The Unthinkable and the Unimaginable

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

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

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

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

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

An outline of last night's presentation...

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

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

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

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

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

CCA | Image via Street View in Google Maps

Not very long ago

in a galaxy not at all far away...

Still from Michael Horn's video Death Star over San Francisco
via The Official Star Wars Blog

Star Wars fans are excited about this video of the Death Star making an appearance in the skies over San Francisco. Check it out:


While I've never been a rabid fan of the space opera franchise, to me this is a neat transreality tribute, and for a homemade effort, it's exceptional, playing the home-video approach completely deadpan (thereby making a virtue of necessity), which is just great. It also illustrates the point, noted here last week in relation to producing in-scenario fragments, that "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".

The clip is reminiscent of what to me stands as the gold standard of high-tech, lo-fi "future documentary" -- South African director Neill Blomkamp's shorts Tetra Vaal and Alive in Joburg.

However, what really excites me here is that this kind of visualisation is becoming so accessible, a sign of the rapid democratisation of the means of production of video artifacts "from" the future. Says the filmmaker, Michael Horn, in an interview for The Official Star Wars Blog:

I shot everything on my junkie DV camera, did motion-tracking and comping in After Effects, and basic sound design in Final Cut.

Now that's cool.

Related posts:
> Neill Blomkamp, visual futurist
> Death of a President

(Thanks Bryan Boyer!)

Hawai'i: The Lost Years

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

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

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

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

Personal journal of Mr Nestor von Hoepper (unpublished)

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

User-modified cookware ("hubcap wok")

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

Ceremonial bowl (kava and ayahuasca residue found)

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

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

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

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

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

San Francisco's awesome future

All images in this post via Steve Lambert's website | Link for this photo

A public art project entitled "Wish You Were Here! Postcards From Our Awesome Future" has just concluded in the streets of San Francisco (press release):

The San Francisco Arts Commission's Art on Market Street Program's new Kiosk Poster Series by artists Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert features visions of a future San Francisco, including transportation improvements and other imaginative urban developments.
[...]
Artists Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert asked Bay Area architects, city planners and transportation engineers, "What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about budgets, bureaucracy, politics, or physics?" Ideas from these conversations were then merged, developed and perhaps mildly exaggerated by the artists to create six imaginative poster designs for exhibition in the Market Street kiosks.

The six original poster designs include a Muni of tomorrow,

expansive new wildlife refuge areas throughout San Francisco,

suggestions for commuter friendly activities on dedicated BART cars,

a farm in the Candlestick stadium,

a new individual commuter line (literally) from the top of the Ferry Building in San Francisco to Oakland,

and suggestions for removing or moving unpopular buildings following a public vote.

Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert, both together and individually, often collaborate with a wide range of people for their projects, which typically engage directly with audiences in public settings about social and political issues.

The artwork combines the schematic line-drawing look of airline safety cards with a warm, whimsical quality which recalls the Victorian-era images of the future associated with writers like Jules Verne. It's really nice to see the too-often sombre, expert-oriented discourse of planners and architects invite engagement with the popular imagination in this way.

It's interesting to compare this project to the Red Cross earthquake awareness campaign blogged here last May. To find such radically different forward views -- shattering vs upbeat -- appearing in different public art projects within the same city begs the question how people reconcile images of the future that are so dramatically at odds with each other... especially at a subconscious level, since few of us are trained to pay specific attention to the competing elements of the futures imaginary.

This is a question to address in more depth as we go along, but I want to mark that as being, in my view, among the primary ongoing tasks of academic futures discourse in general, and this blog in particular.

There remains an open invitation to all readers of t.s.f. who encounter manifestations of scenarios, or images of the future, in any medium, to submit them for inclusion in the evolving gallery of possibilities curated here. On that note, it was NYU media professor Steve Duncombe who emailed Jake and me about this project, which, he said, "seems to resonate with your FoundFutures work" [link]. Thanks, Steve!

Future shock hits San Francisco

In San Francisco yesterday, on a day-long layover between Hawaii and Switzerland, I learned about this ingenious campaign called "Prepare Bay Area", recently launched by the American Red Cross Bay Area Chapter (ARCBA) to raise the public profile of disaster preparedness in this earthquake-prone region:

The last statistics out of the USGS predict that there is a 62 percent chance that a catastrophic earthquake will hit the Bay Area in the next 30 years—leaving an estimated 3,400 dead, 63,000 seriously injured, and over 400,000 people homeless. These statistics and the staggering realization that only a small percentage of Bay Area residents are actually prepared for an emergency prompted the ARCBA to focus on an even edgier campaign that would shock, force people to think, and then take action to get prepared.

"People may ask why we're doing this," said [ARCBA Chief Executive Officer, Harold W.] Brooks, "but it was necessary to send a bolder, edgier, and louder message because folks just aren't listening. So we shifted our campaign by adding provocative billboard images, edgy TV and radio spots, and some innovative street marketing in the hope that it would motivate people to respond now—not tomorrow—and we believe our message will be heard." (ARCBA Press Release, 2 March 02007)

The photographs below record the first of a series of public consciousness-raising interventions put together by the Red Cross, together with advertising company Publicis & Hal Riney: a two-sided mobile billboard parked on Market Street, in front of the Ferry Building.


I have to say, I find this piece of work utterly brilliant. It's an exceptionally important message for the busy residents of a vulnerable city, and it also happens to be an inspired piece of urban art... far more compelling (not to mention comprehensible) than, for example, this quirky, innocuous ad of similar, commendable intent, which I snapped in a MUNI bus yesterday.

The mobile disaster billboard is also a noteworthy example of ambient foresight -- feeding forward scenaric imaginings to "present" a possible future. (The Wired/Metrophile blog where I obtained the billboard shots above also shows some of the other viral/guerrilla tactics the Red Cross has deployed to get its Public Service Announcement heard.)

Last year, while marking the 100th anniversary of the 01906 San Francisco earthquake which levelled the city, a Red Cross survey found that most residents today remain seriously underprepared for this kind of emergency-- so I'm interested to find out more about how this course of future-shock therapy (thanks Jake for that phrase) is being received. For instance, in what kind of proportions has the public reaction evinced anger/denial as opposed to concern/engagement? Images of unwelcome futures, even propagated with the best intentions, will not necessarily be taken in good part...

In other news, meanwhile, with classes in Hawaii done for the 02006-07 academic year, I'm on my way to my first summer session at EGS in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where I'll be for most of June. I'll be back at the Long Now in San Francisco during July.