Earlier this year, my old friend and dynamite futures-designer Jessica Charlesworth invited me to speak with her students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (aka SAIC, where we we once colleagues), in an advanced course alluringly titled “Future Craft: Speculative Worlds & Narrative Game Design.” I enjoy conversations where you really get to delve into specific curiosities and concerns with people who have been grappling with the work themselves.
So I was delighted when, a little while later, Jess passed along a round of post-reflection questions. I took a while to respond with some pretty full answers. When we saw each other this month at MIT Future Fest, I suggested that the group’s astute queries might be of interest to others. She agreed, and so here – with many thanks to Jess, her SAIC co-instructor Kristin McWharter, and their students – are those questions, with my responses. I’m posting in two parts, lightly edited and loosely organized by theme.
Future Craft Questions part 1 – Thinking about Futures
To what extent do researchers or designers who mediate and materialize futures impose — even unintentionally — their own cultural or aesthetic frameworks when translating participants’ narratives into objects or experiences? And what concrete mechanisms could reduce that distortion?
Materializing futures inspired by someone else’s thinking (as in the Ethnographic Experiential Futures / EXF framework) is an act of creative interpretation. There’s no doubt that a designer doing such materializing or mediating brings their own cultural and aesthetic values, and political ones too. Even just their sense of what’s important and worthy to focus on among all the candidate themes or ideas in the mix. Our values show up in all the choices we make.
But I would hesitate to condemn this as a “distortion”. And who says that perfectly neutral translation of participants’ narratives is desirable –– or even possible? I think a useful, honest approach here is to acknowledge the nature of the encounter as interpretation- and values-laden, and on that basis to seek in it an opportunity for co-creation. As in any conversation or meeting of minds: yes, there is always the potential for misunderstanding or misrepresentation when two people’s thought processes meet. There’s also the potential for a deeper understanding in both directions, and for creating something special that would never have happened otherwise.
To try to nudge outcomes more towards deepening than distorting, we might start with two practical mechanisms. One is a stance, and the other is a concrete step.
The stance is to come to the interpretive task with an attitude of curiosity and of being in service. I don’t mean being in service in the sense of merely producing propaganda for the other person, or trying to remove yourself entirely from the equation (taking out one’s own cultural and aesthetic contributions) –– which seemed to be what the question’s framing might assume is ideal. Almost the opposite of that: in good faith, bringing whatever you can to probing and deepening your best understanding of the other’s ideas about the future. It’s not like blowing up a low-res image and merely filling it in to make it less crude and pixelated. It’s more like coming up with your own image from within the world they described, from an angle they haven’t thought about. It’s trying to constructively add your own imaginative contributions to theirs.
The step, a concrete mechanism that we can use to try to surface whatever mismatch might exist between their thinking and yours, is dialogue. It’s conversation. It’s going back to them with the artifact and inviting them to respond. (In EXF terms, this is circling back to the “map” stage.) If they think you missed or misunderstood something, they can go ahead and say so. Or maybe they’ll see what you added and run with it, even making it their own and building on it further.
This is an exciting moment of potential learning, either way. It’s a kind of moment that seems to me to be too often missing from what gets done under the banners of speculative design, critical design, design fiction, or what have you: designers encountering these more discursive practices can get so excited about the licence to explore and express their own ideas about the future, can be so joyful to be freed from the dull accountabilities of classic human-centred design, that they can sometimes fail to allow the space to ask or notice how their thinking lands (and attend to how it might fail to do so).
This is why EXF is described as a cycle, not an arc. It’s a return trip, not one-way. As the designer you can close the learning loop by discussing the design with the person whose thinking about the future world inspired it. Take a look at the EXF article “Turning Foresight Inside Out” and see if this makes sense.
For an additional example, more detailed than those given in the article, consider an experiential futures project we did for the United Nations Development Programme, called “Imagination Is a Commons”. One on one, I interviewed five people (folks chosen by the UNDP) about the futures they wanted to explore. These conversations often gestured to quite radical scenarios that could have major implications for the landscape of global development. But these scenario ideas were also usually not very detailed. The next stage was, with collaborators I came up with a series of tangible future objects inspired by each of those conversations, and sent them through the mail for each interviewee to receive at their home address. This was the week before a panel discussion where we brought everyone together online. So participants came to the panel having received a future artifact inspired by their own thinking, but no one knew in advance what anyone else’s futures or artifacts were. The project culminated with this exciting reveal whereby the interviewees could talk about their future ideas through a kind of show-and-tell, illustrated by the artifact they’d received as a gift, inspired by their own ideas. And critically, this way they got to have the last word.
They were from different backgrounds and parts of the world, so making something that would resonate with their specific cultural context involved quite a lot of research on my end – from Swahili proverbs and Brazilian political history to Welsh mythology and Haudenosaunee ritual. What surprised and delighted me was the extent to which as panelists they really rolled with the concrete ideas embodied in their artifacts. The making process had pushed those often initially vague ideas from the original exchanges into a provocative level of specificity, which they took on board and built upon further in a delightfully constructive spirit.
For a more rigorous, research-oriented application of the same EXF process, more explicitly incorporating feedback on the design/mediation stage, you could look up projects by two of my Carnegie Mellon graduate students at the time, Michal Luria (“Letters from the Future”) or Amrita Khoshoo (“Tomorrow’s Technocultures”).
Design and futures practices are not politically neutral. How should practitioners respond when scenarios co-created with communities point toward transformations that threaten dominant institutional or economic interests?
I very much agree. Design and futures are not politically neutral at all. If this aspect of those practices is of interest then you might find “The Futures of Everyday Life” a useful read. It was the first PhD dissertation to bring design and futures together, and I did it in a department of political science. Acknowledging their inherently political qualities was a point of departure for the whole project of bringing the two into dialogue, and putting them to work more effectively in concert.
Your question asks how a practitioner should respond to scenarios that threaten dominant interests. The answer might seem to depend on who the practitioner believes they are responsible to, and what their own politics look like. But I’m not sure that that’s the case.
To me, futures work done properly always carries at least the potential to be destabilizing, and perhaps includes an obligation to be a bit disquieting. This is because it requires taking seriously that things could be otherwise than the way we find them now, and allowing that some of these alternatives might even be better, and might call for changes to the way things are. After all, if these kinds of what-if thought don’t get included during a futures process, then when will they ever get a hearing?
Therefore it’s possible that the opposite question may often be needed from the one you posed: what should the practitioner do when the futures under discussion in an organization or community do not include transformational or status quo-threatening possibilities? And usually, the task is gently to make room for those transformational or challenging ideas to enter the conversation. This might be done by including more and different kinds of voices in the room (e.g. by using a process such as Open Space for community planning and strategy, because it accommodates a wide range of people and ideas), or by using scenario methods that lend themselves to considering a wide array of future pathways (e.g. the “generic images of the future”).
I should add that I think this obligation we carry in futures work to make room for big, challenging ideas exists regardless of the politics of the person or organization you are serving. If you chose to work for a conservative organization (like the military for example) then it is very likely that they will want to anticipate all kinds of perhaps improbable outcomes that could represent a threat to whatever interests they define as important. If on the other hand you chose to work with an intentionally disruptive outfit (a startup, a political party, an advocacy org), they likewise may need to think through the circumstances that could hurt or help their own missions. Opposite kinds of organization both need boundary-pushing foresight, one way or another.
This is, I would say, is why Shell Oil’s Pierre Wack referred to scenarios as being about “the gentle art of reperceiving”. This is why the pioneering academic futurist Jim Dator’s second law is “any useful statement about the futures should at first appear to be ridiculous”. To me they are similar core ideas, stated differently. And what I am saying is, the reason for the similarity is that the job actually requires helping people and collectives operate more successfully at the edge of the thinkable.
The ethics part enters more sharply or more clearly into the question of the politics of those who you actually choose to serve. What are the missions and values of the clients and partners you actually take on? That’s the more personal question, since whoever you work for, you are essentially striving to help them be more effective in their mission, whatever that may be.
Do you have any advice for a retrofuturist, someone who studies past futures to understand culture throughout history, to start thinking about contemporary futures? With historical studies, the events already happened and are reflected upon, in contemporary studies, it has not happened yet or is happening in real time making it overwhelming to design future scenarios.
One of the founding texts of the field of futures studies is an examination of how various cultures historically thought about their own prospects, and then what happened to them. The work I’m talking about, by a Dutch writer named Fred Polak, was published in English as The Image of the Future. This book (or books, since it originally came out in two volumes) recognized that the “images of the future” we carry in our minds and cultures, individually and collectively, help to constitute the conditions for what actually occurs. The pattern Polak saw in his historical survey of collective futures thought was –– well, I’ll just quote it: “A student of the rise and fall of cultures cannot fail to be impressed by the role played in this historical succession by the image of the future. The rise and fall of images precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society's image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive.”
Today Polak’s work continues to ask us to get curious about the images of the future we see around us in the present, and to wonder what the patterns in them might be, and what these might portend. I often find it helpful to introduce his ideas in the very first moments of a futures course.
So my advice for the retrofuturist: yes, of course the past is easier to study, because it has happened –– but let’s not stop there. The past is also impossible to influence for the same reason. Let us use this awareness of past futures, and what they did or did not enable, to bridge into the contemporary, and lean into the plural possibilities of alternative futures that are still being mapped and navigated and shaped in real time. This is precisely the work of futures as a field. And as complex as it certainly can be, the beauty is that we get to participate in the process, not just study it safely from the sidelines.
Have you ever encountered the phenotype of people/consumers who fall into the category of being more tempocentrist rather than ethnocentrist? Or even a mix of the two? I know it’s a much less researched subject, as you wrote, but how would an experienced futures designer go about tackling an audience or problem group that is more tempocentrist than anything else? How would you adapt a futures design or pitch strategy? How would you go about approaching a group that cares only about or completely centers their own timeframe? I imagine it can be even more difficult to deal with than even extreme ethnocentric ideologies.
What you’re picking up on there – anthropologist-futurist Robert Textor’s pairing of “ethnocentrism” and “tempocentrism” (cited in the EXF article) – is a great provocation, and an interesting pair of lenses on work that we’re doing all the time in futures.
I would say that futures/foresight practitioners are very, very often dealing with this – people who are more tempocentric than they realize – and more tempocentric than they are ethnocentric, as you say. (At least there is a tradition of explicit values and well-worn conservative vs liberal controversies around ethnocentrism. Tempocentrism more often sits in a collective blind spot.) In a sense, the whole of the futures field could be seen as a response to unwitting tempocentrism.
In this, it can and should be allied with the study of history. One of the initial steps that I find powerful in having people encounter futures practices is actually to help them connect to history. For example, over the past decade or so we’ve run numerous workshops for mayors from across the USA, aiming to enable them to become more capable and articulate imaginers of alternative futures for the cities they were elected to lead. My colleagues from the Civic Foresight Project and I have done this with maybe 250 mayors so far.
At our most recent workshop, held at the United States Conference of Mayors’ annual gathering this summer, before asking the mayors to think about their city 25 years from now, we pulled up the front page of a newspaper from 25 years ago, to the day. These city leaders were old enough to remember clearly when this was the present, and being confronted with a concrete demonstration of just how much things have changed in just a generation –– from the topics of the top stories, to the actual language used in the headlines, to the design of the newspaper itself –– helped prime them to realize that a whole lot can and will have changed 25 years out, too. This is a simple temporally-decentering move that you might almost say demands a wider aperture of time than the narrow insistence of “now”.
A different kind of counter-tempocentric step that you can take is to have people connect to past and future times through their own family and personal relationships. The great Elise Boulding, a founding figure of both futures studies and peace studies (and by the way, the translator of Polak’s magnum opus from Dutch into English), gave us the concept of the “two hundred year present”. To put this idea in motion, she would have people call to mind the oldest person who held them in their arms when they were a baby, as well as the youngest person in their life who they in turn have held in their arms. The span from the beginning of the life of that oldest person, to the end of the life of that youngest one, is often two centuries or more. In a simple but intimate way, this can help people realize that they are part of a historical continuum. (I experienced this process led by peace studies professor John Paul Lederach, in a session held online during the pandemic.) Normally, in many workplaces or planning settings, 200 years might sound like an absurdly long period to invoke. But when we realize that we already have a personal connection to both ends of that interval, suddenly it does not seem so crazy or indulgent to have organizations or communities or governments consider their own activities in terms of intergenerational timespans. Doing so can instead start to be seen, rightly, as a natural and responsible thing to do.
[Stay tuned for part 2 – Making Futures...]
Related:
> On Foresight in Organisations
> On Getting Started in Experiential Futures
> Designing Futures (Desktop Magazine)
> What Is the Value of Futures and Foresight? (RSA)
> Future documentary (SAIC)
> American Futures (SAIC)
> Ethnographic Experiential Futures
