When reality outruns imagination

I wrote this reflection a few months ago, just after the COVID-19 pandemic was recognised as such. Now posting here to make it easier to find.

***

A key purpose of futures practice is to invest thought in possible contingencies, so that when something unexpected suddenly happens you are better prepared.

COVID-19 is a vivid illustration of both the importance and the limits of foresight. Let me tell you a story.

This story is about how the first serious game funded by the CDC came about –– a near-future pandemic simulation, back in 02009 –– and how it was overtaken by real events. And what we learned from that.

In 02007, my colleague Jake Dunagan (now at Institute for the Future) and I were both grads in the futures program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. In our work there, at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, we had already designed and run immersive scenarios, set in the year 02050, to engage lawmakers and public in the state’s sustainability planning process.

We then started experimenting with other approaches we hadn’t seen in futures work before, but that seemed worth exploring too. One thing we tried was doing physical installations and encounters in public to bring possible worlds to life, which we called guerrilla futures. It drew inspiration from some early interventions by The Yes Men, tactical media and culture jamming à la Adbusters, Brazilian forum theatre pioneer Augusto Boal, some then-recent alternate reality games, and also, well before any of the above, Situationist détournement.

We developed scenarios for our favourite neighbourhood, Honolulu’s Chinatown, through conversations with residents, and then collaboratively translated these futures into experiences in the streets.

One was about the cultural changes gentrification might bring to the area.

Another explored the potential meaning for Chinatown of China’s geopolitical rise.

The last scenario was about a deadly flu outbreak. It came partly from our research into the history of the Chinatown district, which at the turn of the 20th century had been burned down after being struck by an epidemic of bubonic plague.

This experiential scenario was specifically designed to echo history, in order to help generate connection to and discussion about future possibilities. Outbreaks, like earthquakes, happen periodically. They can’t be completely avoided; only mitigated through effective anticipation, preparation and response.

The gentrification scenario landed our guerrilla project, FoundFutures: Chinatown, on the front page of the state's daily newspaper. It seems we had staged it plausibly enough that some people briefly thought Starbucks, TGI Fridays, and overpriced luxury lofts were really moving in.

But it was the pandemic scenario that caught the attention of the Hawaii Department of Health (DOH). They came to us and asked how experiential futures might help prepare the population. We started exploring, and the DOH set about the slow process of seeking grant funding.

A year on, they had received a grant from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and still wanted to collaborate. By then, late 2008, I was working as a Game Master on Superstruct, “the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game,” an online social platform staged by IFTF and designed by Jane McGonigal, Jamais Cascio, and Kathi Vian. Superstruct was seriously groundbreaking, engaging thousands of players internationally in imagining themselves a decade later –– “real play rather than role play” –– telling stories collaboratively to extend humanity’s survival horizon in-world.

Especially with this successful alternate reality game (ARG) as a newly-minted reference point, the health department loved our pitch: an online pandemic flu ARG with added real-world discovery vectors on the ground in Hawaii; future artifacts installed in public places to boost awareness, participation, and ultimately, resilience.

The core design team set to work –– me, Matthew Jensen, and Nathan Verrill, with Jake Dunagan helping out as permitted by his new full-time job at IFTF –– and we quickly identified the overarching storytelling challenge at hand; one set to make or break the whole project: How could we help our audience with no living memory of a precedent, most anyone under 45, to connect viscerally to what it feels like to live through a pandemic? By this point, early in 02009, there had not been one in more than 40 years –– the 'Hong Kong Flu,' in 01968.

We constructed our in-game scenario around a hypothetical, peer-to-peer, Hawaii-based disaster response org called Coral Cross, which had been founded, in our telling, after a devastating hurricane hit the islands in 02011. This part was sort of modelled against the real example of Hurricane Katrina (02005), to help people connect to the stakes. But it posited a constructive, emergent use of social media –– still very new in 02009. We basically planned to have people roleplay online within that frame.

We also had to produce near-future media assets to put on the diegetic (in-world) Coral Cross website. These would be aimed at helping players grasp the strangeness, and seriousness, of being able to catch a deadly disease from a doorknob. The hypothetical pandemic was inherently challenging to us, too, because of course we hadn’t had that experience either.

So one day in April 02009, I'm at the East West Center directing a film shoot for the project: a press conference set in 02012, three years into the future, where the Hawaiian Governor’s office announces the WHO declaration of a fully-blown, level 5 pandemic of this imaginary in-game disease.

In the midst of filming, a text message appears on my phone from Matthew, then working from Chicago. One word: “Oink.” Plus a link to an obscure report about an emerging swine flu strain apparently showing up in Mexico and California.

Everyone agreed this was a very strange coincidence.

The disease spread. Within days it had graduated to the front pages of newspapers all over the world.

And the major push we had put in to making this unfamiliar experience of a pandemic more imaginable was instantly made redundant by reality.

For me and the project team, this was just about the most bizarre and unexpected conceivable turn. An elaborately constructed "what if" that we had spent months plotting out, unprecedented in the past 40 years, was now being outstripped by events in real time.

I was reeling.

We were still some weeks out from launch, and quickly realised: our plans, this project, absolutely had to change.

We contacted our clients at the health department, who at first tried to reassure us it would be fine to stay the course. We politely insisted otherwise. Fortunately, soon enough everyone was on the same page: it would not be responsible, or even make sense, to run a live social online game about an imaginary pandemic against the backdrop of an actual one.

We had to move quickly. What’s the only thing that can spread faster than a virus? Information.

Our elaborate hypotheticals went out the window. “Alternate reality game” morphed into “emergent reality game.” While still a playable pandemic preparedness campaign, we were now racing a real disease, H1N1 swine flu. The new plan: harness unfolding events to fuel engagement. We rebooted the whole effort to have it revolve directly around helping players learn how to avoid getting sick and spreading illness.

The new Coral Cross launched some weeks later. Players everywhere registered, earned “vigilance” for engaging the medical quiz content we had prepared with expert CDC guidance, and shared their views on the delicate, serious ethical dilemmas around allocating an eventual vaccine.

H1N1 marched on. However, it was gradually becoming clear that, thankfully, mortality rates were well below those feared at first.

This welcome news had a dark underside. Concern was activated, only to be followed by an experience for many no different than a regular flu season. The medical establishment, in good faith, had cried wolf, and the wolf duly arrived! –– technically it was a pandemic –– but instead of a terrifying monster, this toothless creature had limped into town. We were left wondering: was the net effect maybe in fact less preparedness?

Hawaii DOH and the CDC were awesome to work with. They were also incredibly happy with the project as, we were told, their first experiment with a "serious game". Many players showed impressive, genuine, heartening engagement.

And yet.

As you know, last week the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Not influenza, of course, but for our purposes, a similar enough breed of fiasco. I’ve been flashing back to Coral Cross the past few weeks, and I’ve been asked about the project and its lessons.

First, making Coral Cross was I think the first time I’d personally learned or thought much about the catastrophic 01918 Spanish Flu, as well as the best practices for avoiding sickness, etc. A decade ago, sneezing into cupped hands was still pretty standard polite practice.

Second, it is a genuinely humbling, quite surreal, and deeply ironic experience to have a well-meaning initiative that is all about thinking ahead and resilience get blown out of the water while it is diligently being set up. As ever, “The best laid schemes of mice and men…”

But I think the main lesson is this: Pandemic preparedness is not a one-shot proposition. Neither, for that matter, is community resilience. Nor is the capacity for foresight more broadly. These things require habit. Collectively, they are cultural. Society critically needs an ongoing, collective, plural, high quality forward view.

I look at it in terms of three dimensions: difference, diversity, and depth. We must address not just the difference of a single (however currently-likely-seeming) scenario, though that's as far as many folks go. We also need a diversity of alternative futures, constantly updated. And depth, reckoning with what these entail as lived experiences.

Granted, this is a tall order. But it is also what over half a century of futures/foresight practice and education are all about. Our community is worldwide, not just in one particular place, culture, or department. Many hands have helped to develop, hone and share these skills. (Note: not everyone with "futurist" in their bio necessarily knows about the field, history, methods, etc) If new to you, let me invite you to explore.

To be clear: current urgencies need urgent attention. In addition: we need to cultivate wiser, more farsighted and systemically-literate habits of mind, as individuals, as organisations, and yes, as whole societies; a distributed capacity that some of us call social foresight.

I know it can be done at those smaller scales, because I've spent more than a decade and a half doing it. Meanwhile, what we must do collectively is increasingly clear. Whether we will step up is currently an open question.

“History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”
–– Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick

***

(Originally shared on Twitter, then LinkedIn.)

Related:
> Three Dimensions of Foresight
> Hawaii 02050: Ghosts of futures past

> Guerrilla Futures (slide deck)
> Foundfutures Chinatown: The Bird Cage
> Superstruct

> Coral Cross is coming / Coral Cross concludes
> Boing Boing post from back when this happened

Found: The Future of Church

An unearthed future artifact, and the story behind it.

A few years back I worked with Wired magazine on their wonderful monthly feature "Found". I had been inspired by this series during our early work developing experiential futures practice, about a decade ago now, and by 02011 had done a fair amount of "artifact from the future" creation (especially with Jake Dunagan via our jointly-run public art outfit, FoundFutures, staging live encounters with future artifacts and scenes in everyday life).

It was an honour to be involved as a freelance contributor to the magazine, helping to flesh out these playful snapshots of possible futures, and seeing where we might push the envelope a bit.

Each month editor Chris Baker and I would hop on a phone call and iterate on possible concepts to inform image production. One time he brought the idea of the "Health Spa of the Future", and I excitedly proposed making a future spa brochure to tuck inside the magazine; a sort of diegetic insert, and a twist on the SOP of using the back page. Unfortunately, the cost of a separate print run was prohibitive. (The Future Health Spa still ended up being a pretty neat image.)

The concepts Chris brought to the table were usually part-developed already, but one I eagerly initiated for us to explore together came from a news item I'd seen in May 02011:

[N]euroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people. (CNN)

According to this research, "Apple was actually stimulating the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith." (BBC News)

The Future of Church!

Here was a different cultural register from the Future of Health Spas, Yard Sales, Sporting Events, Doorbells, etc. And this image could come, I suggested, from the mashup of a house of worship and the Apple Store, playfully reworking the architecture and symbology -- altars, icons, stained glass, and so on.

Chris persuaded me that a stained glass window alone could be equally evocative but easier to execute (a better tip of the iceberg). We brainstormed its contents and then in the summer he set to work finalising these and getting the thing physically made to photograph for the feature. The resulting illustration by Sam Gilbey, and glass by David R. Forte, made for one of my favourite future artifacts ever produced for Found. It seemed to dig beneath the usual tech preoccupations and invite some deeper questions.

However, Steve Jobs was unwell at the time. The world famous inventor and CEO had been battling cancer, and a "Found" artifact referencing this notion of Apple fans' religiosity through a beatified Jobs could be poorly timed, and in light of his health situation might be misinterpreted. 

So the feature was done, but unpublished. At that time I thought Wired might have been taking an overly cautious view, but the final nail was driven home on October 4th, 02011: that was when Chris told me that, as far as the magazine was concerned, this stained glass window would not see the light of day.

I remember the date because 24 hours later, Steve Jobs died.

Holding off had of course been the right decision. If the piece had run as planned in the October 02011 print issue it may have caused unintended offence, and drawn unwarranted criticism, since the thinking behind the artifact had had nothing to do with Mr Jobs's illness or mortality, and everything to do with the neuroscience research published earlier in the year -- and beyond that, with the far-reaching admiration Jobs inspired, the iconicity of the brand that he had grown, and the enduringly religious character of American society, ever a culture of true believers.

In any case, sure enough, the Future of Church never made an appearance, and "Found" ceased to run in Wired in 02013.

Still, with the back story in view, perhaps this once lost, now found artifact can be seen as food for thought on how the future appropriates the past, as well as fair tribute to an icon of contemporary culture.

Update 6 Nov 02015: Wired's Chris Kohler got in touch to report that the image was later repurposed for another feature comparing the resignations of Jobs and Pope Benedict XVI.

Related:
> The Thing From The Future

> Wired's gallery of Found artifacts

> The Futures of Everyday Life

> FoundFutures postcards
> More found futures
> The Darfur Olympics
> Anachronisms
> Artifacts from the present 

The Unthinkable and the Unimaginable

Update (25MAR10): Video of the lecture (minus the interesting post-talk Q&A, unfortunately), made available on YouTube courtesy of CCA, is now posted here too.

Update (6APR10): This presentation is also now downloadable on iTunesU, together with others in the same lecture series by presenters including designer Tim Brown, artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and critical theorist Donna Haraway. (Thanks to Garry Golden for unearthing this.)

Last night I had the pleasure of guest lecturing at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. The title was "The Unthinkable and the Unimaginable: Why Futures and Design are Getting Married". Our starting point came from a speech, ever on-target, by scifi-and-design prophet Bruce Sterling at South By Southwest back in 02006:

We’re on a kind of slider bar, between the Unthinkable, and the Unimaginable, now. Between the grim meathook future, and the bright green future. And there are ways out of this situation: there are actual ways to move the slider from one side to the other. Except we haven’t invented the words for them yet.

(This talk by Sterling, by the way, is a tour de force, even by his exceptional standards: check out the mp3 via BoingBoing, and full transcript via blogger Sean Harton. Sterling also did an excellent and, it seems to me, overlooked talk about the intersection of futures and design in this same CCA lecture series, back in 02006, highly recommended: video at FORA.tv.)

An outline of last night's presentation...

It is our critical collective need to be able to think the supposedly "unthinkable", and imagine the "unimaginable", that is driving the merger of futures and design practices. Futures provides a big-picture context and sense of the stakes for design work, and design brings concreteness and communicative effectiveness to futures. Together they can do far more than simply convey propositional content about possible futures; they enable otherwise schematic, affect-free, "flat" images of the future to be fleshed out, thought and felt -- in a word, experienced -- in a more profound way.

But the notions of unthinkable and unimaginable are just the extremes of a normative spectrum: dystopian (unthinkably bad) at one end, and utopian (unimaginably good) at the other. As important for our collective well-being as it is to engage these edge-cases, part of the offer of this union of design and futures thought/practice is to move beyond the long-standing and limited utopia/dystopia binary. We need to be able to think, and feel, the "possibility space" of alternative futures in more dimensions -- ones not pre-designated (often thought-stoppingly) as desirable or undesirable. To do this, we can use Jim Dator's four generic images of the future (GIFs): continue, collapse, discipline, transform. Dator's framework, which groups scenarios into sets of narratives based on the trajectory of change that they express, can be -- and for many years at HRCFS, actually has been -- deployed generatively to map and explore the "four corners of possibility space", providing a way to range imaginatively and yet systematically towards the outer limits of possible futures, before proceeding to home in on probable and preferable ones.

The meat of the lecture lay in examining a whole series of projects which exemplify the marriage of design and futures work. My focus was on those efforts I knew best, that is, in which I was personally involved -- mostly undertaken in Hawaii over the past four years in collaboration with Jake Dunagan and a variety of artists and designers (above all Matthew Jensen and Yumi Vong). Some of the projects discussed may already be familiar to readers of this blog -- the experiential futures produced for the "Hawaii 2050" kickoff; FoundFutures artifacts including Postcards from the Future and the Chinatown project; our intervention at SXSW '08; the show curated by Sally Szwed at CCA's own Wattis Institute, and more. These stand as part of an emerging breed of exploratory design/futures work that attempts, we could say, the coinage of some of those needful words Sterling references in the quote above. Except that an important part of this new vocabulary comprises not literally words, but rather objects and experiences, and the methodological approaches that help call them into being.

It was great to have an opportunity to discuss these ideas with such an attentive, curious audience, and I am told that this instalment of the CCA's Graduate Studies Lecture Series will shortly be available online. I'll post when that happens. Many thanks to Nathan Shedroff, Nathalie Kakone, Brenda Laurel and others at CCA who helped organise the event.

Also, while we're in update mode, I should add a word or two about what's been going on here at the sceptical futuryst. In the busy time since my last post, I've joined the Executive Board of the World Futures Studies Federation, passed my comprehensive exams and begun writing my doctoral dissertation, and unofficially relocated my base of operations to the San Francisco Bay Area. I have a load of material to blog, but dissertation-writing remains top priority for the time being. Still, I do expect to be able to post here more frequently than I have in recent times, so please do get in touch [stuart at futuryst dot com] if you spot anything that belongs in the mix!

CCA | Image via Street View in Google Maps

This is not a game

The Coral Coral website yesterday (27 April 02009)

I haven't been posting lately due to intensive work on Coral Cross (described in the previous post). Also, the last week has been one of the strangest of my life. A little background...

Back in October 02007, Jake Dunagan and I ran a project called FoundFutures: Chinatown, wherein we created a series of alternative futures for this historic Honolulu neighbourhood, and with a little help from our friends, manifested these possible future Chinatowns in tangible form during a multi-part 'exstallation' in the area. One of the stories concerned a flu epidemic that took place in (a version of) the year 02016, and this caught the attention of some folks in the Communications department of the State Department of Health (DOH).

Wearing our Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies hats, we started talking about doing some kind of project for DOH using this distinctive "experiential futures" approach, and they applied for a federal U.S. grant to pursue the idea. That was early in 02008.

By September that year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that Hawaii's grant application for a demonstration public engagement project about influenza preparedness had been successful. We at HRCFS then pitched an alternate reality game (ARG) that would build both on our experiential scenarios for FoundFutures and Hawaii 2050, as well as on the success of 'serious ARGs' such as World Without Oil (02007) and Superstruct (then soon to launch) in addressing near-future challenges.

A particular aim was to help people provide input for the state about who ought to be vaccinated first, once a vaccine were to become available, a life-and-death question laden with ethical, political, and cultural implications. To answer it, however, required enabling folks to grasp some important, and frequently misunderstood, background facts: pandemic flu is different from seasonal flu; vaccine is different from antivirals; and vaccine specific to a pandemic flu strain -- since by definition such strains are immunologically unfamiliar -- would take months to formulate, produce and distribute.

We considered that an accessible, immersive storytelling effort should help people to take the premise seriously -- a challenging proposition since the last pandemic was in 01968, and out of sight generally means out of mind. For months, then, the HRCFS team has been working intensively on creating the architecture and content for an experience that would enable people to project themselves undergoing the experience of a flu pandemic. The scenario was set in 02012, partly to avoid a War of the Worlds-esque confusion on the part of our audience. In order to tell the story authoritatively from within the 'alternate reality' scenario, but without pretending to the mantle of a real organisation like DOH or CDC, we created an entity called the Coral Cross. This was a grassroots network, a product of Obama-era public service and web savvy, which in our story emerged in September 02011 after a category 5 Hurricane Cyrus devastated the island of Oahu.

However, after months of design and research, and just a few weeks prior to the scheduled launch, an extraordinary coincidence has occurred. Just before the world's first pandemic flu-themed alternate reality game was to begin -- and following pregame media coverage by ARG websites and local news -- an actual outbreak of swine flu in Mexico, quickly spreading to other locations, has made the fictional premise redundant.

The flu crisis is now real.

And now, so is Coral Cross; transforming, seemingly with its own alternate-reality momentum, as our design team works at full speed to adapt an 'alternate reality game' to a 'reality game' supporting real-time futures exploration as this story unfolds.

As I said, the last week has been one of the strangest of my life.

For me, the swine flu news, which at first I found curious but in no way alarming, came via the CDCemergency twitter feed -- which, bizarrely, I happened to start following last Wednesday (22 April) before any of this was in the headlines, and the most recent message was the first hint of a story soon to erupt:



It has been truly eerie to see this once-in-a-blue-moon scenario occurring just on the verge of hypothetically staging just such a scenario. Last Thursday afternoon, as I was setting up to shoot a Coral Cross press conference set in 02012 -- announcing the onset of a pandemic -- as part of our pre-launch storytelling effort, our lead designer Matt Jensen sent this email:

Subject: Oink

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N23355101.htm

Do we have a contingency plan if a pandemic strikes before our game launches?

We did complete the shoot, incidentally, but in view of events since then, won't be using the footage anytime soon.

Part of me of course finds it hard to say goodbye to the carefully crafted alternate reality premise and extensive in-world storytelling we had undertaken. It is weird -- a mixture of vindication, disappointment, and deep concern -- to see scenaric details, carefully imagined and crafted by our team, being supplanted by reports in the same newspapers and press conferences whose style and conventions we'd been drawing on to tell our story. But the strangest thing is seeing our advocacy for preparation and forethought so swiftly outrun by the flux of events themselves. I can't help but relish the irony that we have spent months strategising the incursion of a hypothetical future into the present, when in a matter of days, we’ve seen instead the incursion of reality into our hypothetical future.

"Any useful statement about the futures should appear to be ridiculous."
~Jim Dator

Embracing that change as best we can is, ultimately, the only option that makes sense. Will the 'swine flu' develop into a full-blown pandemic, or prove to be a false alarm; or rather, something between those extremes? No one can say. But the only sensible way to complete the project we have begun, while accommodating the genuine and pervasive uncertainty that attends these unfolding events, is to make that very uncertainty the subject of our exploration. This is the option that we recommended over the weekend to the Department of Health, and that, as of last night, they confirmed.

The core design team on Coral Cross consists of visual designer Matthew Jensen, interaction designer Nathan Verrill, creative consultant Jake Dunagan, and me as the project lead. I consider myself highly fortunate to be working with such adaptive and ingenious people that we can even consider spontaneously turning a simulation into a real-time futures exploration. But that's what's needed. And we applaud the Hawaii's DOH for recognising and acting so swiftly on the need to (as we've half-jokingly been saying internally) 'turn the Titanic'.

All this raises some big questions which are still only dimly defined in my mind (and which I don't have time to articulate and address properly right now) about the usefulness of emergency preparation, and the relationship between such preparations and the realities to which they ostensibly refer. (Emergency: an interesting word.) But I trust there will be time enough for all that in due course. For now, we're trying to rapidly reinvent the game to support real-life contingencies, exploration and decision-making; an interesting and difficult but necessary -- and perhaps unprecedented -- task.

Our sincere hope is that this event will prove not to be the pandemic that, at this moment in time, it could yet become. Still, whatever happens, Coral Cross will be there to help. All interested are encouraged to register at coralcross.org.

"History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again."
~Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick

The Coral Cross website today (28 April 02009)

In memoriam

A priest pays tribute to Dirk Diggler (Eddie Adams) at his memorial service, 11 March 02025
[Image via coquedesign2000's Flickr photostream]

On 11 March, Jake Dunagan and I staged one of four experiential scenarios set in the year 02025 for the annual South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival in Austin, Texas. A trio of fellow future-mongers, Jamais Cascio (Open the Future), Wayne Pethrick (Pitney Bowes), and panel coordinator Michele Bowman (Global Foresight Associates), each devised and presented their own immersive fragment of a different 02025 in the same session. Thus was the audience for "Futurists' Sandbox" serially bombarded with a quartet of alternative futures exploring possible directions for social networking technology.

Together, the five of us had sketched out four very different settings to ensure maximum diversity in the ideas we would present. Jake and I chose to breathe life into the one dubbed "mobilisation", which resembled the generic image of the future that we usually call "discipline" at Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies. Back in March, Jake posted a detailed description of the scenario and its theatrical translation at the HRCFS blog, in two segments, and the quotations below are his:

Combining our concern with expanding IP [intellectual property] rights and their impact on expression and freedom, we decided to integrate elements of the aesthetic economy, IP expansion, and surveillance culture--thus creating a disturbing totalitarian corporate-state.
...
[W]e chose to tell the story of the locked-down Dream Society through a eulogy for Eddie Adams, aka Dirk Diggler from P.T. Anderson's film Boogie Nights [i.e., the central character played by Mark Wahlberg].

Our experiential scenario, a memorial service for pornstar-turned-copyfighter Dirk Diggler, was advertised at SXSW with "in-world" flyers...
[Photo: Stuart Candy]

...dated 02025.
[Design: Eliot Frick]

There was no indication in the SXSW festival materials that our group would be 'performing' scenes from our scenarios, and, after some debate, we decided not to preface the panel with an explanation of the method. This was a risky choice, and with access to the active twitterati and audience members commenting live on the SXSW Meebo chatrooms, we could see that the reaction to the panel was mixed, but passionate. Still, for what might be risked in subverting audience expectation, we feel this performative, immersive technique is much more effective at engaging the audience at both emotional and intellectual levels—creating an unusual, thought-provoking and memorable event.

For those who haven't seen Boogie Nights (01997), the movie chronicles, with documentary plausibility, the rags-to-riches story of a surburban LA busboy whose astonishing endowment in the trouser department leads him to become a 01970s porn icon. Our scenario picked up Diggler's tale where the movie leaves off in the mid-80s, with the protagonist battling alcoholism and impotence. In our hands, his career then weathers a fallow period, during which he sells the rights to the image and likeness of his famous 13-inch member to a dildo company. Years later, in the 01990s, thanks to Viagra he revives his flagging fortunes and re-enters the porn movie business. Things seem to be going swimmingly, until the early 2010s when the long-anticipated technology of teledildonics (virtual sex) comes of age, and his attempt to market the virtual experience of sex with the enviably well-hung Dirk Diggler runs aground. These entrepreneurial efforts are met with a lawsuit by Disney, the company which (in our *hypothetical scenario*) has, via a series of mergers and acquisitions, come into possession of property in his penis. The case drags on for years, eventually finding its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Diggler/Adams fights it with everything he's got. Ultimately, he loses the case, as the court's expansionist reading of the rights he signed away for dildoes in a moment of weakness are deemed also to cover the haptic experience of sex with the "Diggler" character, as well as revenue from his post-contract comeback catalogue of pornographic performances. Eddie Adams, dispossessed of his very manhood by the ubiquitous corporate surveillance and lockdown of intellectual property, dies in 02025, beaten but unbowed. He is a hero of the embattled "copyfight" movement in an America where market logic has come to infuse every social transaction.

It was a lot to try to convey all this experientially in 15 minutes (one quarter of the hour-long session), but we figured it as an interesting twist on a story and character that many in the audience would recognise. By no means was it the stand-and-deliver panel discussion format that many had expected.

So, when people entered the auditorium, they were greeted by sombre organ music, a suitably reverential arrangement of ELO's "Living Thing", from the Boogie Nights soundtrack (arranged and prerecorded by our talented friend John Maus). This was the first element of immersion in our memorial service for Eddie Adams, to be followed by impassioned eulogies by his priest (me), lawyer (Jake), and erstwhile co-star, Rollergirl (the incomparable Sandy Stone, who lives in Austin and graciously agreed to be involved).

The presentation was six months ago yesterday, and this post is long overdue (mea culpa). One reason for that is I'd been hoping, at first, for some video of the panel to surface, since the material shot on an ancient Hi-8 camera by our friends at the back of the hall didn't turn out. We do however have components from the slideshow we produced to accompany the Diggler eulogies, to provide a little more flavour...

Above: some nostalgic shots from Rollergirl's Polaroid archive
[Images: Captured from Boogie Nights by Stuart Candy, composited by Matthew Jensen]

An automated copyright protection system prevents unauthorised / unpaid glimpses of the Diggler jewels
[Image: Stuart Candy, captured from Boogie Nights]

Copyfight Protesters turn out in droves supporting the Adams/Diggler bid to ressert rights to his famous appendage
[Round placards design: Melissa Jordan, PinkergreenFound image: Stuart Candy | Compositing: Eliot Frick]

Outside the Supreme Court, Eddie Adams reflects on the judges' decision
[Found image: Stuart Candy, via Caroline Bonarde Ucci's Flickr photostream
Aged by Melissa Jordan, Pinkergreen]

Eddie Adams, copyfight hero, at the sunset of his life
[Image captured from Shooter by Stuart Candy
Aged by Melissa Jordan, Pinkergreen]

The other three presentations were wildly different, both from ours and from each other.

Wayne's was a slick corporate presentation by Datapoints.net, a shadowy, all-seeing data aggregation enterprise (with a real website that you can find here):

Screenshot from Datapoints.net, a successful personal data aggregation and marketing site in 02025
[Design: Wayne Pethrick]

Michele's took the form of a charity auction benefiting the "Make A Friend Foundation" (for kids who can't afford to join Facebook), featuring a number of coveted future products and services on which attendees could bid.

Some of the items under the charity auctioneer's hammer of Michele Bowman in 02025
[Designs by Pinkergreen | Images via FringeHog]

Finally, Jamais staged an other-worldly ultimatum from a hive-mind called "The Chorus". The question for audience members: will you join, or will you opt out?

Screenshot from "The Chorus"
[Performed by Jamais Cascio
Audio available in full [mp3, 6.4Mb) here, via Open the Future]

Looking back six months later, what Jamais wrote at Open the Future on the day of the show still resonates:

The futurists' panel was... weird.

No, scratch that. It was freaking bizarre.

Indeed it was. From my point of view, that's partly because of the frenzied preparation which took up the entire time from flying into Austin until going onstage. Combined with which, of course, the content was somewhat surreal (twenty-four hours before the panel, our shopping list included dry ice, a 13-inch dildo, and a priest's outfit). Also, more poignantly, although we had decided long beforehand on the memorial setting for this experiential scenario, in the previous week both Jake and I had been obliged to attend funeral services in the wake of real bereavements.

Life's ironies can be pretty extraordinary.

In any case, thanks are due to all who made this possible, including our hosts in Austin; our talented designer friends who helped bring the story to life; guest star Sandy Stone (for her compelling portrayal of Rollergirl, at ridiculously short notice); and of course our fellow futurist panelists who boldly agreed to immerse the audience in these four 02025s, FoundFutures guerrilla-style.

It made for an experience that I, for one, won't ever forget.

Related posts:
> Experiential scenarios on video
> Found futures> More found futures
> McChinatown

Hawai'i: The Lost Years

Mandatory ration card for the ahupua'a (governing district) of Honolulu, O'ahu

Now that Hawai'i has come out of its self-imposed isolation, our view of the archipelago is changing. But much is still unknown about the period between 2032 and 2104, when outside visitors were banned and news from Hawai'i was rare. The discovery of Nestor von Hoepper's secret archive, detailing his journey and residence on O'ahu from 2069-71 sheds light on this era of mystery and misinformation. Von Hoepper's journals, drawings, and artifacts, which had remained hidden for decades, will certainly cause us to reinterpret the official history of the Hawaiian culture during this period.

~Jake Dunagan and Stuart Candy, 02108, "Hawai'i 2069: A Journey to the Dark Islands" [excerpt]

The von Hoepper collection of recovered Hawaiian artifacts is now open to the public thanks to Sally Szwed and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco

Personal journal of Mr Nestor von Hoepper (unpublished)

Top left: Flag of the Confederation of Hawaiian Republics, ca. 02070
The motto reads "Mai hehi mai ma luna o'u" (Don't tread on me)

User-modified cookware ("hubcap wok")

User-modified self-and solar-powered hybrid wireless telephone

Ceremonial bowl (kava and ayahuasca residue found)

Bottom right: Military uniform of the Army of O'ahu,
Confederation of Hawaiian Republics

The remarkable story of the Hawaiian islands' 21st century, told through the never-before-seen artifact collection of adventurer Nestor von Hoepper, can now finally be told.

A special exhibition, curated by Sally Szwed of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, will be on display in San Francisco until 20 September.

Thanks to Ms Szwed, as well as to the Wattis Institute, the Confederation of Hawaiian Republics and the von Hoepper Family Trust for their cooperation.

Related posts:
> Found futures
> Green Dragon
> It was the pest of times...
> "Hawaii 2050" kicks off

Findability features FoundFutures

Earlier this week I was interviewed by Peter "Ambient Findability" Morville for his blog findability.org, about working at the intersection of design and alternative futures. (I recently rediscovered and responded to a post he wrote over a year ago, in which he expressed an interest in the interweaving of user experience strategy and futures studies.) We talked quite a bit about the ongoing collaborative project FoundFutures which fellow futurist Jake Dunagan and I have been running since 02006, with the help of a stable -- if stable is the word for these people -- of brilliant designers.

The resulting post appeared today.

I'm grateful to Peter for initiating a really interesting conversation.

As regular readers of t.s.f. are already well aware, there's an orientation in these pages toward how design and futures thinking are being (and can continue to be) woven together. One of the biggest challenges in synthetic, generalist, or transdisciplinary inquiry lies in semantic mismatches, so that people discussing essentially the same phenomena using different terms may never become aware of each other's research or ideas. Traditionally this has been a boon to the academy, in that people could become well-known, admired experts in their respective fields without ever having to take into account the challenges of other folks using different terminology in the next building over. Increased connectivity of people and subjects are rapidly breaking down those walls (notably, via tag-based taxonomies which allow you to have your semantic cake and eat it, so things can easily belong in and be accessed via multiple, previously siloed, categories).

So these disciplinary and linguistic divisions both impede and enable new discoveries: each is a different perspective, a different way of perceiving or knowing the subject.

Swings and roundabouts, my friends. Swings and roundabouts.

Consequently each discussion around design and futures with someone whose experience brings them to the intersection from a different angle opens up new (that is, new to me) insights, search terms, and avenues of inquiry. Peter's principal areas of expertise are information architecture and user experience. Several of the links he included in his post open up frontiers I look forward to exploring:

> Victor Lombardi's thinking on "tangible futures"
> The EU initiative and report Design for Future Needs
> Nathan Shedroff and Davis Masten's project Postcards from the Future

Coincidentally, I'd scheduled a meeting with Nathan (an experience design expert) in San Francisco yesterday afternoon, and we enjoyed a highly interesting exchange of ideas, many of which took the form of trading isomorphic insights arrived at via slightly different avenues. Thus, the beginning of another promising thread in this effort.

The Great Design-Futures Conversation continues. All are welcome.

Outdoor installation takes cover

Photo: Jake Dunagan

Elements of our ambient foresight "exstallation", FoundFutures:Chinatown, described in these three previous posts, have been moved off the streets and into temporary residence at The Arts at Mark's Garage, Nuuanu Avenue, Honolulu. They form part of an exhibition on Alternative Urban Futures which opened on Tuesday, and runs until 17 November. There is some other very cool stuff in the show which we haven't had a chance to look at closely, so far, but anyone in the area is encouraged to check it out.

The introductory matter to our contribution in the gallery reads as follows:

FoundFutures injects futures into the present. It is a multimedia, collaborative project based on the idea that a wider range of possible futures should be made visible and thinkable to people in their everyday lives. The project was created and is led by two doctoral candidates in political science at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, who are also futures researchers at the Hawai'i Research Center for Futures Studies (HRCFS). We aim to provoke thought, conversation, and action by creating and distributing art, artifacts, images, performances and other media that embody possible worlds to come.

Making alternative futures tangible is an antidote to the singular, colonized future we are given by mass media, consumer culture, and an intrinsically shortsighted political system. We want participants to be directly confronted with long-range choices, to feel just how different their various futures could be from the present, and from each other. We call this future-shock therapy. Our aim is not to push people towards particular conclusions, but simply to invite deeper engagement with the field of possibilities.

Photo: Jake Dunagan

This side of the display shows elements from an earlier foray into experiential scenarios, for "Hawaii 2050", a statewide discussion which launched in August 02006. These pieces suggest aspects of a high-tech future Hawai'i (artwork by Sky Kiyabu and Steve Kiyabu). Next, in May 02007, we sent to leaders across the community four postcards from alternative versions of Hawai'i in 02036, on consecutive days and with no return address (designed by Yumi Vong).

On the other side of this panel are elements from four immersive futures designed for our first foray into community and street art – FoundFutures:Chinatown. The first future (McChinatown) was staged for the First Friday art event on October 5. Two others have been displayed since (Green Dragon and The Bird Cage). One will continue beyond this show (Dig Deeper). If you are interested in exploring the futures of Chinatown and Hawaii beyond the urgent, immediate concerns of today, please consider attending our Chinatown Futures Workshop on 17 November (RSVP to info at foundfutures dot com). To discuss futures thinking, or specific issues raised by this distributed installation, don't hesitate to contact us.

Stuart Candy & Jake Dunagan
Directors, FoundFutures:Chinatown
22 October 02007

Photo: Jake Dunagan

Our contribution to the Arts at Marks exhibition has been quite an effort, involving many people. Below is a list of acknowledgements from Jake and me, as it appears at the show:

McCHINATOWN

Designers:
Jesse Arneson
Mark Guillermo
Ryan Yamamoto

Installation assistance:
Duk Bu
Brady Fern
JoDee and Ernie Hunt
Pegge Hopper
Rich Richardson
Roy Venters
Melanie Yang

Protesters:
Guen Montgomery (lead)
Jason Adams
Christina Hoe
Bianca Isaki
Rohan Kalyan
John Maus
Josh Pryor
Lorenzo Rinelli
Matthew Stits


GREEN DRAGON

Designer:
Yumi Vong
[for more of Yumi's outstanding work, check out her website]

Additional scenario
development:
Aaron Rosa

Cultural advisors:
Roger Ames
Matthew McDonald

Translations:
Chien-Yuan Chen
Tianyuan Huang

Installation assistance:
Brady Fern
Charles Wong


THE BIRD CAGE

Designer:
Matthew Jensen
[development of many of the beautiful artifacts for this scenario, designed or overseen by Matt, can be found at the Ritual Lab website, dating back about a month]

Additional artwork:
The Great Bendango
Kristin Dennis
Nathan Verrill

Installation assistance:
Oren Schlieman & Fran Butera
Tim Braden
Richard Lum, Worldwide Travel
Maya van Leemput & Bram Goots
Matthew Jensen

Production assistance:
Seong Won Park

Special thanks to
M.P. Lei Shop (at Maunakea & Pauahi), providers of leis for "Hang Ten flu" memorial plaque


This project would not have been possible without
the support of the following individuals:

Wiwik Bunjamin-Mau, Rich Richardson, and Erik Takeshita at The Arts at Mark's Garage

Matthew Jensen

Yumi Vong

Carolyn Borges at Tom Terrific's Printshop, Manoa

Prof Jim Dator, Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies


The contribution of the following is also much appreciated:

Steve Kiyabu
Sky Kiyabu
Ed Korybski
Chetan Mangat
Bernard Uy


Photography by:

Stuart Candy
Jake Dunagan
Bram Goots
Matthew Stits
Yumi Vong

The Bird Cage

Photo: Stuart Candy

On Tuesday, 16 October 02007, this bronze plaque appeared on the corner of Maunakea and Pauahi Streets in Chinatown, Honolulu -- testimony to the resilient response of the community to a hypothetical tragedy that would not occur for another ten years.

Chinatown has in its history been ravaged by the plague, quarantined, and burned to the ground. In April 02016, the future rhymes with bygone times as bird flu rears its beady-eyed little head. Our distributed installation played out the scenario in reverse, from the installation of the memorial 18 months after the outbreak...

Photo: Bram Goots

Photo: Stuart Candy

To the revival of entrepreneurial activity shortly after the epidemic...

"Dust to Dust" flyer: Matthew Jensen

Photo: Bram Goots

Photo: Stuart Candy

"Jake Stuart" poster: Matthew Jensen / Photo: Bram Goots

Photo: Bram Goots

Photo: Stuart Candy

"Still Paradise" poster: Matthew Jensen

To official notices posted by the National Agency for Investigative Epidemiology (N.A.I.E.) as the crisis was brought under control...

"Evacuation" poster: Matthew Jensen / Photo: Stuart Candy

Photo: Bram Goots

Photo: Stuart Candy

"All Clear" poster: Matthew Jensen / Photo: Stuart Candy

Photo: Stuart Candy

To impromptu messages placed in the streets by ordinary people when the outbreak first occurred...

"Missing" installation design: Matthew Jensen / Photo: Stuart Candy

Photo: Stuart Candy

Photo: Stuart Candy

Below, the outline scenario that Jake Dunagan and I wrote for this third phase of FoundFutures : Chinatown...

THE BIRD CAGE ~02016
What if Chinatown were ground zero of a new influenza epidemic?

Chinatown has long been haunted by tragedy. In 01886 and again in 01900, it was burned to the ground. When a deadly strain of influenza called H8N2 broke out in April 02016, this tragedy in paradise was global news; but local authorities acted quickly. Aircraft were grounded and as Honolulu's "Hang Ten Flu" took hold, the National Guard immediately quarantined Chinatown and systematically raided all residences and businesses in search of individuals exhibiting symptoms.

The rapid response of authorities, and establishment of military/medical checkpoints along all highways across the island, meant that the crisis could be confined to O'ahu. Residents and visitors at risk of infection were relocated to mobile quarantine facilities in Honolulu or on the North Shore (several cruise liners were requisitioned for this purpose by the National Agency for Investigative Epidemiology, the newly established, disease-oriented tactical response branch of FEMA). The ill were then shipped to more secure facilities on Moloka'i for treatment -- and, in one out of every three cases, burial.

The "Weeping Spring" of 02016 brought tourism and most other aspects of everyday life on O'ahu to a standstill. The origins of the virus remain controversial -- at first thought to due to low-quality imported poultry, the outbreak has reportedly been traced to a security lapse at a university research facility on the island. Investigations are still underway.

During the tragedy, the community of Chinatown was frozen. A high proportion of residents lost family members, and the cessation of construction which had occurred at first from necessity was extended while residents debated next steps. However, eighteen months later the citizenry has regrouped and, led by a newly elected, youthful Mayor C. Ballesteros, a renewed sense of shared purpose and identity is discernible. The temporary interruption in shipments and motorized traffic had the effect of heightening awareness of Hawaii's isolation, and increased calls for self-reliance. Many residents have begun cultivating their own food sources, and plans are afoot to turn a number of Chinatown streets into public gardens.
[Update 30 October 02007: See also previous scenario... Green Dragon / Next post... Outdoor installation takes cover]