of fun welcome, even essential. We understood that participatory, playful and hands-on elements needed to be foregrounded here, and so they were.

In a more corporate, bureaucratic, or self-serious context, such as strategic conversation for a government department, supranational outfit, or large business, other approaches might be more suitable. Less out-on-a-limb for the participants while still inviting their engagement with future possibilities physically, emotionally, and narratively.

For a different example, consider the World Energy Council’s embrace of experiential futures as part of its triennial Congress and 100th anniversary celebrations last year. To my mind, this channels a different version of the same delightful impetus.

Many thanks then to all at Mithun, and their bold and creative leadership, in particular President Dave Goldberg; as well as a wonderful support team drawn from across the firm’s staff, especially Annie Rummelhoff, Christian Runge, Nate Smith, and Naoe White. Much appreciation also to Danielle Engelman of The Long Now Foundation for joining the dots; and to my fellow event invitee, Chairman Leonard Forsman, for a beautiful welcome and orientation in both time and place, which provided the best possible portal to an open-hearted exploration of alternative futures. Last but not least, a grateful hat-tip to Sam Auster, whose excellent video documentation (my condensed re-edits of his footage above) somehow managed to bottle the lightning of the futures fair at Design 2099.

Related:
> Tomorrow’s Energy Today – for the World Energy Council (Medium)
> Dreaming Together – from the book Made Up: Design's Fictions (pdf version)
> Introducing experiential and participatory futures at the BBC
> THE FUTURES BAZAAR public imagination toolkit
> 1-888-FUTURES with Extrapolation Factory
> The School of Worldbuilding (pdf version)
> Using the Future at NASA (pdf version)
> On Getting Started with Experiential Futures – with The Omidyar Group
> What is the value of futures and foresight? – for the RSA
> The Futures of Everyday Life (pdf version)

Building Time Machines at California Institute of Technology

I haven’t posted here for ages – a story for another time.

Today, I’m writing to share something I’m focused on right now.

This weekend I’m starting a stint as Artist in Residence at Caltech Theater. This is tremendously exciting to me – a chance to bring experiential futures, worldbuilding, and high-speed co-creation to a remarkable and storied institution. For example, one of the spaces we’ll be working in is the Feynman Room, named for the legendary bongo-playing Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate who was active in the theatre community there.

Our first event coming up is called “Immersive Futures Jam” – IFjam for short.

With a select group of participants, including undergraduates, graduates, alumni and staff from Caltech, as well as folks from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the wider community, we’ll be embarking on an ambitious co-creative process; producing immersive, you-are-there experiences of various futures, at the scale of a room, over the span of a weekend.

In a hat-tip to H.G. Wells, I call such room-scale future immersions “Time Machines”. Without quite meaning to, we essentially piloted a highly adaptable format two decades ago in Hawaii, and I’ve since modularized and sharpened it through numerous iterations – in Canada, Mexico, the UK, Singapore, and various parts of the US – with hundreds of students, colleagues, and intrepid volunteer time travellers. This is the first time I’m running it in California.

The very possibility of this edition of IFjam comes down to the vision and will-to-experiment of the unique creative force that is Brian Brophy, Caltech’s long-serving director of Theater Arts. We got to know each other over the past few years while working together on the NASA JPL show Blended Worlds; JPL’s contribution to the most recent instance of Getty Museum’s once-a-decade initiative PST.

A fuller treatment of Time Machines is in the pipeline. But for a sense of how they can look and something of the underlying process, a few starting points: A Pecha Kucha talk given years ago in Chicago. A short piece from The Futurist (the periodical of the World Future Society, as was). And another one from The Economist.

Stay tuned.

Related:
> Experiential Futures for NASA JPL (Library of Possibilities)
> A Time Traveller's Story
> Experiential Futures in The Economist (pdf version)
> Time Machines in The Futurist (pdf)
> Bringing futures to Stanford d.School
> Futures for Bristol
> Ghosts of Futures Past (Hawaii 2050)
> Time Machine / Reverse Archaeology (pdf)
> Using the Future at NASA (pdf version)

Library of Possibilities

“The most potent time-traveling technology we have is also the oldest technology we have: storytelling. The shelves of every library in the world brim with time machines.” – Anthony Doerr §

* * *

This is my latest experiential futures project: a series of books from the future, each inspired by the work and interests of a different NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist or engineer, made tangible, and smuggled on to public library shelves in Los Angeles for readers to discover.

It’s part of the newly opened exhibition Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination, assembled by a terrific, multi-talented JPL team led by David Delgado. (Regular readers here might recall encountering David’s outstanding work before.) In addition to serving as Curatorial Advisor over the past few years, I’m honoured to have had the chance to make my own unorthodox contribution to the show.

At a philosophical level, Library of Possibilities is an imaginary provocation: it’s the vast collection of all books that have not yet been published. Compare to Borges’ fantastic Library of Babel, which contains all possible books (even if most are nonsense, à la the proverbial typewriting-monkeys). At a more practical level, it’s a fraction of that mind-boggling catalogue; the dust jackets for six titles that might come out decades from now. A collection of hypothetical volumes.

Each one started with a deep-dive conversation with a JPL or NASA scientist or engineer about what they do, and imagining changes their work could help catalyse in generations to come. I also asked each interviewee to name a favourite work that has inspired them, to use as the underlying physical book, around which the book cover that they inspired is wrapped.

As a lifelong bibliophile I’ve had this idea of a series of future dust jackets in mind for years – but the stars finally aligned here, with NASA JPL, and the City of Glendale’s Library Arts and Culture department.

The first two future books have already appeared. When a reader finds one, they can take it up to the circulation desk to log their discovery officially. It then goes back into the collection for someone else to find.

With each new release, a copy is also added to the Blended Worlds exhibition at the Brand Library and Art Center, but for now, the only way to see all the details – front and back covers, blurbs, clips from press reviews of the imaginary works etc – is to track the physical books down at various Glendale Library branches.

I’ll share more when the project wraps up, including a full list of credits for the indispensable collaborators who helped make all this possible!

Meanwhile, to see announcements about each new book drop, follow Glendale LAC or me on social media.

If you’re able to get to the area, there’s already a future book somewhere in Glendale Central, and one in the Brand.

Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination runs through January 4th, 02025. It is part of the Getty Museum’s huge once-a-decade initiative PST ART, the theme for which this time is Art and Science Collide.

* * *

§ Doerr is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of novels and short stories. This quote comes from his New York Times review of the book Time Travel: A History by science writer James Gleick.

Previously posted on LinkedIn. Blended Worlds image from NASA JPL. Photos by Stuart Candy, installation process photo by Ceda Verbakel.

Related:
> What if we could sing better futures to life?
> Adding dimensions to development futures with UNDP
> Using the future at NASA
> Ghosts of Futures Past
> What is the value of futures and foresight?

What if we could sing better futures to life?

Notes from our collaboration with Brian Eno on using music to grow public imagination.

This post is about a new initiative in progress – something I’ve really enjoyed working on, and have great hopes for as it unfolds.

Sing Wild Seeds is a project about having musicians and audiences pre-enact preferred futures together.

Conceptually, it springs from a question along these lines: how might music-making be combined with experiential futures towards developing our collective ability to imagine and shape desired change?

Institutionally, it’s a collaboration between the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and Earth/Percent, both independent UK-based social change organisations, dedicated respectively to accelerating the “transition to a more equitable and just future”, and “unleash[ing] the power of music in service of the planet”.

Also centrally involved is Earth/Percent founder Brian Eno, a celebrated musician, producer, and expert collaborator in multiple artforms, whose extensive experience facilitating individual and group creativity has helped form the foundation for this effort.

To say a bit more about the idea behind the experiment – or series of experiments, really, as I’ll explain – the focus is on harnessing the promise and pleasures of worldbuilding on one hand, and musical co-creation on the other, to help people not just think or imagine but play and perform their way into future possibilities. 

If this strikes you as different from the commonplace framing of futures in support of “strategy” or “decision-making”, you’re right. In a sense, this is upstream of those, aiming at some of the background or cultural context within which conscious decision-making occurs. And in a different sense, it’s downstream, in the detail of lived experience, a part of what I call the futures of everyday life.

This goes to a motivation that’s long been key to our practices of and arguments for experiential futures, towards developing a distributed cultural capacity, social foresight.

As I wrote in The Economist many years ago:

Driven by the irrepressible human urge to bring our inner worlds to life, the culture of public imagination is set to make a leap: in coming years we can expect to see more and more companies, governments, advocacy organisations and communities creating and sharing experiential futures. The sooner we learn to use and democratise collective imagination to dramatise our alternatives, the more powerful will be our capacity to shape change towards just and worthwhile ends.

Sing Wild Seeds could be seen at once as a datapoint exemplifying this forecast coming to pass, and as a conscious contribution to taking it further.

It’s a matter of what my collaborator Cassie Robinson of JRF, who initiated the project, has inspiringly framed as imagination infrastructures, a kind of “soil work”, gardening towards conditions favourable for certain kinds of things to grow. (I also find the cognate idea of acculturation a helpful rendering of this approach, and an important complement to organisational reflexes towards institutionalisation.)

We’ve worked together on several occasions over some years, but Cassie and I began talking about this particular project late in 02023, on the back of a series of conversations about social foresight and collective imagination.

We launched Sing Wild Seeds in March this year, with a hybrid online / in-person event in two parts: I gave an introductory presentation on foresight and experiential futures practices for a cohort of interested musicians, assembled from Brian’s network, then he and I had a conversation to begin exploring a bit more of what the possibilities might look like within our chosen design space.

Cultivating public imagination through music is an appealing creative prospect, and also a good practical challenge.

Our approach has been not simply to have musicians integrate richer or more deliberate futures imagining into their existing creative practices – because while helping professional music folks make “songs from the future” is super interesting, Sing Wild Seeds has a more ambitious and fundamentally more participatory notion at its heart.

The idea is to expose musicians to futures ideas and methods, and then to support them in devising site- and event-specific experiments where they in turn will engage live audiences in real time, co-creating and performing songs from the futures that they’d like to see (and hear) come to pass.

This comes with an inbuilt complexity; synthetic and nested.

Nested because the project has entailed devising and running a participatory process to help prepare the musicians in turn to devise and run their own participatory processes, particular to them, with later audiences elsewhere.

Synthetic because it has meant figuring out a way to mesh the musical gifts and creative preferences of a cast of songwriters / performers with two other sets of practices that in most cases are unfamiliar; one to do with the granular imagination and articulation of preferred futures, and the other to do with facilitation and process design.

Tackling this combination was an exciting prospect, and maybe just a little daunting, since not only were the particulars of the musicians’ own sensibilities and orientations impossible to plan for in advance – the ways artists write songs varies enormously – but the ultimate design parameters, practical elements of context in which they would eventually run something themselves (location, duration, format, audience size, cultural composition, etc), would not be found out until later either.

Last month, then, while I was in the UK, we held two in-person workshops at Brian’s studio in London, to try out some ways of helping folks navigate and identify the most promising sectors, for each of them, within the vast design space of potential project-experiments.

The wonderful designer Sarah Drummond was enlisted to co-facilitate, and to support the musicians going forward as they craft their experiments to carry out with festivals and other partners over the next few months. (Sarah is an exceptionally intuitive and adept facilitator; we’ve known each other for well over a decade but hadn’t a chance to work together directly before – and what a pleasure!)

I’d suggested that we offer this face-to-face project development workshop not once, but twice, on different dates, in order to reach a wider pool of potential collaborators, and also to enable a bit of reflection and iteration between runs. This structure worked well, allowing Sarah and me the chance to simplify and better integrate our process for take two.

It’s too early to start talking outcomes, but I doubt if it’s ever too early to start trying to learn from an ongoing process, so I’ll just remark briefly on a few aspects of the foresight part of the project.

I chose two contrasting points of departure for engaging our musician friends in futures imagination and songwriting ideation. One was quick, and deliberately time-pressured; a combinatorial prompting activity using The Thing From The Future card game (second edition). The other was more leisurely, taking the form of a guided meditation or daydreaming exercise; the sort of approach that my colleague Oliver Markley calls mental time travel.

The pair of contrasting tempos aimed to elicit different kinds of creative response: imagining fast and slow, you might say.

From the outset, in relation to the mental time travel exercise, I was specifically interested in going beyond guided visioning. The sense of sight often implicitly overrides all others when it comes to imagining alternative and preferred futures, so we invited guided listening, too – having folks attend especially to their auditory experience, along with other senses, during their inner journeys.

We used a time horizon of 30 years (02054) the first time, and 50 years (02074) the second. Although we were able to give the activity a bit more breathing room in workshop two, on both occasions, from the reams of notes that people took upon returning to the here-and-now and opening their eyes, and the animated conversations that followed, there was clearly much more to explore.

In relation to the card game, both meetings were highly generative, but the second provided an opportunity to fine-tune the prompting a bit.

With participants clustered in small groups of 2–3, one member was asked to select a card on behalf of their group, to indicate the type of preferred future or world that they would be creating a song from (e.g., a “fair” future, a “decolonised” future, and so on). The theme or aspect of that world which each person would focus on for their song was individually drawn from the deck at random (e.g. farming, the ocean, love, cities). And finally, I assigned to the musicians not just the generic output “song” as the future thing for them to create, but instead gave each one a particular kind of song to make from within their chosen future (e.g. anthem, show tune, folk song, etc).

(The Thing From The Future has been compared to, and at its inception over a decade ago was directly influenced by, Brian Eno’s own classic creativity-enabling card deck, Oblique Strategies, so there was a highly satisfying coming-full-circle quality in getting to deploy it with musicians in his studio!)

In addition, following one of Brian’s specific creative mandates that arose in workshop one, we ventured to insist on strict parameters: people had to finish a song corresponding to their personalised prompt within five minutes, then actually sing it.

While obviously the product of a highly compressed creative process, the resulting first-draft compositions from both gatherings truly exceeded expectations. They included a chanted exchange between different species seeking to peacefully inhabit the same planet, a future ballad about farming, a children’s song celebrating science, and a call-and-response performance recounting how humanity saved the oceans.

Modest as these beginnings are, there’s something potentially significant here as a kind of prefigurative politics (see TFOEL p. 220) in the use of music, not just as a social medium – which thankfully has been part of human society since time immemorial, and which has nothing necessarily to do with futures content per se – but on top of that, as a way into shared imagining of new possibilities.

We can make out a kind of double prefiguration: the desirable-in-itself investment in solidarity or community-making by creating and performing in a group, coupled with the roleplay-like composition and singing of lyrics deliberately formulated to bespeak, concretise, and summon the futures we hope to bring into being.

Politics is perhaps too small a word. If this doesn’t sound like a recipe for magic, I don't know what is.

The very first public deployment for Sing Wild Seeds has just taken place – at Britain’s legendary Glastonbury Festival, in an experiment led by the marvellous Genevieve Dawson (pictured at the top).

Many thanks are due to Cassie Robinson, Sepi Noohi and Magda Maculewicz from JRF, to Cathy Runciman and Becky Young from Earth/Percent, to my star of a process design and facilitation partner Sarah Drummond, to Brian Eno for generously hosting these gatherings, and to all our musical participants to date.

No doubt there will be more to say as these wild seeds take root.

Related:
> Experiential Futures: A Brief Outline
> Introduction to Experiential Futures in The Economist
> Dreaming Together (from the book Made Up: Design’s Fictions)
> What Is the Value of Futures and Foresight? (a Q&A with the RSA)
> Imagining Transitions (interview by Rob Hopkins)
> The Futures of Everyday Life
> Inside a bold new experiment in public imagination (on UNTITLED Festival)
> Participatory Futures for Democracy (see “acculturation”)
> Gaming Futures Literacy (PDF – from the book Transforming the Future)
> The Thing From The Future (see also Situation Lab website)
> Anything but Text (post anticipating XF from 02006)
> Historical pre-enactment

Note 1: All photos by the author. Note 2: A bookmark: to write up an assignment I once set for my (non-musician) graduate students at KAIST – creating and performing songs from various futures for Korea.

(Update 08aug2024: This post was also published on Medium.) 

Sharing Experiential Futures with governments around the world

I was recently honoured to deliver a virtual masterclass seminar to a global audience of public sector futurists, through the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Government Foresight Community, or GFC for short.

The seminar was called Whatever It Takes: Supporting Strategic Conversation by Design. Briefly:

In order to be effective, foresight practitioners need to adopt a multidimensional approach to foresight. This means being able to distinguish and use what I posit as the three dimensions of foresight – difference (which is basic to thinking about change over time), diversity (essential to all scenario generation processes and to the field’s core philosophical shift from “future” singular to “futures” plural), and depth (often neglected in the field, but now addressed by the family of approaches known as Experiential Futures, or XF). XF practices are about providing immersive, interactive, embodied and emotionally engaging glimpses of alternative futures through design, media and the arts: whatever it takes. With this powerful set of methods, we are better equipped than ever to engage foresight in all its dimensions, for strategic and dialogic decision making, public policy, collective imagination, and cultural transformation.

The OECD has just posted video of the presentation, and it’s embedded above. My title “Whatever It Takes” is a nod to Yale information designer Edward Tufte’s philosophy of achieving communicative goals by hook or by crook (see The Futures of Everyday Life p. 110).

A lively conversation followed, but since their policy is to protect the possibility of open dialogue via the Chatham House Rule that part wasn’t recorded. 

This was the second masterclass to be offered in the series, the first having been given late last year by my friend Aaron Maniam from Singapore, now at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. 

It’s a significant opportunity they’ve spotted and initiated here; convening folks around big foresight questions and best practices from government and beyond. For those interested, the GFC was described to me by its OECD organisers as:

a network of public sector foresight practitioners from around the world. It includes OECD Member countries, but also non-OECD governments as well as some experts and practitioners from other international organisations, civil society, academia and the private sector. The purpose of the Community, and the speaker series, is to improve the practice of foresight within governments.

My sincere thanks to Rafał Kierzenkowski and his team for hosting me, as well as for this series in general, which is now several months and several more contributors further along. I place great value on the chance to demonstrate for such an audience not only the importance-in-principle, but also the possibility-in-practice, of producing more multidimensional, compelling, and impactful futures work in the public sector – where I started my career.

I'm told that this whole series, together with supporting materials, will soon be available via a new webpage for that purpose, and I'll update this post when that happens.

(Update 08aug24: The Government Foresight Community site is now live. My talk “Whatever It Takes”, including a PDF version of the presentation deck, can be found here. For links to all the talks in the series, scroll down here.)

Related:
> Experiential Futures: A Brief Outline
> On Getting Started in Experiential Futures (for The Omidyar Group)
> Adding Dimensions to Development Futures with UNDP
> Exploring Technology Governance Futures with the World Economic Forum
> Introducing Experiential and Participatory Futures at the BBC
> Bringing Futures to Stanford d.school
> Participatory Futures for Democracy 
> Three Dimensions of Foresight (for Columbia University DSL)
> What Is the Value of Futures and Foresight? (for RSA)
> What Is Futures Studies? (for WEF – external)