As the covid-19 crisis unfolds, many of us are looking to an extravagantly uncertain future with anxiety, as well as a new appreciation and appetite for whatever brings confidence and clarity to prospection.
How might concerned citizens engage in more effective futures thinking and storytelling?
Columbia University's Digital Storytelling Lab (DSL), led by a veteran experimental storyteller, my friend Lance Weiler, has responded to the pandemic by offering ingenious, collaborative, and free opportunities for hundreds of folks in quarantine and isolation all around the world to come together, imagine alternative futures, and manifest them through co-created digital story artifacts.
The project is called From the Futures. With this effort, Lance, Columbia DSL and team are tending a welcome oasis of collective creativity for our moment.
They invited me to help kick things off with an introduction to a framework related to the experiential futures space that the project inhabits and plots out. The slides embedded above distil that talk, "Three Dimensions of Foresight".
The three dimensions can be seen as corresponding to various manoeuvres or methods in the futures repertoire that typically require quite a bit of practice to master. But even for those trying experiential futures for the first time (which would include many From the Futures participants), they can also be mobilised right away via a series of practical moves towards storytelling more different, deep, and diverse than it might otherwise be:
• Difference : let us seek seeds of change in the present that could be really transformative if they were to grow.
• Depth : let us try to not just think, but also feel, our way into these imagined conditions by devising specific future artifacts and diverse media to bring the imagined possibilities to life as if they came to pass.
• Diversity : let us operate generally in terms of plural futureS, but even if constructing a single scenario or possibility for a particular project, find what is fresh and uncommon for the ecology of thinkable and feelable futures, since a new story may be dramatically more valuable than yet another telling of one that we have already heard many times before.
The framework has its origins in my doctoral project on experiential futures. There I ventured an arguments about the need to build on, and systematically range beyond, the most common practices and methods of previous generations of futurists. I wanted to show that foresight practitioners could and should embrace a range of "experiential" (a deliberately big umbrella) approaches, in pursuit of the requisite realism and resonance to affect how we think and what we do in the present. Often this would mean seeking and evoking depth; making a future's details and implications available and graspable –– tangibly, sensorially, viscerally –– in ways usually lacking from the even most carefully researched, well written horizon scans or scenarios. This approach includes an assumption or acknowledgement that things at later points in time are bound to be as real, complex, and full of contradictions as the present. We should strive then to get "under the skin" of the futures we face, and engage them not in the abstract as intellectual constructs, but through evocative concrete experiences, as potential realities in waiting.
In this connection I wrote about the need for a "mundane turn" in futures practice (The Futures of Everyday Life, 02010, pp. 89–94), by analogy with an important shift of orientation that had already taken place decades earlier in cultural history, tying this quest for modest but evocative fragments, details and textures of worlds to come, to design and discussion in the present of artifacts or experiences that might exist in those futures (hence the phrase "futures of everyday life"). Among other contributors, Nick Foster's perceptive essay The Future Mundane, and Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby's influential book Speculative Everything (both 02013) carried these sorts of ideas further among design audiences. It has been satisfying to see the spread of futures-curious, design-led practices like design fiction and speculative design summoning new explorers and fellow travellers to this terrain.
The three dimensional lenses on futures practice came into sharper focus soon after the dissertation work, and they helped frame our first run of the Strategic Foresight course in the Design Strategy MBA program at California College of the Arts (02010). That course is outlined here. Since then, and refined thanks to audiences and student groups over the years, 3D foresight has become one of the main ways I introduce futures to newcomers.
For those who might like a more methodologically detailed overview of 3D foresight, with additional examples, I recently gave a lecture across campus at Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute, How to think about the future.
Our video of the talk to From the Futures participants (via Zoom) has already been shared, and Lance's written accounts of the initiative so far can be found in the posts Designing for immersion in Zoom and From the Futures: experiments in collaborative art and collective wayfinding in a time of ambiguity.
A wonderful sense of the swarming, emergent, hive-mind creativity that this process has helped to unleash, and to guide, is captured visually in the timelapse below. If interested in receiving updates or taking part yourself, head here.
Related:
> The Futures of Everyday Life (pdf)
> About the first Strategic Foresight course at CCA (pdf)
> A Brief Outline of Experiential Futures
> Design for the Next Context (Closing Keynote at 02010 AIGA Conference)
> The Experiential Turn (with Jake Dunagan)
> On Getting Started in Experiential Futures
> Design is Storytelling
How might concerned citizens engage in more effective futures thinking and storytelling?
Columbia University's Digital Storytelling Lab (DSL), led by a veteran experimental storyteller, my friend Lance Weiler, has responded to the pandemic by offering ingenious, collaborative, and free opportunities for hundreds of folks in quarantine and isolation all around the world to come together, imagine alternative futures, and manifest them through co-created digital story artifacts.
The project is called From the Futures. With this effort, Lance, Columbia DSL and team are tending a welcome oasis of collective creativity for our moment.
They invited me to help kick things off with an introduction to a framework related to the experiential futures space that the project inhabits and plots out. The slides embedded above distil that talk, "Three Dimensions of Foresight".
The three dimensions can be seen as corresponding to various manoeuvres or methods in the futures repertoire that typically require quite a bit of practice to master. But even for those trying experiential futures for the first time (which would include many From the Futures participants), they can also be mobilised right away via a series of practical moves towards storytelling more different, deep, and diverse than it might otherwise be:
• Difference : let us seek seeds of change in the present that could be really transformative if they were to grow.
• Depth : let us try to not just think, but also feel, our way into these imagined conditions by devising specific future artifacts and diverse media to bring the imagined possibilities to life as if they came to pass.
• Diversity : let us operate generally in terms of plural futureS, but even if constructing a single scenario or possibility for a particular project, find what is fresh and uncommon for the ecology of thinkable and feelable futures, since a new story may be dramatically more valuable than yet another telling of one that we have already heard many times before.
The framework has its origins in my doctoral project on experiential futures. There I ventured an arguments about the need to build on, and systematically range beyond, the most common practices and methods of previous generations of futurists. I wanted to show that foresight practitioners could and should embrace a range of "experiential" (a deliberately big umbrella) approaches, in pursuit of the requisite realism and resonance to affect how we think and what we do in the present. Often this would mean seeking and evoking depth; making a future's details and implications available and graspable –– tangibly, sensorially, viscerally –– in ways usually lacking from the even most carefully researched, well written horizon scans or scenarios. This approach includes an assumption or acknowledgement that things at later points in time are bound to be as real, complex, and full of contradictions as the present. We should strive then to get "under the skin" of the futures we face, and engage them not in the abstract as intellectual constructs, but through evocative concrete experiences, as potential realities in waiting.
In this connection I wrote about the need for a "mundane turn" in futures practice (The Futures of Everyday Life, 02010, pp. 89–94), by analogy with an important shift of orientation that had already taken place decades earlier in cultural history, tying this quest for modest but evocative fragments, details and textures of worlds to come, to design and discussion in the present of artifacts or experiences that might exist in those futures (hence the phrase "futures of everyday life"). Among other contributors, Nick Foster's perceptive essay The Future Mundane, and Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby's influential book Speculative Everything (both 02013) carried these sorts of ideas further among design audiences. It has been satisfying to see the spread of futures-curious, design-led practices like design fiction and speculative design summoning new explorers and fellow travellers to this terrain.
The three dimensional lenses on futures practice came into sharper focus soon after the dissertation work, and they helped frame our first run of the Strategic Foresight course in the Design Strategy MBA program at California College of the Arts (02010). That course is outlined here. Since then, and refined thanks to audiences and student groups over the years, 3D foresight has become one of the main ways I introduce futures to newcomers.
For those who might like a more methodologically detailed overview of 3D foresight, with additional examples, I recently gave a lecture across campus at Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute, How to think about the future.
Our video of the talk to From the Futures participants (via Zoom) has already been shared, and Lance's written accounts of the initiative so far can be found in the posts Designing for immersion in Zoom and From the Futures: experiments in collaborative art and collective wayfinding in a time of ambiguity.
A wonderful sense of the swarming, emergent, hive-mind creativity that this process has helped to unleash, and to guide, is captured visually in the timelapse below. If interested in receiving updates or taking part yourself, head here.
Related:
> The Futures of Everyday Life (pdf)
> About the first Strategic Foresight course at CCA (pdf)
> A Brief Outline of Experiential Futures
> Design for the Next Context (Closing Keynote at 02010 AIGA Conference)
> The Experiential Turn (with Jake Dunagan)
> On Getting Started in Experiential Futures
> Design is Storytelling
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