U.S. Earth Force

Introducing the sixth branch of the American military, founded in 02029.

What happens when the world's richest and most powerful country puts its full weight behind efforts to address climate disruption?

Earth Force is neither a prediction nor a preference, but a possibility, a way of asking how climate action might look if addressed seriously at a federal level.

A belated response to the crisis, when it comes, could be all the more pronounced; making up for lost time.

To date the United States has waged war on various things including poverty, drugs, and terror. A range of responses and a mix of feelings may arise about the idea of adding global warming to the list.

Making space to sort through these responses, and their implications, is a reason to consider such possibilities in advance.

Grand as some of our collective challenges and actions might be, they will also play out in the most ordinary of contexts.

If this really happened, it would show up in all sorts of encounters in everyday life: at airports, sporting events, shopping malls, and school campuses. It would leave visible and tangible traces across all media, from cinemas to recruitment stations, news reports, and social feeds.

The medium of billboard advertising may be mundane, but the kinds of questions it can pose are momentous.

With well over half a trillion dollars spent each year on American military capability, what is the possible scope and impact of climate action at such a scale?

How might the militarisation of governance proceed once systemic issues like this start to be approached seriously on a whole-of-society basis?

When and in what ways will military culture adapt to engage with an unprecedentedly diverse and globally-minded wave of younger citizens, the “March for Our Lives” values of Generation Z?

I took all these photos of billboard sites within minutes by foot or bicycle of our house in Pittsburgh.

The idea was to explore some potential macro-changes of historic significance by crafting a number of local, micro-glimpses of what that reality might entail on the ground.

I also wanted to look at some of the tensions between national-scale and planetary-scale affinities, logics, and symbols.

The project speaks to the notion of duty in at least two different registers.

Our duty to the future is to rectify the catastrophic, systematic errors that we have known for some time are causing global warming.

Our duty to ourselves is to widen the horizons of imagination, debate, and action today.

***

A word of background: this experiential scenario was supported by Institute for the Future (IFTF) and the World Bank's Climate Investment Funds (CIF), as part of a project also involving a number of other commissioned artists working in various media, called Artists Imagining the Future of Climate Action. At IFTF's invitation, I pitched the concept in April 02018.

This story is about activating and amplifying the latent and hugely significant potential of a wildly well-resourced aspect of American governance and infrastructure. In our scenario, the U.S. Earth Force is established in the mid 2020s (alongside the existing Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard), with a view to gradually reducing and supplanting the need for conflict-based military forces by prioritizing global climate security. In terms of the RFP, this experiential scenario tells a ‘White Mirror’ story. It is a story about owning up to the most inconvenient of truths, and starting to turn the ship around.

As my research and thought process went along, the specific media, future artifacts and communications strategy for extruding the scenario morphed a bit, and the diegetic timeline pushed out to after the 02028 election. The central concept stayed the same. (Incidentally, a couple of months after getting the green light from IFTF, I began hearing about President Trump's plan to create a Space Force. Not that it matters particularly, but this project was not conceived or intended as a response to that idea.)

The resulting set of billboard images of the U.S. Earth Force recruitment campaign was completed in September 02018. A few weeks later, the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C was released, decisively shifting the public conversation and ushering in over the following year a new phase of the climate movement that made Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion household names. More recently, the covid-19 pandemic has of course altered the footing for climate action yet again.

This project was initially under wraps, to give its sponsors a chance to share the commissioned artworks first.

As the world marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, I'm sharing U.S. Earth Force with some hope that it may help in a modest way to enrich our collective capacity to imagine and initiate vital climate action in this decade.

***

Many thanks to branding consultant Devika Khowala and compositing consultant Matthew McGehee. For help with field visits and early design explorations, thanks to research assistants Helen Hu and Cathryn Ploehn from CMU Situation Lab. Special thanks for scenario and research advice to Michael Dila, Rosemarie Forsythe, Nils Gilman, Karen Grattan and Alex Steffen. Finally, gratitude to all at IFTF and World Bank CIF for vital support in the creation of this project.

This post was also published on Medium.

Related:
> Foresight is a right
> Ghosts of futures past
> A climate of regret
> Politicians discussing global warming
> Participatory cli-fi
> Mapping c-change
> Critical activism

Future food for thought

Our friends over at Institute for the Future in Palo Alto recently released a report to help people think about possible futures of food for the next decade.

Four Futures of Food serves up a quartet of scenarios plotting out alternative descriptions of how America, as well as the wider world, could be eating in the year 02021. Each is based on a different trajectory that change could describe — Growth, Constraint, Collapse, or Transformation.

In the Growth scenario, 'Consumers can get practically anything they want, whenever they want, and without much concern for cost.'

In Constraint, a food poisoning outbreak triggers massive loss of confidence in internationally traded food and meat, as the global rallying cry becomes "Know your farmer. Eat local. Eat plants."

Collapse is a future in which previously ignored stresses on pollinator bee populations cross a critical threshold to cause widespread crop failure and scarcity.

In Transformation, people embrace lab-grown meats and domestic 3D-food printers which are networked to share recipes. Much as social media and blogging have upended the mediasphere, in this future, food supply chains and restaurants are suddenly reinvented.

The narratives are recounted in just enough detail to help readers see how they could really happen, and further thought is invited by accompanying vignettes of a typical dinner in each world. The plausibility of the Four Futures is further underlined by examples, from the history of food, of each of the four classes of change.

This set of alternative stories about the future describes a wide range of outcomes, yet each clearly grows out of specific seeds of change that can readily be found in the present, if we know how to look.

Overall it is a really interesting, accessible, and usefully provocative piece of work from IFTF, shedding light on a critical subject; the viability and vulnerability of food systems. This appears to be a topic of great public interest and concern, as attested by the works of Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, as well as by recent popular documentaries including Food Inc, King Corn, and The Future of Food.

The Long Now has also made a contribution to long-term public thought and discussion around these issues, notably through Jim Richardson’s recent SALT talk 'Heirlooms: Saving Humanity’s 10,000-year Legacy of Food' and Pollan himself on 'Deep Agriculture'.

But I want to take a moment to comment on the story behind the stories that IFTF puts forward in its food futures briefing.

As the report indicates, the framework used for generating these four ‘generic’ or ‘archetypal’ scenarios originated with Jim Dator, a Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. It was brought to IFTF in 02008 by their Technology Horizons director Jake Dunagan, an alumnus of the graduate program in Futures Studies which Dator has run in Hawaii for the past four decades. (I know this from having studied alongside Dunagan and Dator in that same program.)

Through working extensively with student and community groups in the then-embryonic field of futures since the ’60s, Dator’s key insight, which he published in the late 1970s, was that the countless disparate notions about the future could be grouped into these four categories. This made possible a different kind of conversation. From the chaos of incommensurate notions about possibilities emerges a way of characterising both the landscape of future narratives and individual elements in it.

Similarly, devotees of the analysis of storytelling have long realised that although the specific narratives presented in various media are innumerable (plays, books, movies, TV, comics, etc), underpinning that huge set is a very small number of basic plots.

The four futures can be used not only descriptively, but also generatively, Dator realised. Starting from the generic descriptor, such as Transformation, you can creatively 'deduce' specifics of a hypothetical future that tells a Transformation story. That’s not all you need, of course; to craft a premise for the story and details that are suitably thought-provoking, and then to express these compellingly, all are elements of a scenario-producing artform. But what the four futures offer is a valuable starting point for testing our thinking across the widest conceivable array of potential outcomes.

Dator was among the first to develop curriculum around futures studies. Until the early ’70s, there was no such thing as a university program that taught thinking systematically about the ways the world could change. Since that time, a small yet lively and internationally distributed community of futures scholars and practitioners has emerged — although in many ways it has been disconnected from mainstream public discussion of 'the future'.

There’s a profound irony here: a critical starting point for futures thinking is rejection of the artificially siloed way in which university disciplines produce and share knowledge, and yet until recently, the silo of academia itself prevented insights from the field from making their way into the wider culture.

The net result is that even after almost half a century of futures studies, mainstream thinking about the future remains tragically shallow. Perhaps its principal shortcoming is an obsession with prediction (THE singular future), which the field of futures studies has recognised from the outset as a fatal limitation.

Which brings us back to the excellent contribution of the Four Futures report. As the introduction notes, "When imagining the future, we often assume things will keep moving in the direction they have been in the recent past." It goes on to use Dator’s four generic futures to create four radically divergent stories about the future of food, as a basis for encouraging the reader’s further exploration.

Many ways other than this are of course available for generating scenarios (such as the well-known 2×2 matrix developed by Jay Ogilvy and his colleagues at GBN), and many methods other than scenarios for thinking both rigorously and imaginatively about possible futures. The point is that wherever such methods are used engagingly, competently and transparently for a public audience, there is some possibility of collective learning.

The usefulness of mainstreaming methods such as Dator’s archetypal futures is that it moves towards a futurist equivalent of teaching people to fish, rather than feeding them fish already caught -- scenarios mysteriously cooked up somehow behind the scenes.

Thus, both this IFTF report, and its coverage in mainstream journalism (by the always excellent Ariel Schwartz over at Fast Company, for example) can be seen as small but significant signals, not only for the future of food, but for the future of futures. They are small steps in a gradual cultural process of open-sourcing deeper, longer, and wiser thought processes -- or so we may hope.

Originally posted at The Long Now Foundation blog, 27 March 02012.

Related posts:
> Humans have 23 years to go
> The Futurist banquet

Evidence

"Evidencing": a 02003 slideshow by service design consultants live|work features a fragment of press coverage about a hypothetical "Timebank" service offered by their client, Orange, in 02014

Some months ago, an old post at Victor Lombardi's blog Noise Between Stations (previously mentioned here) led me to a piece at Worldchanging about "Future-making", in which Alex Steffen started on a kind of catalogue of "available tools for making better futures". One of his headings was "Design and prototyping" and it contained a link to an earlier note, back in May 02005, about "Evidencing".

This is a practice, pioneered by British "service design" firm live|work, whereby the various components of a proposed service design may be rendered in tangible form (unlike in product design, such prototyping is neither obvious nor typical as a stage in creating services). The Worldchanging article pointed to a live|work case study conducted for multinational communications company Orange:

The live|work team developed a range of artefacts -- the touch-points of services, such as magazine articles, packaging, web sites, newspaper advertisements, letters and television news items -- that animated the assumptions and differences in strategic outlook uncovered from within the business.

These artefacts acted as 'tangible evidence' of future service touch-points, and were used as discussion points and provocations for the Innovations team.

Product manufacturers use form models and prototypes to represent concepts and aid the decision-making process. Service companies often lack equivalent tools and processes, as there is no single product to focus on. Although services themselves are intangible they are accessed and experienced through a number of touch-points. By creating 'concept touchpoints' that act as evidence we are able to bring the service experience into the decision making process.

(Although the original link is no longer live, the above quote was accessible through the magic of Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.)

That case study document directed any jargon-puzzled readers to a brief "Service Design Glossary" illuminating the company's terms of art (service design, evidencing, touchpoints, etc): the original is archived here, while a more comprehensive version is now live at servicedesign.org.

Now, I mention all this, firstly, because the vocabulary used here, albeit with intentions clearly oriented towards the business-consulting (vs artistic-political) end of the design spectrum, is otherwise functionally compatible in every detail, philosophical and processual, with the approach to creating experiential futures that we developed independently. (That is, without ever having heard of each other, they and we arrived at quite similar processes for evoking bits and pieces of future experiences. ) The creation of The Bird Cage intervention, for instance, part of FoundFutures:Chinatown, involved our "evidencing" a moment of future-history; a flu crisis set in 02016-17, from outbreak to aftermath. From the scenario we had created came artifact concepts, then tangible objects produced and distributed in the streets. All this was done with a view to evoking the hypothetical event through the kinds of fragments, traces or "touchpoints" that it could leave in its wake (including "missing persons" posters, official quarantine notices, fly-by-night business brochures, and a memorial plaque cast in bronze).

Their current glossary's definition of "evidence" says, in part:

Evidence can represent the effects of possible designs as much as the design of the service itself. Therefore evidence are [sic] not only core service touch-points, but often third parties’ response to an service such as newspaper articles describing the results of the service.

Evidencing, or the making of evidence from the future, can be used as a rapid way to prototype future service experiences. You can use the evidence as a stimulus with users or in Roleplay to test the ideas. This type of "archaeology of the future" enables service providers to make early qualitative judgments about the implications of a design. Ultimately it allows customers and collaborators to "play back" their own assumptions as concrete experiences rather then abstract evaluations.

The notion of playing back assumptions in concrete form, in order to engage participants more deeply than abstract, or superficial, ideology-based conceptions of the future would allow was precisely the idea behind the "Hawaii 2050" experiential scenarios (although we had the added goal of doing so for several deliberately divergent scenarios at once, emphasising alternative possibilities). Also, the above term "archaeology of the future" is extremely similar to "reverse archaeology", a concept we've been using to describe the process of generating such evidence -- "whereas the archaeologist must deduce the 'world' from the 'fragment', we as multimedia futurists deduce the 'fragment' (or fragments) from the 'world' expressed in the scenario".

However, the proximate reason for noting these connections here, lo these many months later, is that in the past week I've become aware of San Francisco-based service designer Jeff Howard's blog, Design for Service, where he recently used the term "evidencing" to describe the wonderful New York Times Special Edition, alongside another, much less wonderful, anonymously mocked-up image of a "future" USA Today front page. The latter was fore-dated 1 February 02009, and circulated via email prior to the 31 January election of the Republican National Committee chair. I have no idea how big a part it played, but the candidate implicitly criticised in the fake news story didn't win.

Parody USA Today front page
Image via The Plum Line blog, 26 January 02009

(Some interesting recent comparators for the above bit of politically-pointed nearcasting can be found here and here.)

A nice earlier post from Howard's blog tries to excavate the origins of the term "touchpoints", and two others address service evidencing; the latter linking to what he called "the only really clear, public example I’ve found" -- which was by none other than Lavrans Løvlie and colleagues at live|work; a presentation in 02003 at Doors of Perception East of the project they did for Orange! (The source of the image at the top of this post.)

And finally, to close the loop, I've just this evening found a post called "How design evolves", blogged by Doors organiser John Thackara (on the same day as Steffen's post at Worldchanging), which noted that Interaction Design Institute Ivrea alumnus Jason Tester was then introducing "artifacts from the future" into the mix at Institute for the Future. (As an aside, I want to acknowledge a very helpful conversation with Jason around the time that Jake Dunagan and I were working out our ideas for "Hawaii 2050", back in summer 02006.) Anyway, Thackara goes on:

At Ivrea, the design of enticing representations of imagined futures was regarded as a core process, and a technique was introduced there by the English service designers Live|Work. Live|Work called their technique evidencing. One of the roots of evidencing, in turn, was the development by Tony Dunne [bingo] and Bill Gaver of "cultural probes" at the Royal College of Art during the late 1990s (where the Live|Work guys studied interaction design). [Aha!] I don't suggest that a linear history is playing out here - but every now and again in the chaotic blizzard of life one briefly glimpses tracks in the snow.

Footprints. Evidence of the journey so far.

Related posts:
> Manifesting vision
> Tangible futures
> Guerrilla futurists combat war on terror

Tangible futures

Victor Lombardi is a design strategist, consultant and lecturer, trained in journalism and music technology, and based in New York City. For a couple of years already, in his consulting practice and at his blog Noise Between Stations, he has been tracking the development of what he calls "tangible futures" -- a cousin concept to future artifacts, experiential futures, ambient foresight, and other ideas at the intersection of design and futures thinking that regularly feature here.

Borrowing an idea from my friend's old column at Salon.com, Mr Rheingold's Neighborhood, I decided to ask Victor four questions via email, which he graciously agreed to answer, after introducing himself...

Victor Lombardi: Stuart, thanks for inquiring about my work. I want to make progress in the world by making technology easier for people, and I try and accomplish that through design, business consulting, and teaching. Lately my focus has been creating educational materials for designers.

SC: How do you define "tangible futures", and what's your history of that idea?

VL: If I remember correctly, the term was coined by Christina Wodtke, a friend of mine. We were partners in a business design consultancy and were exploring ways of helping our clients manage more effectively through awareness of their strategy.

It was around then, in 2004, we saw other firms in our space delivering their recommendations as the proverbial binders of reports, and we didn't think this way of engaging managers significantly changed performance. We saw a lot of fascinating work in the field of futures studies that wasn't on the management radar at all. And we were aware of the work of people like Jeanne Liedtka, from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, who pointed out that strategy is too cognitive; it rarely exists outside of our minds. A purely cognitive expression of strategy makes communication and understanding difficult across an organization.

So we started to consider this problem through the lens of our design experience, asking, "How can we help managers *experience* futures and strategy so that it can more substantially be understood, shared, and acted on?" The working definition became: Tangible Futures are the output of applying design-fueled disciplines like visualization, drama, and film to represent futures and strategies.

Around this time we saw others like The Institute for the Future coming to similar conclusions and developing what they called Artifacts from the Future. This was validating for us.

SC: What are your favourite instances of tangible futures in practice?

VL: Here's two historical examples I love. Imagine it's the mid-19th Century and there are no skyscrapers, much less the giant city skylines we have today like in Manhattan where I am writing this. There are a plethora of issues in helping people understand what a future could be like when we live and work high above the ground. Elisha Graves Otis was responsible for communicating a key part of this vision, that riding in elevators could be safe. He accomplished this through performance...

...during P.T. Barnum's Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York, marked the first time Otis demonstrated his "safety elevator." The invention enabled elevators to travel safely up and down by employing a special spring device that locked in place automatically if the hoisting ropes (later cables) broke. Today's elevators, while far more sophisticated and safer, continue to rely on the same principle.

During the Crystal Palace demonstration, Otis rode a lifting platform up an open shaft. When he reached the top the hoisting rope was cut. The crowd gasped, expecting the elevator to come crashing down, but the safety device held fast. "All safe, gentleman, all safe," he announced.

from http://www.otis.fi/news/newsdetail/0,1368,CLI1_NID16925_RES1,00.html

Another facet of this challenge was helping architects, city officials, business owners, and citizens visualize what those buildings would look like, taking into account building designs, materials, and zoning laws. Hugh Ferriss illustrated these structures through dramatic perspectives and stunning lighting effects to communicate both the architectural details as well as the emotional effects such changes would bring.

See http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/avery/da/ferriss.html

SC: What role does this kind of practice play in a typical organisation, and how can it perform in an ideal situation?

VL: Organizations who do this now are the ones you already know about. The city planners in places like Dubai who need to plan decades into the future and do so by building physical models and simulations. And it's the companies that have already mastered the tangible aspect of this practice, design-dependent companies like BMW. For example, they recently created a concept car covered in stretchable fabric that allows the car to change shapes...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTYiEkQYhWY

As opposed to a product development concept that directly influences what is made in the near-term, this sort of vision concept connects the long-term strategy with the attitudes and practices of the organization. As officials from BMW said, "It is in the nature of such visions that they do not necessarily claim to be suitable for series production. Rather, they are intended to steer creativity and research into new directions."

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/06/bmw-builds-a-ca.html

As rapid prototyping tools become more accessible -- from software frameworks to 3D printing to video editing tools -- more people will naturally adopt them to tangibly express futures and strategies. But, as is so common in media today, individuals may widely adopt the practice before organizations do.

SC: Why do you think this concept has emerged now, and where do you see it going?

VL: Rather than re-invent the wheel, I'll refer you to Alex Soojung-Kim Pang at the Institute for the Future who blogged about five ways that their Artifacts from the Future are valuable:

1. artifacts reach some people who don't feel they have time to closely read long reports
2. their tangible, specific nature forces us to think hard about what we really believe
3. thinking about artifacts makes you think hard about the interrelationships of technological, social, economic, and cultural factors
4. the shift to artifacts reflects our own sense that design is going to be a critical strategic skill in the future
5. many of our clients actually make things. They already communicate with each other in a language of prototypes

http://future.iftf.org/2006/06/artifacts_from_.html

Many thanks, Victor, for sharing your thoughts with us.

Related posts:
> Object-oriented futuring
> Cheap prototypes, valuable insights
> Design fiction is a fact
> Where futures meets experience design

Superstökt

Image: Screenshot from Superstruct

Hot on the heels of a recent post describing the IFTF's new alternate reality game, I'm very happy to announce that I'll be joining the Superstruct team as a gamemaster.

I'd certainly encourage readers of this blog, whose interests obviously stretch to strange immersive experiences of possible futures, to play -- email superstruct@iftf.org now to receive an alert about the September launch.

See you in 02019...

Update (13/08/08): And -- stop the press -- exciting news from HRCFS colleague Jake Dunagan, who will be joining the IFTF gang full-time, also starting in September.

Hawaii won't be the same without you, pardner.

Humans have 23 years to go

Do not be alarmed. Continue swimming naked.

Image: NASA† (via astroThink)

Last month, the newly-quadragenerian nonprofit thinktank Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, announced an exciting upcoming project. Superstruct, billed as "the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game", is an ARG run by avant-gamer Jane McGonigal and future-opener Jamais Cascio, set to unfold over six weeks, starting in September. Here's an extract from the press release (drafted as an in-world artifact -- nice):

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

Humans have 23 years to go

Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens.

PALO ALTO, CA — Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the "survival horizon" for Homo sapiens - the human race - from "indefinite" to 23 years.

"The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse," GEAS president Audrey Chen said. "It is the point from which a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices."

According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models. The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called "super-threats", which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks.
...
The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Vaira Vike-Freiberga released the following statement: "We are grateful for GEAS' work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity."

GEAS urges concerned citizens, families, corporations, institutions, and governments to talk to each other and begin making plans to deal with the super-threats.

Like last year's World Without Oil (McGonigal again, working with writerguy Ken Eklund), Superstruct is a serious game predicated on *real play rather than role play; people remain themselves in the scenario and bring their own resources to the table, making it a psychologically and socially meaningful simulation rather than an escapist diversion. So Superstruct is designed to be not only a source of future-oriented entertainment, but also, and more profoundly, an innovative distributed research strategy for IFTF's 02009 Ten-Year Forecast.

You can find a bit more about the game at the curiosity-piquingly brief FAQ, or this ARGNet article.

While awaiting its official beginning, prospective players and applicants for the gamemaster positions have been submitting short dinner-time vignettes to lead into the game. The scenario outline states: It's the summer of 2019. You are yourself, but 10 years in the future. Describe where you are having for dinner, what you're eating, and what you're thinking or talking about. How did you wind up there, compared to where you had dinner most often in the summer of 2008?

Here's mine:

To my left, the Taedong drifts by slowly. But I'm in a hurry -- for two reasons. First, it's raining like a sonofabitch, and second, I have places to be. So tonight, I'm having dinner at a McDonald's. For the first time in over twenty years.

Back in 01995, at age 15, I launched a personal boycott after seeing the golden arches on the Champs Elysees. It blew me away that the French, in all their gastronomic genius, could be wooed by such inglorious industrial tidbits. But, to be fair now, over the last decade, the company has reinvented itself. Completely. They faced a choice between a catastrophic erosion of customer base, as environmental and personal health came to the fore; or staying big by going local. In the summer of 2008, in New Haven CT, where I was staying with my very health-conscious girlfriend, every night we ate organic food we couldn't really afford, and avoided all foodstuffs deemed too "fast", for reasons that were sound at the time. However: that was the last summer of the old Mickey D's.

Early in 02009 -- just over ten years ago -- way ahead of legislation, and with rising transportation costs hot on their heels -- they were the first major fast-food concern to initiate a strategic five-year shift to a 200-mile limit for key suppliers. Where they led, others followed, pushing the development of hundreds, and eventually thousands, of micro-providers and farms within the radius of each branch. As inventory practices, and consumers, got more sophisticated, the actual carbon cost per item came indexed and included on the menu; as a result they now boast a cheeseburger footprint 20% lower than any other global provider. All-important signature condiments are still usually imported from further away, but the staple supplies come from close by. Of course, as a result, menus vary hugely from place to place; that's the model now. A few recognisable items remain -- the "Kun Mac" tasted more or less as before, though there's a popular animal-free beef option -- but the rice I'm eating tonight, declares the biodegradable package proudly, is from a farm just to the south, in the former DMZ; and my kim chee is made in a facility just a mile or so down the river.

All this is on my mind because of the project I came here to do. This is my first trip to Pyongyang, and with "Dear Leader" departed nine months ago at the ripe old age of 77, the transition to a more open era has been energetic. Many of the high-tech firms established in the south are in the midst of opening northern operations, and the whole peninsula is hungry for foresight expertise. I'm here with a delegation of futurists, many of them based in the lower half of the newly reunited country --- some I've known since we worked in Hawaii together over a decade ago. And now, in about an hour and a half, at the convention centre next door, we're staging an event that translates to English as "Food Court 02049". Executives from some of the biggest enterprises like Samsung and LG, and Daewoo Electric Vehicle Co. are interested in so-called smart- and nu-food technology (the intersection of agriculture, psychopharmacology and info science is a big deal at the moment -- they're touting "consumable software"). As a provocation to their "C-level" and "D-level" -- D for design -- teams, we're offering a series of meal options; some real, others simulated with help from master chefs and artists). There's a fish speakeasy (simulating endangered species that can't be consumed legally), a neo-aztec taco stand (culinary archeology is set to take off -- try the cuisines of an extinct civilisation!), an ayurvedically diagnostic, instant personal currymaker (which whips up a curiously neuroactive Saag Paneer), and just for fun, several bio-electrical charging posts for the possible post-singularity denizens of our imaginary 02049. We won't be serving Kun Macs at tonight's event -- that'll just be my no-longer-guilty indulgence at this newly opened branch. Sure, it would've been a stretch to imagine myself stooping to McDonald's ten years ago: but I figure, if McDonald's can change, then so can I.

My wife is no less health-conscious these days, but I've persuaded her to join me. Everyone says this is the best kim chee in town.

Related posts:
> Gaming alternative futures (anything but text)
> Gaming the end of oil (*See the comments to this post)
> World without oil photo essay

† Link not functioning at time of writing. If you're desperate to get to the original, try Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Tomorrow's headlines

Speaking of future news, the Palo Alto-based futures consultancy Institute for the Future has a new project which playfully mounts hypothetical future newspaper headlines in a physical newsstand. Anyone can make a submission at the website The Daily Future, including a headline, subhead, lede, date, and image.

Early results were on display at the Bay Area Maker Faire at the start of May.

Image: Anthony Townsend, aGreatNotion's Flickr photostream

IFTF's Jason Tester, part of the team responsible for The Daily Future, has been among the key innovators in scenario communication strategy working at the intersection of futures and design for some years already (see, for instance, this Business Week article, and this post on "human-future interaction" from the IFTF blog).

Plans are afoot to add further functionality to the Daily Future website, including new headline formats and user voting. Meanwhile, those who can't make it to the Bay Area to see the newspaper box in person might content themselves with a visit instead to the Newspaper Clipping Generator (via Open the Future), which cranks out reasonably authentic-looking, if generic, images of future-news "artifacts" to order -- type in your newspaper title, headline, date, and story.


(Thanks Rosa!)