Design is a team sport

I was interviewed recently for Architecture Australia by editor Timothy Moore about the importance of collaboration in foresight and design for the built environment. The conversation grew out of an AA Roundtable we did on related themes in Canberra back in May.

Photo by Lisa McKelvie courtesy of Architecture Australia
From left: Hal Guida, Catherine Townsend, me wearing a slightly pugnacious expression for some reason, Ben Hewitt, Timothy Moore

Both exchanges highlighted for me the great extent to which my work as a futurist within Arup, a global design and engineering firm, consists in providing opportunities for people to share and negotiate disparate perspectives of futures possible, probable and preferable -- as opposed to simply cranking out supposedly futurogenic collateral. I keep thinking of my friend and fellow futurist Jamais Cascio's line, "With enough minds, all tomorrows are visible", a riff on the Open Source dictum known as Linus's Law. The kind of practice that these times call for, especially in the massively multiplayer game of the 21st century city, is built upon a fundamentally Open Source sensibility, a collaborative structure and intent: the meshing of many minds. That means not only that foresight itself should be treated as a team sport (the apt phrase of my former CCA teaching collaborator Jay Ogilvy), but also that for all sorts of design activity, be they explicitly foresight-themed or not, we need to enable significantly more participatory and bottom-up approaches than have traditionally been the norm.

An edited version of the interview appears in the current edition of AA (vol. 101, no. 5, Sept/Oct 2012, pp. 70-76), alongside related discussions with two other "strategic designers". I haven't ever used that label on myself, but it's a handy lasso bundling us together here. The others are Ben Hewitt, South Australia's Government Architect, and Rachel Smith, a transport planner at AECOM in Brisbane, who has also been a curator at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in Berlin. (The piece also runs opposite a great article on "multi-scalar thinking" in architecture by my colleague Michelle Tabet.)

Thanks to Timothy Moore for making both the original panel and follow-up interview happen. Below is the text as published, with some links I've taken the liberty of adding.

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The future is coming - but there are several of them. As a leader in foresight at Arup Australasia, Stuart Candy's task is to enable people to make considered choices about these potential futures, in the face of the complexity of the environment around them and its rapidly changing context. While he cannot predict what will happen, Candy works out various scenarios for the future by bringing people - and all their anxieties and aspirations - together.

Timothy Moore As a part of Arup's Foresight and Innovation team, you identify and monitor the trends and issues likely to have a significant impact upon the built environment and society at large. You literally look into the future. How do you do this?

Stuart Candy The heart of this work is about serving as a catalyst to enable, encourage and exemplify different ways of looking at things. It is about inviting and at times seducing people into a certain way of thinking, rather than mandating it. As the pioneering corporate futurist Pierre Wack put it, foresight is "the gentle art of reperceiving" - looking at the present in terms of the alternative potentials that it contains, to inform wiser action today.

We set a process in motion whereby people can discover for themselves the choices they face, and the future implications of various paths that might be taken. It's a different philosophy from that of the guru who distributes pearls of wisdom. It's intrinsically collaborative.

An example of this approach in action is the Drivers of Change cards, which the Foresight and Innovation team created. Each set of twenty-five cards looks at a theme - ranging from climate change, to poverty, to oceans - and each card encapsulates a trend or issue that will have an impact on the built environment as change unfolds. The cards cover a huge range of social, technological, environmental, economic and political issues, and we use the cards both internally for our own research and externally to help our clients and partners. (The cards are also publicly available.)

TM How do you go about getting people to see possible futures in terms of making people realize that everyone plays a part in making architecture; that everyone is, in fact, building?

SC There's a 1958 essay, "I, Pencil," written from the pencil's point of view. The pencil says, "not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me." Now, a pencil seems a basic enough artefact, but this pencil has a point: there's far more to it than meets the eye, so no individual knows every detail. It's a complex synthesis of different skill sets and knowledge bases. If that's true of a pencil, its obviously the case for the scale and complexity of things produced by architects and engineers. Nobody can know everything about any project, so what matters is the process of bringing the elements and expertise together to make it possible anyway. We're co-creating these highly complex design outcomes.

And this is also true of the future overall. What we get is the product of everyone's actions, which is just one of many imaginable pathways.

TM By going into the future, there is more uncertainty because of the increasing number of unknown variables. The Long Now Foundation, of which you are a research fellow, looks ten thousand years into the future in order to encourage tong-term thinking.

SC The "long now" is an invitation to see the whole of human history, past and future, through a wide-angle lens. That time horizon comes from the approximate birthdate of agriculture, about ten thousand years ago. It's a seriously big-picture challenge, a time span three or four orders of magnitude longer than most of us are used to thinking, and a terrific provocation to the culture at large. But in most organizations, the relevant version of this challenge is to stretch our collective time horizon out even a decade or two. Certainly, multi-decadal time spans are directly relevant for the buildings, infrastructure and urban environments that we at Arup help to shape, but they are well beyond the typical attention span of most businesses, politics, media and even education.

One thing that a "long now" view makes clear is that different layers of change occur at different rates. For instance, you can't really see or say anything meaningful about climate change on the timescale of a few months or years, so you have to tune your attention in to different timespans, like different radio frequencies, in order to pick up the signals.

TM Do people mistake you as a prophet, because you are far-forward thinking?

SC I think there's a pretty deep atavistic impulse towards prophecy in our culture, which we're very slowly coming to outgrow. The fact that nobody can predict the future should be a clue to the fact that the future is not predictable. Still, some people want bold predictions to act on (or argue with), and hope against hope that you'll provide them. And some so-called futurists are happy to oblige. For now, it seems being a guru is easier to sell than being a thought partner or catalyst. The former is philosophically and politically dubious. The latter is a harder sell, but it has the advantage of being true.

The greater service is to help people towards their own deeper and more thoughtful understanding of change. We provide opportunities for them to become comfortable explicitly acknowledging the degree of ambiguity and uncertainty that's really in the system. And this is surprisingly empowering. Seen this way, the future is a landscape of potentials, and the result of thinking about futures in plural terms is that you can prepare for multiple outcomes and (within your domain of influence) act towards those possibilities you'd like to see happen. This is common sense, but we need to be reminded of it regularly.

TM How is this philosophy demonstrated in your work at Arup?

SC The first external project that I did with Arup in Australia (after moving from the US in late 2011) was for the CEO and executive team of the Sydney Opera House (the original design and build of which was the project that put Arup on the international map). This engagement was about considering some upcoming renovations in a broader context of change. They have three years worth of performances booked already. So when a facility like this wants to change any physical aspect; for example, if they want to do a renovation or a new build, they must factor in significant lead times, and it can take up to five years from planning to project completion. That's half a decade of rapid change, and for a cultural organization in the midst of a technological revolution in how people access and consume cultural artefacts - consider that the iPad didn't exist three years ago - this has big implications for how any renovation process might proceed.

Generally, we shouldn't simply plan for today's problems (and opportunities), because by the time we've solved those, there will be different ones. You can be sure that the people, businesses and places you're designing for will keep changing. Especially when you talk about a design with a life expectancy of decades or longer, down the track that design may be part of a world that's radically different from today. In this light, it suddenly becomes obvious that thinking systematically and creatively on these longer timeframes is not just a nice thing to do, it's crucial to doing good work.

Lost futures

A very well-written article published at Salon on 12 May, entitled "Back to the Future", reviews a new book called Where's My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived, by Daniel H. Wilson, the robotics specialist who gave the world How To Survive a Robot Uprising. Writes reviewer Simon Reynolds: "I get the feeling a more serious book is struggling to extricate itself from Wilson's arch and camp approach [... but the] research is top-notch and fascinating. Some of the best material here entails a sort of archaeology of stillborn or prematurely abandoned futures."

Reynolds uses Wilson's book as the springboard for an interesting discussion of the fluctuating fortunes of future-oriented discourse, and the article is well worth reading for that. (I haven't got a copy of the book yet, but the review stands alone as an interesting point of departure for discussion here.) Reynolds notes that, from an earlier era of star futurists such as Alvin Toffler and Buckminster Fuller, there's no one quite occupying that space for now. "Futurology as a popular nonfiction genre has been largely reduced to short-term trend watching, cool hunting in the service of marketing people and brand makers." Sad, but largely true, as a popular nonfiction genre. Meanwhile, as he points out, "It carries on as an academic discipline, as research and speculation conducted by think tanks and government-funded bodies." That's also fair to say, and I suppose the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies is one of those mysterious bodies (except that we're not government funded). Aside from their waxing and waning popularity, it seems to have fallen outside the scope of that article to engage with the content or approaches used by any of these groups. And so what follows does not claim to speak for the futures field as a whole, although some of my colleagues may agree with parts of what I have to say, but what I want to do here is illustrate how the book Reynolds describes can fit into an alternative futures framework, and why that framework can offer a useful corrective to the usual single-future reflex.

Let's first of all locate it in terms of its subject matter. Futures studies invites and affords engagement with a multitude of complex avenues of inquiry, but let's talk first about how it relates to time and the unfolding of possibilities. Starting with a mental model of spacetime that calls up a sort of "branching universe" notion, in principle every sentient being is in a position to elaborate, at some level, alternative possible futures from any given "here and now". These can be possible futures (the broadest set) or probable or preferable (narrower subgroups); and substantively this includes a vast array of varying images. Every individual has his or her own complicated, and frequently contradictory, profile of beliefs, expectations, hopes, fears, and so on. Each of these also implies a range of potential viewpoints from which "our present", as well as things that have gone before, take on different significance, because as today recedes into the past, it will be cast in very different light depending on the kind of future from which it is surveyed. In contrast to contemporary futures, there are also historical instances -- yesterday's futures -- and it seems Where's My Jetpack is in this category. In principle we can subdivide past futures into possibilities actually perceived and discussed at the time, and, by contrast, those realised or identified only in retrospect. Both types could be pursued further, to generate alternate or counterfactual chronologies; paths not taken which, nonetheless, given different circumstances or choices, could have been.

At a first glance, all this may seem to some readers like an elaborate, and not especially practical, form of intellectual entertainment. On the contrary, though, I would argue that our society desperately needs a more nuanced understanding of time and possibility, and this is the only field I know of that is directly addressing the need. The reduction of future-oriented discussion to a predictive binarism (will this happen, or won't it? or, in the hindsight mode; did this "prediction" come true, or did it not?) is a symptom of a civilisation unwilling to face up to its responsibilities in the unfolding historical process. (As I'll explain below, I don't mean to say that lost futures can play no part in our thinking about present-day options, but I suggest we treat them with caution.)

Now, the range of possible futures in circulation at any given time is broad, multifarious, and very difficult to map. Naturally we look to the images of the future actually expressed -- the stories we tell each other; the films we make and watch; paintings, magazine articles; and cartoons; and political pamphlets; and corporate projections; and government forecasts... But this is in a sense just the tip of the cultural iceberg, because after all, the decisions that comprise and produce change trace back to the contents of people's minds, of which only a part manifests visibly in the ways listed here. So the range of possible futures we allow ourselves to imagine, or which we could imagine, is bound to be broader than what's most prominently in view at any given time. Add to this complexity the fact that all these images are constantly changing. Certain ideas about the future which were widely seen as sure bets in times gone by later strike us as absurd; and vice versa (hence the value of Dator's second law, that any useful statement about the futures should appear to be ridiculous). "The future" doesn't exist, but our ideas about it (or lack thereof) have a palpable effect on what we do, or not, in anticipation of times to come. In parallel to the chronology of observed events is the chronology of ideas, the lives of our minds, in which the notion of the future plays no small part.

In one of his letters, Mark Twain famously dismissed nostalgia -- yearning for the past -- as "mental and moral masturbation". Generally speaking, I'd have to agree: yearning for times gone by is a singularly useless way to spend one's time. By definition, the past is gone, and it's not coming back. But it remains essential to try to learn what we can from history, and that includes identifying things that we'd like to carry forward, or recreate. The futurist (at least!) needs to wonder about the history of possibility, how or to what extent horizons of imagination, as well as actual states of affairs, can be recovered or recreated. So it's potentially quite politically profound to consider what conditions made the jetpack idea seem viable and appealing in its heyday, but more especially, to apply this kind of learning to the question of what it is about the present era that leads so many of us to think about the future in such radically disempowered, morose terms. As Reynolds says, "Today we seem to have trouble picturing the future, except in cataclysmic terms or as the present gone worse." It should go without saying that this dearth of imagination is not the future's fault. It's our problem, our limitation.

Those bygone images were products of their time, emblems of the thought world that produced them. Reynolds coins "neostalgia" to refer to this longing for "the impressively futuristic-looking tomorrow that never showed up". But we make ourselves "wrong" about the future, and get mired in neostalgia, by constantly, and for the most part fruitlessly, focusing on correct prediction of content -- as opposed to, say, a more nuanced, inverse view of the future as process. It can instead be seen as a mostly unpredictable, undecided space whose relatively "predictable" parts provide constraints within which we invent, pursue, and reinvent our ideals. Neostalgia is an alternate history (or present-counterfactual) variant of nostalgia -- with identical implications in terms of mental and moral masturbation! Unless we're planning to use these ruminations to fuel our understanding of change, and to pursue a preferred future that seems appropriate starting from here and now, it doesn't help. Dator has suggested we cultivate "aiglatson" (nostalgia backwards) -- a yearning for our preferred future, which we can use to help guide our actions today.

Now, let's take a look at the domain of past futures. It's interesting that they commonly appear to be so heavily imbued with a kitsch aura (Reynolds calls Wilson's approach "arch and camp", which goes with the territory of certain strains of science-fiction, as well as its ostensible non-fiction counterpart, "futurology"). I confess a kind of aversion to kitsch as an aesthetic. It strikes me as lightweight, but somehow self-indulgent. There's a stale, embarrassing air about a lot of past projections of the future -- like childhood photos of us dressed in silly costumes -- a sense that we've outgrown them and would rather not have to face up to them being on the record. And as a futurist, there's a possibility that, if the pattern holds, the work I'm currently doing is destined to look increasingly stupid as time goes on (a humbling and perhaps salutary thought).

But let me suggest two reasons for this, which I'd really like to open to discussion. The first is that earlier decades were more optimistic than our own, and to realise this now amounts to a reminder of lost innocence; not a pleasant sensation. As Jay Ogilvy writes of contemporary attitudes in Creating Better Futures: "World-weary pessimism seems so much more intellectually respectable than even the most educated hope." Tied up with this is a sense of deadly earnestness about the predictions made in the past. They seem silly now because so many of us (whether as credulous children, or credulous adults) believed them; hence the disillusionment, the disappointment of dreams that did not materialise (Q: Where's my jetpack? ... A: In your mind, where it always was).

So here's how I propose to tie these strands together -- meeting the hazards of getting hung up on neostalgia with the investigative toolkit of alternative futures. Hopeful, idealistic, preferred futures are among our choices. So are hellish ones. (Which notions fall into which categories is not given outright, of course, but will depend on your values and so on.) Yet, regardless of what each of these means for you, we all need to pluralise futures to escape the -- rightly embarassing -- earnestness of much past discussion of "the future", which is closely related to monofuturism and binary predictive thinking. Pluralising futures is not simply a hedging strategy -- considering alternatives as a way of spreading our bets. (Although at one level, it is that.) More importantly it's a strategy of inquiry that's faithful to the fact of uncertainty as we experience it, being creatures in time, and it means that many -- nay, most -- of the alternative futures we consider won't come into being. Perhaps none of them will. The future doesn't owe us anything. It's just a lens that we in the present use to consider our predicament differently.

In light of what I'm suggesting, the continual rediscovery of the extent of our own naivete is unlikely to be surprising, embarassing, or frustrating. Just part of the process, and maybe even a mystery in which we'll find delight and wonder.

What we desperately need right now is to develop and use ways of thinking about the future that help us act more wisely, so that what eventuates is, if not the best of all possible worlds, at least not one of the worst. Reynolds: "[P]erhaps sociocultural and political prediction is simply a mug's game." Yup. But discussion of a range of possibilities that reflects our best understanding of the role of the unknown is a game we should all learn to play. Playing it might make our discussions of the future seem less silly, because it's framed all along as possibilities may look one way today, and another way tomorrow. But although many forecasts and predictions age poorly, this is not true of all futures oriented work. Dator's publication archive reads incredibly well, even 35 or more years later (most of his several decades of articles, as a pioneer of alternative futures thinking, are freely available as pdf documents at the HRCFS website). It's written with an awareness of the possibility of being wrong, and it advocates a methodological/epistemological shift that our culture is yet to make. That is, for the most part, it's not about the content of the future, but our role in the process by which it comes into being. Which is a major part of the shift in emphasis advocated by ourselves and others in the futures field.

So, where does all this leave us? Reynolds concludes with a sort of dig at Wilson's neostalgic project. "Forget the goddamn jetpack: It's the sociocultural version of the 'amazing future that never arrived' that really warrants our anguish." He exhorts us to move away from fetishised, technological "science-fiction" discussions of change. I support this gesture, and made a similar point in this recent post about the ubiquity and narrowness of sci-fi as a genre and frame for future-oriented discussion. But with all due respect to Reynolds (and Wilson, whose book I look forward to reading), I beg to differ on the point of what's most important here. Forget the goddamn jetpack: it's the sociocultural version of the amazing future that we're barely even trying to bring into existence right now that really warrants our anguish. And here's the best part -- unlike lost futures of the past, we can actually do something about it.

Prediction will eat itself

Since early May, I have been working with the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to encouraging long-term thinking and responsibility, as research fellow on the Long Bets project. Long Bets is based on an ingenious, simple idea. If people want to make predictions about matters of long-term social or scientific importance, let them put their money where their mouth is. Stakes placed on bets, involving two contrary views of the future running head to head, are held in a long term investment fund, and when the matter is settled, perhaps years, decades or more down the track, the money goes to the winner's chosen charity. Money is also put up in support of predictions (one person's statement about the future, no opposing view necessary), which goes towards maintaining the service. The point is that all this behooves participants to think carefully about how posterity will judge their prognostications, and their audience benefits from the availability of relatively well thought-out, succinct supporting arguments.

Four years after the project was launched, the key to what I've been trying to do at Long Now recently is to take what is clearly a long-standing human interest in prophecy -- call it a predilection for prediction -- and leverage it into a more complex and nuanced appreciation of multiple possibilities. (Hence my preferred title for the field I'm in: futures. The "s" is for plurality, multiplicity, unpredictability. This condition is what makes choice possible.) Why would I want to do a thing like that? Because I believe prediction, without more, to be an inherently limited, and often erroneous, if not dangerous, stance towards the future.

A London Financial Times article (subscription required) was sent around at Long Now by Board of Directors member Peter Schwartz last week, on a recent book called Expert Political Judgment. Author Philip Tetlock is a psychologist "who has spent 20 years asking pundits to predict who will win elections, what countries will acquire nuclear weapons or enter the European Union and how the first Gulf war would end. He has tested 30,000 predictions from 300 experts against outcomes. Mr Tetlock finds that his respondents are not very good. They do better than a chimp who answers at random, but not much, and worse than simple forecasting rules based on extrapolation" (John Kay, "The world needs more foxes and fewer hedgehogs", Financial Times, 20 June 02006; see also this excellent review of Tetlock's book by Louis Menand, "Everybody's an Expert", The New Yorker, 5 December 02005).

For those who expect the future to be predictable, assuming that in principle it can be known but that they simply don't quite have the expertise, tools or funding to get at it, this conclusion may come as a surprise. GBN's Jay Ogilvy has made the point well: "modern planners have often assumed that, with enough Enlightenment science in the budget, the future can be predicted and/or controlled. Scenario planning is based on a contrary assumption, that the future cannot be predicted..." (Creating Better Futures, 02002, p. 12). And it's not just "modern planners" who hold this mistaken view; in my experience it's far more widespread than that. Yet, for many of the things that are most important to us -- social, human-level things like our families, communities, workplaces, and countries -- the future is in principle and by definition unpredictable; partly because the predictions themselves feed into the change process.

Tetlock's findings, which indicate that even experts aren't much good at prediction -- that those who ostensibly know the future best, in fact know no more than the rest of us -- are, however, very much in accord with one of the main lessons taught by a long-time academic futurist, Professor Jim Dator at the Hawaii futures program, where I study. Dator's First Law of the Future is, "The future" cannot be "predicted" because "the future" does not exist.

Now, if you're convinced that the future is predictable, you're not going to change your mind here (...I, er, expect). Fine. But stay with me for a moment. Assuming for the sake of argument the basic contention here is sound, what would this mean for Long Bets, and predictive discourse generally? Based on many, many conversations I've had on this point, at this stage quite a few people start to wonder what the hell is going on with a self-proclaimed futurist who believes there's no future to study. As well they may. What we look at, since the future itself is perpetually unavailable for comment, is images of the future. These are the beliefs, hopes, fears, desires, intentions, fantasies, expectations and, yes, actual images of one sort or another, that people carry around in their heads, and express in their art, stories, and above all their decisions; thereby bringing "the future" into being from among the countless possible futures that might have been. Returning to the question above, what this means for predictive discourse is that predictions can make a useful, interesting point of access into futures-oriented discussion (constituting, as they do, a major example of images of the future, albeit a conspicuously overconfident variety). It also means that predictions should not be mistaken for statements of fact about things that have not happened yet. Simply put, what people predict is a useful guide to what they believe and how they plan to act, but one of the dangers of prediction is that, while you're arguing over what the future will be, you're missing the more important discussion about what it could be, and other people may be making the crucial decisions without you.

What this means for Long Bets, as I see it, is that there's an important challenge in diverting some proportion of the prodigious amount of energy that people seem to devote to figuring out what the future "will be", and redirecting it into the exploration, invention and pursuit of what they would like it to be. Dator again: "The point is not to try to predict a better future, but to strive to create one." Similarly, sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling once said in an interview, "Future is not a noun, it's a verb." Long Bets version 2.0 should, then, be a useful broad-based resource featuring all sorts of different images (predictive expectations) of the future, which at first exploits the apparently timeless allure of "the future will be thus and so", but which deepens the discussion unexpectedly and problematises the predictive stance. People may come expecting a noun, but will end up getting verbed.