Steve was writing with a question – a good one. Characteristically his message got right to the point.
Subject: Futurist question
Hey Stuart,
Who, besides futurists, think long term about the future? And specifically not in the frame of capitalism and how they can make money – but about how to shape the world for the better? Who does a good job?
A lively discussion followed, but two contributions stood out, and their posters gave permission to share them more widely. (By default, these conversations are private to encourage participants to speak among themselves more freely.)
One fantastic contribution was the diagram above, offered by the brilliant Austin, Texas-based consultant, designer, and futures veteran Lloyd Walker.
The other highlight came in response to someone wondering aloud about the relationship between the academic and professional variants of futures practice. Futures professor Jim Dator replied:
Futures practice without academic underpinning is smoke and mirrors.
Academic pretense of futures without practical experience is mirrors and smoke.
It is exactly ten years and one day since an event that turns out to have been something of a milestone in the foresight work documented at this blog.
"Hawaii 2050" was an initiative of the state legislature to engage the public in addressing the islands' sustainability, over a commendably farsighted time horizon, nearly two generations out. At the time the project began, in late 02005, more than three decades had passed since the last comparable process. A big-picture re-examination of Hawaiian prospects was overdue.
At that time I was a graduate student in University of Hawaii's "Manoa School" of futures studies, founded and run by Professor Jim Dator, who had taught the first futures course in the United States in 01967, at Virginia Tech, and then became closely involved in "Hawaii 2000" in 01970-71. He was also founding director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies (HRCFS), an agency the state had established at the end of that process, and which it then engaged more than thirty years later for a 02050-oriented effort.
To help bring the fullest possible consideration of alternative futures to the "2050" Kickoff on Saturday 26 August 02006, staged at the charmingly shabby ballrooms in the former Dole pineapple cannery, my HRCFS colleague Jake Dunagan and I put 550 or so people into four rooms.
We had designed and staged these rooms, with the priceless involvement of two improv theatre troupes, as well as a gaggle of wonderful colleagues and friends orbiting the Futures Center, to embody alternative possible Hawaiis set in the year 02050; a quartet of radically different social, economic, and governance outcomes.
In one (code-named "Orange"), the islands had found a way to continue a growth trajectory, dramatised via an election in which candidates were not individuals but corporations.
In the second ("Silver"), global economic meltdown had led to a tentative, militarised reassertion of the islands' independence from a presumably beleaguered U.S., the so-called "Democratic Kingdom of Hawaii".
In future number three ("Maroon"), a concerted effort had been made to realign political and environmental priorities, though the adoption of Hawaii's pre-colonial, watershed-based ahupua'a governance structure, combined with "bright green" environmentally friendly technology.
The fourth experience ("Blue") was of a future where not only society but the very definition of humanity had transformed, with the World Council seeking to bring the Pacific Islands' underprivileged premods––regular, unaugmented people––up to par.
Our intention was to give people a chance not just to contemplate these potential realities as intellectual hypotheticals, but to visit physically and invest emotionally in them. Thus this set of brief yet provocative immersions, instantiating highly contrasting assumptions and theories of change, as a fast-track to higher quality, more richly imaginative mental models and civic conversations.
The original notion for this experiential approach to the Kickoff, which I'd proposed in hopes of avoiding the uninspiring albeit reliable standby workshop formats, was to expose people to the scenarios via a series of tangible artifacts physically set out on parallel (or rather, diverging) timelines. Following that approach would have meant creating a sort of popup museum of alternative future histories, or a real-life gallery counterpart to Wired magazine's back-page feature Found: Artifacts from the Future, as I thought of it at the time (this was before design fiction). But we soon realised that the interest of maximising narrative engagement and comprehension, as well as the sheer practicalities of moving hundreds of bodies through multiple rooms on a tight schedule, militated for scenarios unfolding over time, as performances, with built-in roleplaying opportunities for attendees.
A retrofitted shorthand for this difference in approaches:
The "Hawaii 2050" scenario rooms were therefore immersive and experiential not only literally, with participants surrounded by performers and designed media (set dressing, props, soundscapes, etc), but also narratively, with each room devised as a coherent scene that would place attendees in medias res, and invite in them a sense of being transported in time. We aimed to ensure that people would not only witness these futures first hand, but interact with and within them: hence, four situations from alternative futures: a pre-election speech night; a naturalisation ceremony for climate change refugees; a government-mandated sustainability class; and an information session at a posthuman wellbeing facility.
None were supposed to feel like tendentious "best" or "worst" outcomes. Instead we wanted to offer qualitatively differentiated stories, in the classic Manoa School mould. To mirror some of the complexity of real history, we hoped people would find both good and bad things in each world they visited; genuinely "alternative futures" as opposed to mildly different flavours of the same idea, as scenario generation processes sometimes yield. Building on this divergent futuring tradition, we reasoned that more vivid and sensorily engaging food for thought could help support wiser decision making in the aggregate.
Below is a two-minute video of the fourth room described above, the high-tech transformation scenario. (Please forgive the low resolution, and note that on the day these ran for 20-30 minutes, so these edits convey only a fraction of the experience.)
Following a year of meetings with state legislators and public administration collaborators; after weeks of intensive work and long days that summer, of Jake and I making thousands of directorial decisions large and small, of generating dozens of artifact concepts and iterating their execution with our astoundingly resilient graphic design helpers, of writing and rewriting scripts and workshopping them with actors, of eking out our shoestring budget to make every room as fully realised and detailed as possible, of criss-crossing the island doing everything from taking venue measurements to sourcing fabrics for future military outfits: somehow, impossibly, the futures arrived at last.
And on that Saturday morning ten years ago, as the time for the first round of experiences approached, taking place in four rooms simultaneously, I have a memory of walking through the ballroom lobby in a daze, emotionally addled, exhilarated, exhausted, halfway between tears and laughter.
For us this was the mother of all proofs of concept. It was of course bound to be a big deal, in our minds, if for no other reason than the amount of work involved, and the responsibility of delivering all we had promised––without a clear precedent that we knew of––to state senators and other community leaders, not to mention our colleagues and collaborators.
The fruits of our collective labour soon began to emerge. One participant was so disturbed by the cynical appropriation of Hawaiian culture depicted in the post-collapse room that he started breaking the scene to argue about it. We could not have been more delighted: real feelings about our hypothetical narrative! The four experiences elicited various responses from laughter to discomfort, bemusement, and also genuine passion.
The post-immersion dialogue in all rooms was unusually energetic. The exchange of values, hopes, concerns, ideas, and intentions was meaningful and earnest. The verdict was in: our first trial of what we soon came to call experiential futures had worked.
The project didn't immediately generate a lot of media attention, and this was all a couple of years before social media took off –– although our guest Jamais Cascio from Institute for the Future did a great write-up. And, in years afterward, the event has cropped up here and there in design literature, for instance in Parsons/ex-RCA professors Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby's Speculative Everything, and more recently in Umeå University prof Håkan Gulliksson's Pervasive Design For Sustainability.
But what about the impact on the islands themselves? In case it had not been clear from reactions plainly visible on the day, some 94% of respondents to a Kickoff exit survey indicated that the experiences had impacted their thinking and desire to take action accordingly (see The Futures of Everyday Life p. 105 for details). But for reasons reaching well past the scope of our modest involvement –– Hawaii 2050 was a big undertaking, not confined to the futures-oriented kickoff events described here –– both the immediate political outcomes of the Kickoff and the "Sustainability Plan" published in 02008 were, in my view, underwhelming (see earlier account in TFOEL pp. 8-13).
I moved away a few years later, and others are better placed to gauge how the influences of "2050" and our part in it, if any, have played out since. Although I did take heart from the news, reported one year ago, nine years to the day after the event, that Hawaii's governor was committing to dump fossil fuels for 100% renewables by 02045.
In any case the significance of this project –– or rather, the story I am trying to tell here –– is personal.
Looking back after a decade, "Hawaii 2050" was a point of departure, breaking our futures work open to a much wider world of collaborations, creative possibilities, media and settings.
Today I find myself regularly thinking of, and occasionally borrowing from, ideas tucked into the details of the scenarios, or elements from among the dozens of costumes, badges, posters and other items produced for "2050". Situation Lab's first Futurematic design jam with The Extrapolation Factory, which filled a vending machine with future artifacts made in one day in 02014, was a benign conceptual cannibalisation of the vending machine full of future artifacts which had sat largely unnoticed in the corner of the Blue room ("InstaSleep" pills - eight hours in eight minutes; "Inhale" - health enhancing cigarettes featuring anti-cancer nanoclouds; "Ahoy" - enhanced chocolate bars for replenishing essential vitamins lost during space travel).
Having spent my undergraduate years training in mostly hyper-intellectual and unimaginative ways of thought, in class at least, I never really had a way to relate to art as something I could do. I spent a year trying (and failing) to make a documentary on my own dime, in the former Yugoslavia, and then another half year starting a business (also failing) in Canada. But it was in that first year in Hawaii, collaborating with my dear friend Jake Dunagan, that this project helped to unlock a door that has only continued to open wider.
I still have a box full of these future artifacts, and packing them up to move house last week stirred a lot of recollections.
See, when you make stories, images, artifacts, interactions and experiences from the future for a living, they are constantly circling back to play with you.
In this work, we are not just creating experiences, or even memories.
We are designing ghosts.
Experiential futures is about the design of ghosts of a special sort –– not the remainders of things dead, but the advance traces of things waiting to be born. Ghosts of what is yet to come. Ghosts of the possible.
I have come to suspect this is one of the primary purposes of art. We create it to haunt ourselves. When it stays with us, that is how we know it is working.
***
Above: Jim Dator speaking at the "Hawaii 2050" kickoff on August 26, 02006
Here are the original scenarios for 02050 written by Dator, Dunagan and me, on which the four futures rooms were based.
For a fuller look at the development of experiential futures practice, see this peer-reviewed article that Dunagan and I recently published about our project The People Who Vanished.
All the photos in this post were taken by Cyrus Camp; most have not been seen until now.
Finally, I want to register my appreciation again to everyone involved in bringing futures to life at "Hawaii 2050". Ten years later your contributions continue to haunt me, for which I am most grateful.
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.
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.
Artwork by Sky Kiyabu for FoundFutures, August 02006
Poster used in Hawaii 2050 Blue Room
(Update 31jan12: The full dissertation is available for download as a pdf here.)
(Update 12aug16: Previous link amended to point to DOI.)
In Honolulu last Thursday morning, 27 May, I defended my completed doctoral dissertation. The five committee members accepted the document as submitted, without requiring any changes. To say that this comes as a relief hardly begins to describe the feeling.
I owe a debt of gratitude to a lot of people -- family, friends, and colleagues -- for incalculable moral and intellectual support. You know who you are: thank you. But I want to acknowledge here the key contributions of two people in particular: Jim Dator, my committee chair and mentor, truly the futurist's futurist, and the reason for my going to Hawaii to begin with; and Jake Dunagan, my long time collaborator and friend, with whom much of both the practice and theory of experiential scenarios, as described in the dissertation, were developed. To be able to work with such fine people as these makes an otherwise arduous process totally worthwhile.
The rhythm of everyday life around here is going to change now that the long PhD writing process is behind me... Time at last to take a few deep breaths.
The Futures of Everyday Life: Politics and the Design of Experiential Scenarios
Abstract
The great existential challenges facing the human species can be traced, in part, to the fact that we have underdeveloped discursive practices for thinking possible worlds ‘out loud’, performatively and materially, in the register of experience. That needs to change. In this dissertation, a methodology for ‘experiential scenarios’, covering a range of interventions and media from immersive performance to stand-alone ‘artifacts from the future’, is offered as a partial corrective. The beginnings of aesthetic, political and ethical frameworks for ‘experiential futures’ are proposed, drawing on alternative futures methodology, the emerging anti-mediumist practice of ‘experience design’, and the theoretical perspective of a Rancièrian ‘politics of aesthetics’. The relationships between these three domains -- futures, design, and politics -- are explored to show how and why they are coming together, and what each has to offer the others. The upshot is that our apparent binary choice between unthinkable dystopia and unimaginable utopia is a false dilemma, because in fact, we can and should imagine ‘possibility space’ hyperdimensionally, and seek to flesh out worlds hitherto supposed unimaginable or unthinkable on a daily basis. Developed from early deployments across a range of settings in everyday life, from urban guerrilla-style activism to corporate consulting, experiential scenarios do not offer definitive answers as to how the future will look, or even how it should look, but they can contribute to a mental ecology within which these questions may be posed and discussed more effectively than ever before.
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!
The Iraq War is over, Bush has been indicted on charges of high treason, the PATRIOT Act is to be repealed, the economy will be restructured, and public universities are now free.
I awoke this morning to emails from two New York colleagues about a marvellous and painstakingly planned guerrilla futures intervention today in the Big Apple.
A "special edition" of the New York Times has been produced, to convey, through a detailed set of carefully crafted articles and advertisements, a near-future scenario in which progressives' dreams for the United States have all come true. And 1.2 million copies of it have been distributed for free around the city by a network of volunteers.
Alongside the print edition, a counterpart website has been launched where all the stories are available in full. Both paper and electronic versions are rendered impeccably in the newspaper's signature style, and are dated 4 July 02009 (Independence Day next year).
In scale, this is certainly the most impressive guerrilla futures campaign I've heard of, and I heartily congratulate all those concerned for pulling it off. (It seems -- according to Gothamist, citing Gawker -- that the volunteers were assembled via becausewewantit.org and the effort is being attributed to the Yes Men, guerrilla performance artists supreme, whose astonishing Dow Chemical/Union Carbide interview on BBC World was previously featured here.)
Now, we can expect that some disgruntled newspaper recipients or onlookers may accuse the folks behind this terrific intervention of leading people, shall we say, up the garden path. Such accusations will be missing the point.
Adopting the Times dress is not about hoaxing people; it's a way of calling authority to the vision. As well as being a proprietary media business, its actual status in our media ecology as an authoritative source of news, an idea which belongs to everyone even if the newspaper itself does not, is recruited to lend verisimilitude and weight to the cause.
As Jake Dunagan and I were recently discussing in another context, one of the many devices which makes the Orson Welles classic Citizen Kane so successful is its intermittent cutting to newspaper headlines that help tell the story. (Now, like any novel and effective cinematic trope, this has since become cliche, but this original fictional biopic application, referencing newspaper's authority to help put a frame around plot points in the biography of a larger-than-life newspaper tycoon, makes perfect sense.)
No one addressing more than the most cursory scrap of attention to the actual content of the articles will fail to notice that they are fragments of an "impossible" dream, even if a profoundly noble one: the wholesale transformation of U.S. political culture. Post-election euphoria notwithstanding, the kinds of change described in the "special edition" don't tend to happen overnight, if at all. But the paper quite deliberately calls precisely that into question -- why not?
Similarly, Professor Steve Duncombe recently said in his presentation at HRCFS on Dreampolitik:
These impossible dreams open up a space for democratic participation in the process of imagining the future, which also offers the possibility of escaping the tyranny of the present... for people to imagine, 'why not?', and 'what if?'
This Dream Newspaper is, to use Duncombe's term, an "ethical spectacle" par excellence.
Here's an in-scenario video about the campaign, also from the Times SE site:
Again, kudos to those who orchestrated this highly thoughtful, lovingly detailed, and timely piece of future-jamming. The sceptical futuryst doffs his virtual hat to you all.
Update (19/11/08): On Monday, my own copy of the New York Times Special Edition arrived in the mail.
It brings me so much joy to hold in my hands that it's almost embarrassing.
The difference between hearing about or seeing images of an impossible object, and experiencing it tangibly, is immense.
There's a colour-printed cover; National, International, Business and New York sections; political cartoons; and reports announcing massive legislative and social change around topics ranging from bicycle lanes to corporate criminality. The details in content, graphics, and layout of the 14-page publication are thoroughly splendid -- starting with the slogan "All the News We Hope to Print" on the header. It is, in short, a beautifully wrought artifact of the near-future.
The Yes Men's hallmark "identity correction" strategy is everywhere in evidence: the U.S. government recall notice for all gas-powered cars; advertisements reflecting drastic changes of strategy (or heart?) by companies such as oil giant Exxon Mobil and diamond merchants De Beers; a contrite farewell from pro-invasion columnist Thomas Friedman; and a Corrections section addressing repeated editorial lapses of judgement on the part of the Times itself.
For those unfamiliar with the strategy I mean, the following comes from a book manuscript about the Yes Men's infamous WTO intervention [pdf]...
As many readers will know, "identity theft" has become a major problem on the internet: scoundrels intercept personal information like your date of birth, residence, and credit card numbers, then have all kinds of fun at your expense.
What we have done is the opposite: we have found people and institutions doing horrible things at everyone else's expense, and have assumed their identities to offer correctives. Instead of identity theft, identity correction.
~The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization, 02003, p. 6.
Their future newspaper manages to communicate sincere, blue-sky idealism not through earnest moralising or shrill propaganda, but through wit, irony, political satire, and the indisputable thereness of the physical medium whose mantle and idiom it borrows. A preferred future performed, with aplomb. Injected into everyday life, 1.2 million times over, for your consideration. This is one hell of a feat.
Even better, it strikes me as being part of something bigger, of which the Obama campaign and election was a more formal signal. That is, a coming of age, in terms of self-awareness and tactical savvy, of the American left. An answer to the call made in books like Don't Think of an Elephant and Dream.
But this particular effort deserves to be recognised as a landmark, an ingenious, street-level dissemination of one particular vision for American politics. It was a normative intervention more powerful, interesting, and just plain fun (why not, dammit?) than any number of pamphlets or TV advertisements; as outrageously ballsy as calculatedly logical. And one repaid handsomely in the true currency of human communication: attention. "The amount of media coverage the Fake New York Times stunt received was staggering. It spread to news outlets all over the globe like wildfire." (Urban Prankster, 14 November 02008)
It's true that these newspapers have been fetching quite a bit on eBay over the last week, but my copy is safely in the archive. One piece of a laudable future-jamming effort of unprecedented magnitude, which -- and I mean this in the most flattering possible way -- I hope will be outdone, many times over, as soon as possible.
I'm extremely grateful to Steve Duncombe for sending it (our man in NYC, who helped arrange the intervention). Thanks Steve!
This is a video of political activist, theorist and NYU prof Stephen Duncombe (previously mentioned here) presenting recently at the Honolulu Futures Salon. It runs for about half an hour.*
Imagining and planning for the future on a large scale, argues Duncombe, is usually the province of "experts"; architects, urban planners, engineers, and yes, futurists (sometimes). Similarly, the purveyors of future-oriented texts whether utopian (such as Thomas More and Edward Bellamy) or science fiction in genre have been individual authors. The result is that the production of images of the future has traditionally been quite undemocratic. That is, it has been left to a very small group of individuals.
In its most pernicious form, the top-down imposition of a particular, singular vision of the future has meant projects seeking, and sometimes accomplishing, a terrifying lockstep obedience, embodied by autocratic figures like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Rumsfeld. However, Duncombe points out that intrinsically "the future is a democratic project -- people make history". And various participatory, public projects have been animated by this more collective, bottom-up way of thinking, such as Constitutional Conventions, Glasgow 2020, and (to add my own example to the list) Hawaii 2000 [pdf]. He notes:
With this model of futurism, the futurist's job changes. They're no longer architects of the future, but instead, organisers and facilitators of situations and experiences that bring people together to imagine the future.
Notwithstanding the explicitly "political" character (in an institutional sense) of these examples, future-oriented initiatives need not be positioned that way in order to tap public concern and imagination. The above quote happens to be practically a word-perfect description of the futurist's role in Superstruct, the world's first massively multiplayer forecasting game, and a cutting edge instance of harnessing collective intelligence. (By the way, the game is live as of last Monday, so if you're interested in these themes and not a registered player yet, you should be!)
Now, Duncombe knows that even if this more democratic, distributed kind of futuring addresses the autocratic problem, serious challenges remain. One of these, which may sound abstract, but plagues even the most practically oriented attempts to envision the future, is "the problem of totality". However much we might like to, we can't simply step outside our social, political, cultural and temporal context to think and communicate about radical change.
It is exceedingly difficult to imagine something you don't know.
...
Not only can we not dream something new, but even if we could, it would be impossible to communicate that. It would literally be insensible; I would be seen to be speaking gibberish.
Thus goes the argument, support for which can readily be found in the way that conceptions of the future, historically, are so clearly a product of their time: consider Bellamy's inescapably Victorian vision in 01888 of the year 02000 [link], or 01950s designs for future cars (especially flying ones) replete with telltale tailfins [i.e.] that instantly date them [e.g.].
Against this backdrop, then, comes Duncombe's central idea, a contrast to Otto von Bismarck's Realpolitik contention that "politics is the art of the possible". Another way to approach politics (in the broad sense that covers perceptions, not just institutions) may be a practice that Duncombe calls Dreampolitik, to invoke the art of the impossible. He cites the work of artists Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings (blogged here earlier) and also the FoundFutures postcard project (see here) as examples of strategically provocative depictions of futures that may appear entirely unlikely, and yet which enable discussion of possibility in a different way.
Duncombe says:
These impossible dreams open up a space for democratic participation in the process of imagining the future, which also offers the possibility of escaping the tyranny of the present... for people to imagine, 'why not?', and 'what if?'
This argument is essentially identical to the distinctive conception of futures practice at the "Manoa School", the most well-known encapsulation of which remains Dator's second law: "Any useful statement about the future should appear to be ridiculous". However, the usefulness of ridiculousness is not universally appreciated by practising futurists. And the fact that Duncombe, a political theorist and activist, has found his own way to much the same conclusion as veteran futurist Dator does not in itself make them both right. But I happen to think that they are, and here's why.
Imagine a spectrum or scale of likelihood, ranging from "impossibility" at one end (probability = 0), to "inevitability" at the other (probability = 1) . Any point on this scale may be associated in our minds with a scenaric proposition. The extremes of this scale, those notions of impossibility and inevitability, are among the most politically potent ideas in existence, because, deployed effectively, they are like the traffic lights of the attentional economy. An idea about the future that is constructed (we could say "tagged") as impossible or outlandish is red-lighted, and those who adhere to it or perhaps even idly entertain it may, it follows, be dismissed as stupid, dangerous or irresponsible. A proposition tagged as inevitable, on the other hand, is accordingly green-lighted for all manner of attention in response.
Of course, the spectrum between these poles is possibility -- a greyscale of maybes. Now, I'm focusing on the extreme cases because they make the point clearer, not because the middle is insignificant. But these extremes, though they appear to be opposites, have one important thing in common: when we believe something is either impossible, or inevitable, we are by definition implicitly accepting that nothing can be done about it. Such conclusions are showstoppers. Inevitable means it's going to happen; and impossible means it's not on the menu. Either way, there's no scope for agency, or responsibility for the occurrence of those things. (There may, I hasten to add, be plenty to discuss about what to do following such a conclusion -- e.g., if some course of action is tagged "impossible", the "possible" alternatives may come under scrutiny; or an "inevitable" disaster may be mitigated, even if you've concluded that it can't be avoided.) But the point I'm making is about the crucial consequences that flow from embracing these extremes. If a tax hike is to your mind "impossible", any argument about it is over before it begins. If war is "inevitable", you might prepare to fight the war, but evidently you'll no longer fight the proposition that war is in our future.
Incidentally, "necessity" is another politically charged tag, substituting normative commitment for probability. That which is "necessary" needs to happen; although it's conceivable, if unacceptable, that things go otherwise.
In any case, clearly our understandings have concrete normative implications. To question ideas about what's possible (a restlessly moving target, if ever there was one) is part of a mode for futures work that encourages people to think for themselves, and for us as political actors to assume as much responsibility as we can for the great mass of possibilities that rightfully belong on the greyscale of probability, where things can be influenced to some degree, and preferred futures may be invented, pursued, and (perhaps) realised.
I'm not convinced that a scenario or artwork needs to be literally (or according to informed consensus, at any rate) "impossible" to be useful, although neither do I think that Duncombe is necessarily advocating that. "The art of the impossible" that he describes deliberately plays with subjective perceptions of impossibility, as a political heuristic, a lever to pry open what Dator has long called (after C. Wright Mills) the "crackpot realism" of the present. In my experience, for the purpose of exploring alternative futures, a good scenario ought to seem ridiculous or even impossible at a first glance, and then become more compelling as you spend time with it. That's a powerful way in which our perceptions may be rewired, and our conceptions of the range of plausible futures rewritten.
It is in my view necessary -- but not, I think, inevitable -- that more futurists develop their appreciation for, and facility with, the art of the impossible.
* The full version with post-talk discussion can be found via the HRCFS website. Jake Dunagan and I started the Honolulu salon in 02005, with the encouragement of John Smart at the Acceleration Studies Foundation. Since then, we've been delighted to host a variety of interesting forward-looking thinkers, including GBN cofounder Jay Ogilvy, Long Now executive director Alexander Rose, Jamais Cascio of Open the Future and IFTF, as well as Smart himself.
Above is a series of images from Bryan Boyer, who recently completed an MA in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Here's Boyer's task, as described by him at the blog he maintained while the project was on foot:
[T]he design project I've chosen for myself is to redesign the US Capitol building. ... The short version of the pitch is that the Congress is broken... [yet however] much we dislike the current administration, they're playing by the rules of the game, more or less.
In the course of my research I discovered an interesting coincidence in the history of the US House of Representatives. Intended to grow with each uptick of the census and maintain something of a parity with the population, the House of Representatives actually stopped growing in 1911. The date has no significance, but it's interesting to note that 435 is about as many people as can comfortably fit into the chamber of the house as it stands today (the current chamber was first occupied in 1858 with 262 desks). In other words, the House's membership stopped growing because of architecture, not politics. By interfering with the political process of the country, in 1911 the US Capitol changed from monument to memorial.
The real issue is what architectural questions we can address with the Capitol as our vehicle. The primary issue at stake here is how one may develop a sense of monumentality without fixity. Perfect static environments, little capsules of space preserved for future generations, are memorials that purposefully mark a certain moment in time.
Here Boyer confronts, directly and quite literally, the insight captured in Mitch Kapor's memorable aphorism "Architecture is politics". What he says also opens up some other fascinating lines of inquiry. For me, an important one is the ambitious but, as his argument implies, necessary program of redesigning the political system itself, not just its edifices. A fully-fledged political design discourse is especially needed for moving beyond well-entrenched but misguided assumptions, such as the idea that an increasing number of representatives requires more co-located space. (e.g., What about electronically-enabled direct democracy; a virtual forum?) Indeed, (re)designing political systems themselves is the task that Dator has assigned to generations of students, including me, in the futures studies program at the Dept of Political Science, UH-Manoa. (This semester he's co-teaching a seminar which brings architecture and politics students together to synthesise their disciplinary perspectives, but in relation to the institution of the University, rather than Congress.)
Still, I digress; the main point I want to discuss isn't about the project's topic per se, but what Boyer goes on to do with it.
In addition to the elevation plans, exploded views and interior mockups shown above (and there are more where those came from, as well as a nifty animation), Boyer produced photo-illustrations of the new Capitol in its Washington, D.C. location. These boldly reimagine the famous view from Pennsylvania Avenue...
...and from the Lincoln Memorial, looking down the National Mall:
The iconicity of the target makes this a pretty audacious student project. Even so, this is all pretty standard architectural fare so far -- designs and artists' impressions of the structure-to-be.
But then it gets really interesting. Boyer offers a hypothetical back-seat passenger view of the Capitol out the windshield of a vehicle on New Jersey Avenue NW...
...which (although maybe a bit cryptic out of context) to me has the ring of a photographic artifact from the future.
Yet there's more. He also produced a series of souvenir plates adorned with the proposed building's imagery...
(below, a more detailed shot of one of the plate designs)
...and (the icing on the cake) a U.S. $50 bill featuring his version of the U.S. Capitol building:
Not only is this an ingenious riff on the current bill design, it's close to "guerrilla futures" gold.
(Compare to Daniel Carr's hypothetical Amero coins, which appeared here late last year.)
OK. A few more points and we'll be done.
Generally, I don't post much on architecture at this blog. That's partly because I feel somewhat out of my depth talking about it. (A perhaps unkind but difficult-to-deny rejoinder could be that my boundless ignorance doesn't seem to dent my willingness to write about anything else; and duly chastened on that point by my internal critic, I've searched for a more compelling reason why future buildings don't make a more steady stream of appearances here at t.s.f.) I'm sure it has something to do with volume, as in, there are so many public-park or building-and-skyline visualisations that I couldn't hope to keep up. And the other side of that coin is banality. Most of the time, I find, architects' renderings of buildings-to-be isolated, visually sterile and uninteresting, in much the same way (as noted here previously) that the minimalist backdrops of concept designs in the gadget world usually say nothing of interest about the social context for those gadgets. They don't therefore do much to help us imagine tomorrow any more wisely, but bypass or occlude the most interesting questions about the various forms that the future they purport to show could take.
Now, Boyer's strategy doesn't precisely address that type of (what we might call) scenaric context-anemia, and since his focus lies elsewhere, I don't mean to fault him for it; I'm just observing that we can't deduce much about how, if at all, the political system might be different from today's in the vision set forth. He has, however, hit on a few extremely interesting ways to convey his building design, and more importantly, its iconic intent. Ironically, it's not by the "direct" schematic and traditional design representations of the building that we get a feel for it. Instead, it's through the mediation of the new Capitol building's role as a cultural force -- one iconically reproduced on currency, commemorated in tacky souvenirs, and glimpsed through grubby windows from the backseats of cars -- that the presence of his future makes itself felt. In cinema and television, the artifacts of documentary (jerky camerawork, imperfect vantage points, bad sound fidelity) can sometimes lend a more nuanced and lifelike texture to the story than squeaky-clean realist cinema, with the camera always positioned just-so. Boyer has found his way to a sort of architectural equivalent of documentary, and I think it works.
[The project] seems well-considered and suitably imposing - but the killer part is not the building I think.
For me it’s the almost science-fictional level of world-building touches around his project of new currency featuring the building, folk art and even commemorative plates.
Puts you in mind of Paul Verhoven’s ad breaks in RoboCop and Starship Troopers in terms of really convincing peripheral visions of a world.
It puts you in a future-fictional America where something or someone has caused and completed a reboot of the Union’s sacred symbols.
It seems that Boyer knows he's doing it, too. Buried in his project blog, not apparently in reference to these specific artifacts, is a meditation on time travel (emphasis added):
The time traveler, as an individual in a new land, must both confront material differences and be curious about the mental framework (consciousness, subjectivity, design intentions) that put this material into that world.
Nostalgia is passive, time travel is active. Hijacking an object or aesthetic from another time is to rip it out of context. Fair enough. Time travel, however, as a mode of working requires that you move people (and their ideas) into a new time and then force them to adapt to their new setting. This is an active process that must evolve as a conversation between then and now. Time travel uses primary sources and thus tends towards literalness instead of abstraction.
A future-facing analog to history's "primary sources" is an idea I feel like I've been hovering around (in relation to future artifacts) for some time. I'm relieved to have found it, along with Boyer's work around these ideas, and look forward to hearing more about what may be going on in architecture that taps the same vein.
Poster design by Media/Continuation group Students from Introduction to Political Science 110 and Beginning Digital Imaging 400 University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Spring 02008
Design and installation: Media/Continuation | Photo: Claire Schulmeister
A text-heavy entry, this one, but the need to document my recent experience teaching futures and design has been hounding me of late, so I wanted to get something out there before the dissertation commitments nipping at my heels sink their teeth in.
In the leadup to last semester (Spring 02008) I was invited to teach an introductory political science course at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, where I’m doing my PhD in the same department.
I inquired about whether there was anything in particular I needed to include, or avoid, and the answer was no: I would have free rein to shape the syllabus my own way.
Irresistible.
So I set myself the goal of constructing the most interesting course possible. I wanted to engage students in the exploration and expression of ideas, in a politically relevant way (broadly construed), and to do it through an alternative futures lens.
After personal introductions done via freestyle rap (which I can commend to teachers as embarrassing but effective), the first substantive task we undertook was to survey everyone’s understanding of "politics". The parade of notions about traditional institutions and processes engaged in the conventional exercise of power was not at all unexpected. But the agenda was to bust open the notion that politics happens only, or even primarily, on the campaign trail and the voting booth.
The way we set about doing that was by considering the whole of our discursive lives -- the "mental commons", to use the phrase of an Adbusters article I set early on (reproduced here); or "mental real estate", in the words of a Hollywood screenwriter -- as politically charged: the stories told or not told, the ideas promoted or occluded, the interests privileged or marginalised. (For those with a theoretical bent, I was drawing on the politics of aesthetics of Jacques Rancière: thinking of the "political" as redistribution of the sensible, i.e. of the perceptual order.)
Together with art instructor Scott Groeniger, who miraculously was scheduled to teach an introductory class in digital imaging in the same timeslot (Tuesday and Thursday mornings), a couple of buildings over, I put together a plan for "Future Jamming 101" which would enable his art students and my politics students to put their heads together and actually intervene in their mental environment, in their own way. (Scott and I had been talking for a few months about a potential collaboration, ever since we’d met when some of his artwork was featured in the same 02007 exhibition as FoundFutures: Chinatown, at Honolulu gallery The Arts at Marks Garage.)
A few aspects of the class were deliberately experimental and may be worth recording for others to build upon. And, since I had asked my students to conclude their semester with a brief "Reflections" paper looking at the approach they had taken in their culminating group projects, and evaluating what they had learned from that process, I figured I ought to do likewise. So here, slightly belated -- the whole summer has passed by now -- are my Reflections on the exercise we undertook together. I've tried to include details here which may assist other instructors to formulate a comparable exercise, so my apologies are due to the general readership, to the extent that such details are less than exhilarating.
The purpose of our "future jamming" project was to teach students futures thinking, in an active, hands-on manner, such that they would have an opportunity not only to master the basics of alternative futures, but also to apply them in a satisfying, and hopefully impactful, way.
It seemed sensible to do this by having them do something like what Jake Dunagan and I had done quite a few times – bring futures thinking and designers together to manifest possible scenarios.
We borrowed the term "future jamming" from Australia-based futurist Jose Ramos (a coinage parallel to "culture jamming"), whose energetic advocacy of the radicalisation of foresight communication -- in conversations a few years ago, as well as in print meanwhile -- has stayed with me. The trick here was, it seemed to me, to scale up the approach Jake and I had developed in collaborating with designers on our series of "FoundFutures" experiential scenario projects (e.g., postcards, Chinatown, South by Southwest, and most recently the Wattis Gallery).
The steps for the project panned out as follows. (These seem slightly more distinct in retrospect than they were at the time.)
> forming groups and selecting topics
> generating scenarios
> devising and producing artifacts expressing those scenarios
> installing materials and recording responses
> evaluating the projects
With about 20 students in each class, the joint sessions would be jam-packed, as neither of our assigned classrooms was big enough to accommodate everyone comfortably, and so we didn't want to risk having an untried format eat up too many weeks. We settled on a schedule which had our two groups meeting for the two sessions in the week before spring break, developing their ideas over that break, and then meeting and working together for the three weeks (six sessions) to follow. Each politics class was 75 minutes long. Scott’s classes ended at the same time as ours, but started more than an hour earlier, which was extremely helpful in production week -- students needed all the time they could get.
Session 1: Briefing. The purpose, aspirations, and timeline of our future-jamming project were set out. This included an introduction to the four generic images of the future [Dator], culture jamming and future jamming, and showcasing similar projects to kickstart thinking around possible approaches.
Session 2: Forming teams. Facilitated by the instructors, students brainstormed a long list domains of interest (futures of "X"), and we used a voting process to whittle it down to two: Energy and Media. The joint group was then split in two, and individuals were assigned more or less at random (with sensitivity to arts/politics representation in each) to one of four sub-groups within their domain; eight groups altogether. So, everyone ended up in a small team of four or five, assigned to a domain (energy or media), and a generic future for that domain (continuation, collapse, discipline or transformation: the "four generic images of the future"). The time horizon for scenarios was put at approximately 30 years.
Sessions 3 & 4: Building scenarios, devising artifacts. The students had two sessions to work with their groups to develop the content of their assigned scenario, with instructors’ troubleshooting as necessary. The main criteria for building these scenarios were that groups should find a story to tell that they themselves found interesting, and that might be ridiculous at first sight, but which would seem quite plausible on closer inspection (following Dator's second law [pdf]). Happily, we were able to access a large art production room with enough space and chairs for all eight groups to convene. By the end of the week they turned in a half-page narrative of their scenario, together with a shortlist of intended artifacts or experiential interventions which could express it. So, for example, the Media/Transformation group submitted the following:
Scenario
It is the year 2038. Multiple devices are no longer necessary for communication. Mobile communication and internet access is consolidated into a chip half the size of a dime that is implanted into the brain. This tiny chip is connected to the neural passages that allow all the senses to be fully integrated into the user’s communication experience. Our newest product has proven physically and mentally safe for several hundred users, and several new features have been added.
The chip was made in 2018 by Hans Fineman of Fineman Universal Corporation initially made as a prototype for the United States Armed Services to be used to communicate during warfare. By 2035 a consumer form of the chip is distributed in select countries and several companies by that time made compatible content available to subscribers.
Materials
A printed business card flyer with a url
A website with information
That's exactly what the group went on to do (whereas the plans of most others, especially the more ambitious ones, changed as time marched by).
Website promo card design: Media/Transformation | Photo: Stuart Candy
Sessions 5 & 6: Production. We moved our operation to a computer room in the art school, since the equipment was necessary for the graphic design of almost every artifact produced. Space was tight but energy high. During this phase, Scott in particular dealt with an astonishing variety of challenges as people sought to translate their ideas into tangible pieces.
Media/Collapse group's posters in production | Photo: Stuart Candy
Poster design: Media/Collapse
Session 7: Installation and recording. Students had resolved to do their installations largely on campus at UH-Manoa. Output ranged from a website selling brain-implanted communication devices (and promotional materials distributed to drive traffic there); to magnets affixed to cars’ gas-cap covers, reminders drivers about the phasing out of gasoline in 02038; to a candle-lit surfboard memorial for a dissident Hawaiian felled by Chinese occupiers. And so on. They were asked to document intensively so their efforts might be preserved for posterity.
Session 8: Conclude installation, group presentations and debriefing. Each group did a powerpoint presentation on their scenario and its manifestation. Everyone who had been steadily immersed in their own project finally had an opportunity to see what their counterparts, assigned to the other domain, or to the other three futures within their own domain, had been doing.
Installation of designs by Energy/Transformation group | Photo: Stuart Candy
Design: Energy/Transformation | Photo: Stuart Candy
Some lessons (not exhaustive):
1. Clear constraints enable creativity. The 22 undergraduates who wound up in my class were on the whole extremely gracious about not getting the standard introduction to politics that many of them had, reasonably enough, anticipated (especially in the midst of an upcoming U.S. presidential election). I wouldn’t change anything there, but I certainly would recommend making clear to students how an unorthodox task like this fits into whatever else they might be expecting. There were occasional complaints about insufficient instruction in the assignment, but I tried to be forthcoming about the reason for leaving so much to the groups’ discretion. It seems to me that for an exercise such as this, the guidelines for scenario-building and deadlines for each phase are best treated as clear and strict, to enable maximum innovation (and concomitant assuming of responsibility) within the degrees of freedom thereby laid down.
2. Randomly assigned groups are a crapshoot. Like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. Some teams needed closer attention than others where, for instance, production skills were less well developed. So it goes.
3. Every installation strategy has its tradeoffs. I would love to see more output ranging beyond print artifacts. Since this was a digital imaging collaboration (rather than, say, a theatre class), output understandably leaned towards print and web. Even so, in previous FoundFutures outings we have found print posters and brochures to be (along with websites) the cheapest, easiest, media to use for future artifacts -- or at least the ones lying squarely on the path of least resistance. More varied and imaginative approaches are possible, but they may require more opportunity for planning than print and web production, which lend themselves to last-minute execution. Tradeoffs emerge. Easy installations are also easily undone (most posters in non-designated areas were immediately torn down; while some of those placed on bulletin boards remained for weeks). Highly visible and impactful setups may also be highly vulnerable (the Media/Collapse group's guerrilla "memorial" installed in the campus centre was short-lived; they were moved along unsympathetically by nearby staff). Permission can clear the way to more striking interventions, but it takes time, and risks a negative answer. Examples: Media/Discipline wanted to display an "official" instructional presentation about “redeeming media rations” in Hawaii, 02030) on flatscreen TVs in the campus centre; meanwhile, Media/Continuation had the marvellous idea of taking over a campus vending machine, or at least one or two of its slots, with their 02038 product, iDream pills (in rebranded tic-tac packets). These were both great concepts that didn’t eventuate: official clearance impossible in the short time available.
4. Under-documentation is a pitfall. Lots of photos don’t turn out, so when you're working in digital, there's no such thing as taking too many. If I did it all again, I’d want to devote more attention to helping students install and record their interventions. (That phase spilled over from the original intended single date, session seven, into the following class -- a time issue, on which see more below.) Not every group will be blessed with an experienced photographer, so it may even be worthwhile bringing in others to follow and document the groups’ work during installation (and, particularly, the encounters of unsuspecting members of the public with the artifacts). Not filming, photographing, interviewing, or actively promoting as much as we might have is a familiar problem from several FoundFutures projects, and in truth even with experience it hasn't become any easier to remedy by our own efforts, because the logistical pressure of performance always seems to push these to the background. Help would be great to have for this phase.
5. Time is always short. This isn’t all we did during the semester: there were 16 weeks, and the project I’ve outlined here took up just four of them. (The spring break didn’t in fact result in any progress. It’s not clear that anything much gets done outside of class time; certainly I would not want to count on it.) Overall, I think it could certainly have been spread out over a longer period, and the quality of the work would benefit from a slightly more leisurely pace. At a minumum, if I were to do it again I’d try for two weeks of production time rather than one. A lot begins to shift, and thus requires room to adapt, as you concretise a scenario’s abstractions.
6. It worked. The interaction of art/design-trained people and newbie futurists (who, despite their newness to the field, brought diverse experience in other areas to the table) generated the kind of energy that I'd hoped for, and that typically characterises creative interdisciplinary work. The end-semester feedback from students was extremely positive, and happily, suggested that our plans (of engaging them via hands-on expression of their ideas) had borne some fruit.
To anyone interested in knowing more, educators in particular, may I suggest taking a look at our class blog "alternativity" (which has been a public document from day one), and I'd be delighted to pass on the syllabus. Let's bring other voices to this ongoing conversation about making futures tangible via design.
Gas cover magnet design: Energy/Discipline See also Ka Leo [campus newspaper] report
Poster designs and installation: Media/Discipline | Photo: Stuart Candy
Poster design: Energy/Continuation
Production week in full swing | Photo: Stuart Candy
Thanks to all the students in my Intro to Political Science section; you were a pleasure to teach. A hearty cheers to Scott Groeniger, a willing and highly skilled collaborator, and his intrepid troupe of digital imagers; and also to Jim Dator for setting a fine example which informed so much of what I tried to do in the classroom.
Diagram by Lloyd Walker
