A history of experiential futures

What could become of all this intriguing experimentation around turning ideas about the future into visceral experiences?

Fortunately, a research paper unearthed from the year 02034 offers some answers.
 

(Update 26aug16: Free pdf download here.)

Apparently co-authored some twenty years from today with fellow Toronto-based design futurist Trevor Haldenby, the article provides a timeline documenting the rapid rise and remarkable reach of increasingly large-scale efforts over a generation or so (02006-02031) to bring futures to life through immersive scenarios and participatory simulation. What emerges is a portrait of a society that, via experiential futures and transmedia storytelling practices, has integrated and harnessed public imagination as a world-shaping cultural force.

In a way this so-called "age of imagination" echoes in more concrete terms an argument I mounted in the last chapter of The Futures of Everyday Life (pp. 287 ff.) about the development of what Richard Slaughter dubbed "social foresight", a distributed and always-on capacity for thinking and (let's be sure not to omit) feeling ahead.

Due to some sort of wrinkle in the spacetime continuum, it seems this paper from 02034 by Trevor and me was actually prepared and accepted for the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, which – lo and behold – starts in Toronto today. While neither of us could make it to the event in person, the program has some very alluring bits; particularly the workshop Alternate Endings: Using Fiction to Explore Design Futures. Here's a full list of accepted papers.

And here is the abstract (aka summary) for our paper, the full text of which is embedded above:

Imagination is a critical public resource. However, in Western culture, as late as the turn of the 21st century, it was primarily thought of as a fragmented and personal property of individual consciousness. This paper examines the recent flourishing of transdisciplinary practices for cultivating shared public imagination, focusing on the generation-long period circa 2005-2030, now known as the Age of Imagination. The historic emergence during this time of design fiction, together with other experiential futures practices consciously scaffolding collective imagination, proved to be a turning point for collective human capacity – not only, as many initially recognised, for practical design applications on a modest scale, but also for shaping history itself. Acknowledging a cultural debt to long-standing and diverse strands of imaginative activity including storytelling, theatre, simulation, prototyping, and the 20th century tradition of futures studies (aka strategic foresight), two practitioners who helped bring this new tradition into being pause to look back upon a quarter century of astonishing change. In the process, they acknowledge the growing significance of seventh generation ritual computing technologies to the Age of Imagination.

Related:
> The futures of everyday life
> A future of design
> Build your own time machine