When reality outruns imagination

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone agreed this was a very strange coincidence.

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

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

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

I was reeling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

(Originally shared on Twitter, then LinkedIn.)

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

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

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

Coral Cross is coming

By the end of May, the world will be six months into a deadly influenza pandemic that will take the lives of millions, wreak havoc with economies, and strain the social fabric, irrevocably transforming life as we know it.

Perhaps I should clarify that.

In May, web users everywhere will have an opportunity to take part in a bold experiment, an immersive and participatory "playable scenario" that tells the story of a hypothetical near future in which a flu pandemic takes place.

The project Coral Cross is named for a network of volunteers established in 02011 on the Hawaiian island of Oahu; a grass-roots organisation which in this scenario steps forward to aid islanders as they prepare to weather the crisis.

Coral Cross is being produced by the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, for the state Department of Health, and I'm leading the game development team, an incredibly talented lineup of designers and futures thinkers.

A Honolulu Advertiser article last weekend announced the state's federally-funded pandemic preparedness project, of which Coral Cross is just one part, but we're now able to share a bit more about this piece of the effort. Michael Andersen of ARGNet (Alternate Reality Gaming Network) recently contacted me about the project to ask a few questions. The resulting report, which drew on the responses provided, appeared yesterday, but for the interest of other futurists, game designers, and pandemic flu watchers who may wish to know more, our email Q&A is reproduced in full below:

Michael Andersen: What made you and your team consider using ARGs to facilitate discussion?

SC: "Coral Cross" is a playable scenario about the first six months of a global flu pandemic, but with the focus on Hawaii.

The ARG-inspired format for this project grew out of two things.

First, for several years, the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies has been innovating in the design of objects and experiences that help people consider alternative future scenarios in a deeper way. We call this area of practice "experiential futures". In 02006, my colleague Jake Dunagan (until recently at HRCFS, now at Institute for the Future) and I staged a set of immersive scenarios to kick off a statewide project called "Hawaii 2050". Hundreds of people experienced four different versions of the year 02050 that we had created for them, to provide a wider context for discussing long-term sustainability in the islands. This approach worked so well that we independently founded a collaborative, public art collective, called "FoundFutures", dedicated to making futures experientially available to people in the midst of their everyday lives. Through FoundFutures we have produced several projects, most notably a series of guerrilla futures "exstallations" for Honolulu's Chinatown -- artifacts and images embodying alternative futures, strategically placed in public spaces. This unique futures-infused form of public art and provocation is an ongoing strand of work.

The second factor is that back when "World Without Oil" launched, we were becoming increasingly aware of the potential benefits of situating these future experiences in a gamelike structure. Subsequent discussions with WWO designers Ken Eklund and Jane McGonigal confirmed that our efforts to date had independently led us to many of the same conclusions as ARG designers about what makes for effective engagement with a scenario. Then, last year, as a Game Master on IFTF's "massively multiplayer forecasting game", Superstruct, I had an opportunity to consider more closely the similarities and differences between what we had been attempting to do as futurists, on the one hand, and what certain publicly-oriented ARGs aimed to do, on the other. Due in part to the example of FoundFutures Chinatown, an opportunity arose for us to create an experiential scenario about pandemic flu for the Hawaii Department of Health. At that point, the two strands clicked, and we knew we'd be doing something more explicitly ARGlike than we had tried before.

MA: What kinds of audiences are you hoping to attract with this game?

SC: Although we have approached the design in such a way that people can participate from anywhere, we will judge our own success mainly by the degree of engagement we can achieve in Hawaii, and especially on Oahu, the most populated island. In other words, anyone can play, but our core audience is here. A key limitation comes from the fact that fewer than one million people live here, because unlike national or international games, we're not drawing our core player base from a distributed pool of many millions of possible players. However, it also has two upsides. First, we can make use of the limited geography -- a captive audience, if you like -- by using more real-life elements to augment the storytelling. Second, as a member of our design team observed, the fact that we're tackling a global topic, pandemic flu, with a local tilt, not only gives it an interesting flavour, but it also helps focus the scenario. Instead of trying to evoke every last thing about how the world could transform as a result of a deadly disease sweeping across it, the island acts is a sort of microcosm in which, no matter where they're from, people will be able to see what's at stake more clearly and concretely, in how particular lives and communities are affected.

To render an abstract possible future concrete, and to have people participate in and be affected by this future, is perhaps the key principle behind "experiential futures". The last several years of work have been a very rich period of work in this area, and we're excited to see what Coral Cross can add.

MA: Can you give any hints as to what media you will be utilizing and how you will elicit interaction out of the participants?

SC: It is a cross-media effort, and I can't say too much more at this point, but the golden thread of the experience will be online, so anyone interested should go to coralcross.org and sign up.

MA: What is the timeline for the game? Approximately when can we expect to see a launch, and how long do you anticipate it to run?

SC: Coral Cross will run in the second half of May, an "event" which happens on a specific, shared timeline -- like pandemic flu itself. The story we're telling is on a scale of months, but the experience in real time will be short, on a scale of a week or two: one month per day. Once we're underway, it's really important for players to check back every day. Changes will happen very quickly!

MA: How do you see this project fitting in with your work at HRCFS?

This project is part of our effort to make foresight relevant and actionable to the public. Our mission is to inform and prepare the leaders and citizens of the State, the region, and the world, for possible changes on the horizon, such that better decisions will guide us away from negative outcomes, and toward preferred futures. ARGs are becoming a key tool in public futures practice and communication, and we need to experiment with this tool and learn how best to use it.

Let me know if I can clarify or elaborate on anything for you.

MA: Thank you for your time, and good luck on the project. Please let me know when it goes live, as I'm very interested in following the game's progress.

SC: Anyone can now submit their email at coralcross.org and they will be notified in May when things start to happen.

Folks, our next big experiential futures project is underway -- and you're invited to participate.

Many thanks to Michael Andersen and ARGNet for taking an interest in this effort.

Related posts:
> "Hawaii 2050" kicks off
> Experiential scenarios on video
> FoundFutures (series of posts)
> Humans have 23 years to go
> Gaming the end of oil

White House Redux

White House Redux Project 1342 by Brandon Shigeta (#2 in popular vote)
The presidential residence reimagined as a Disney theme park.

White House Redux, an international architecture competition, was launched in January this year by the Storefront for Art and Architecture and Control Group. The competition brief explains (the first page, mysteriously numbered p. 33, in the book):

Home of the world's most powerful individual. Universally recognized symbol of political authority. One of America's greatest tourist attractions. Nerve-center of the world's most complex communications system. The architectural embodiment of power.
...
The original White House design, by James Hoban, was the result of a competition held in 1792. ... What if, instead of in 1792, that competition were to be held today? What would a White House designed in 2008, year of election of the 44th President of the United States, look like?

An impressively miscellaneous set of responses was gathered, and made available via a project website, as well as an exhibition which concluded earlier this month at Storefront's space in New York City. From 487 projects submitted, with 42 countries represented, 123 of those concept designs (a quarter of all entries) have also found their way into a fascinating book, published in a limited run of 500 copies, which I learned about through BLDGBLOG. Mine arrived in the mail not long ago, and I had an opportunity to read it yesterday.

Physically, it's an odd specimen. About as thick as the O'ahu phone book, and alternating between sections of B&W printing and colour, it's printed on the flimsy stock that's characteristic of more ephemeral publications (comics, newspapers, telephone directories). The newsprint ink rubs off on your fingers, and thence, all too readily, back onto the shiny white paperback cover. This isn't your usual coffee-table art book.

Among the side-effects of having been assembled in what was obviously a bit of a hurry (shipping just over four months after the competition jury convened at the end of May) the book has no ISBN or edition notice, nor is there any sign of the advertised essay contribution of Storefront's Joseph Grima. The introductory 50-page photo essay, about the jury's day of deliberation in WTC Building 7, is unnecessarily long. However, to me it's interesting not only as a partial record of the production process -- which is nothing if not collaborative, all the way down -- but also, kicking off a 700-page tome, it is an example of the overall direction in which the work prefers to err, towards excess, low-rent generosity.

Indeed, content wise, this is an embarrassment of riches. The quality of entries may be uneven, but the eclecticism is astonishing.

There are aerial, submersible, floating, inflatable, and underground White Houses in the mix. Many envisage its functions as going mobile or being dispersed, however systematically or haphazardly (and in ways fanciful, pragmatic, or symbolic) around Washington D.C., the United States, and the world. At the mischievous behest of this architectural swarm, the Presidential residence is uprooted, launched, buried, destroyed, rebuilt, renovated, redistributed, and repainted. It's reimagined as mall, museum, battleship, space station, farm, coliseum, zeppelin, forest, and theme park, and transposed to such diverse environs as Antarctica, the Moon, and Lebanon (not in the Middle East, but a small town in Kansas identified as the geographic centre of the lower 48). One entry envisions a giant plant à la Jack and the Beanstalk, for some future President to both inhabit and nurture, in downtown Manhattan. Another gleefully proposes a global centre of ice cream distribution. There are hypothetical White Houses made from blasting a huge rock slab; delicate bubbles; edifices rhizomatic and spongiform; quivering bionic blobs; and monumental phalluses -- literally -- which lie flaccid during peacetime but engorge and stand menacingly at attention in times of war.

Project 1386 by Fernando Molina and Paola Zini
The White House as harvest farm, embodying knowledge, nourishment, and shelter

Project 236 by Tom Marble and Ariel Hsieh
An article, dated July 02009, for the fictitious magazine "Retropolis", about the incumbent President delivering on a promise to make the Executive Branch turn a profit, by redesigning the White House as a mixed use hotel/retail/office space.

White House 2.0 (Project 1369) by Wayne Congar, Arrielle Assouline-Lichten
The White House as an immersive, Open Source information display space and hub of global political conversation

Project 655 by Jorge Rocha Antunes (winner popular vote)
The White House enveloped in an enormous glob of biotic jelly

Project 1463 by Yoshi Ogawa
The concept starts from an intersecting arrangement of the 13 stripes of the American flag

12 Cautionary Tales for a New World Order (Project 1485)
by David Iseri, Jefferson Frost, Justin Kruse and Laura Sperry (Second place winner)
A tribute to architectural firm Superstudio, with 12 alternative possibilities for the White House, each based on different cultural, economic and environmental scenarios. They are presented as snapshots of a book, some including in-scenario artifacts. This one puts the White House in Las Vegas, the new U.S. capital after "the Malthusian catastrophe of 2012".

The White Wing (Project 1414) by Ralf Arno Schormann and Alex Schulz
A helium-powered zeppelin with on-board environmental research laboratory.

The White House Show® (Project 248) by Joachim Seyer
Seyer proposes to split the White House in half lengthwise, rendering it an open stage in two parts, on which political figures perform nightly at 8 p.m.
[While this project is featured in the book, this particular "artifact" image isn't.]

To devour the book in a single sitting, as I did yesterday morning, makes for a heady kind of aesthetic workout, an exercise in navigating the wilfully abundant alternative premises of some anarchic, multimedia short story collection; stumbling between the pieces of a bewildering collage of imaginative gambits. This may be the first politically themed collection of "architecture fiction" (a Sterlingism which applies perfectly here), and it's fully as invigorating, frustrating and engaging as, say, a half day spent at the Tate Modern; or an end-of-semester presentation marathon for a massive and wildly divergent design class.

Reaching for a more immediate comparison, actually it put me in mind of playing the collaborative forecasting game Superstruct -- just when I was at risk of starting to miss it. (As a Game Master/Community Leader on that project, for me it entailed a regular process of sifting hundreds of user-generated proposals for hypothetical, collaborative organisations, intended to reverse the world's flagging fortunes, which formed the centrepiece of game that just completed its sixth and final week.) I wonder whether the resonance of that game with this book's contents may come from an emergent, shared aesthetic wavelength -- the look-and-feel of collective imagining, lightly moderated, of the early 21st century.

In White House Redux there is of course a fair complement of half-baked ideas, but this is part of what makes it so stimulating; one is invited to sample an array of exploratory hors d'oeuvres -- earnest and satirical, critical and hopeful -- made according to any of 123 different recipes.

However, this great strength is also its great shortcoming: you don't get a full meal. The essay which brings the book to a close, written by ever-insightful BLDGBLOG curator Geoff Manaugh, runs less than a page. I found that after the whirlwind tour of visual and conceptual possibilities, I was hungry for more substance, insight, analysis. To drop the culinary metaphor for a literary one; the book read like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, with a superabundance of beginnings that all turn out to be loose ends, and nowhere to go from there. I wanted something to help me tie these disparate ideas together, to help connect original question ("What would a White House designed in 2008... look like?") to the startling multiplicity of orthogonal responses before me. Just what the hell is this revolution that seems to be going on in architecture, and giving rise to such a cornucopia? That query, or something like it, was what I had hoped a commentator more familiar with that subject than I am might address. Manaugh's all too brief gesture in that direction concludes as follows ("Speak Space to Power", p. 719):

How do we spatially respond or give shape to the political situation today? We can use architecture to diagnose and interpret the world -- risking the projection of our own fantasies upon such structures -- or we can use architecture to lay the foundations of future terrains no one anticipates.

By the end of the day, then, with nearly five hundred entries, White House Redux began to feel more like a genre in its own right, something between science fiction and political manifesto. But that is precisely the strength of architectural design today: it is literary and diagnostic; it speculates and narrates. Applied to icons of political power, architecture extends the imaginative reach of design into the realm of everyday possibility -- changing governments, minds, and nation-states alike.

I think he's making an important point. It does, very much, have the feel of a new genre, an experimental and potentially very fruitful type of work -- and play -- at the crossroads of futures, and politics and design (clearly not just "architecture" as strictly understood). "Architecture fiction" is part of it, as is "design fiction". Alternate reality gaming is getting close. What I call experiential futures is implicated here also.

The thing we're talking about here, the transdisciplinary theory-object at the centre of this developing conversation, is hybrid, serious-fun in tone, promiscuously multimedia, playfully transreality, and above all, potentially world-changing.

We saw another example recently in Bryan Boyer's speculative design for a new U.S. Capitol building. Although the crossroads we're looking at here is not always literally, institutionally political, it's always very political in the broader sense of having the potential to rearrange our perceptions.

Architecture of course does not have a monopoly on artistic licence, however, both as an academic discipline and a broader, cultural practice it certainly seems to promote fluency, or at least tolerance, across different modes of expression. (Spoken from the wistful vantage point of a doctoral student in a university department where much energy is expended deciphering and encoding theory.) As far as I can see, right alongside design, architecture is fast moving toward exploiting this more fully (here's another example). Back in July, I presented at a conference where design theorist Benjamin Bratton (one of whose architecture-related involvements is teaching at SCI_arc) pointed out that of the articles by Nicolai Oroussoff -- since 02004 the NY Times architecture critic -- half are about proposals rather than actual buildings. Architecture's comfort with the visual/experiential modes of exploration, coupled with its necessary familiarity with the speculative and the hypothetical, seems to position it ahead of a lot of futures practice for engaging a wider audience in the tricky enterprise of worldbuilding. What it doesn't seem to do so well, yet, is scenaric depth. Still, that can be learned.

In any event, the confluence of these practices seems to me to be edging towards making available not just an argument, but a visceral experience, of the malleability of reality itself. The essay title "Speak Space to Power" neglects the design strategy that is used arguably to greatest effect. Of course, architecture is a spatial practice, but that's not all it is, and that's not the dimension in which the contributors to White House Redux (or the kindred activities to which we've pointed) make their most important contribution.

It is what we might call alternativity -- a plurality of worlds, in terms not only of different futures but also of rewritten histories and presents -- that speaks to power in this work. Not space, but hyperspace; different universes, configurations of reality, possibilities. It brings them into our awareness here and now, not merely to say, but rather to manifest, with a panoply of visual, symbolic and rhetorical strategies: "Other worlds are possible. Now, here they are."

Related posts:
> Architectural time travel
> London after the rain
> Design fiction is a fact
> Dreaming the home of the future

Historical preenactment

An emerging trend?

Artwork by Aaron Diaz | via preenactment.org

At Burning Man this year I was intrigued to see in the schedule a theme camp called "Time Colony", featuring some sort of collective named The Historical Preenactment Society.

Now, historical re-enactments have long smacked to me of the thoroughly bizarre. It could be a result of exposure at an early age to Monty Python (see for example the unforgettable Reenactment of the Battle of Pearl Harbor, by the Batley Townswomen's Guild). Pre-enactment, however, while no less bizarre, is admittedly something of a preoccupation of mine (exhibit A, exhibit B).

My search for Time Colony around the advertised intersection was a bust, because (I later found out) the camp had been relocated at the last minute, so I missed their scheduled events. When I did eventually find it, I was pleased to make the acquaintance of one Nick Ernst, the camp's affable coordinator who in real life is an undergraduate student in maths and physics at UC Santa Cruz. Nick told me all about what they had been up to. He's just recently posted a description of their efforts at his blog...

The cyborg leader made to untie the robot at that point. Someone in the audience held up a gun and fired twice. The robot and cyborg leader fell. After a silence, a cyborg yelled "Murder! Double Murder!" And fighting ensued.
Everyone stopped for the end narration: The audience member who had shot the cyborg and robot was charged with two accounts of murder in the first degree. The robot was thus recognized as an entity with the right to life, and so this tragic event spurred a big step forward in the fight for robot rights.

This was, as far as Nick knows, the first instance of future performance to travel under the name of "historical preenactment". The concept for the Historical Preenactment Society was borrowed, he explains, from Dresden Codak, a webcomic by Aaron Diaz that will thrill anyone equally interested in manga-style artwork and The Kurzweilian Singularity. (Check out the comic's instalments featuring the Society's first and second mentions, but note they're both part of a longer story that starts here.) Nick has also set up a Facebook group for his version of the Society (296 members and counting -- and there are four or five other chapters, too). Meanwhile, someone else has (independently?) created a website for Society activities, the first instance of which is apparently a concerted group involvement in Superstruct, the massively multiplayer forecasting game set in 02019, which is currently underway. The entrepreneurial artist Diaz has also put HPS t-shirts on sale here.

While we eagerly await news of the group's next intervention, here's another bit of gleefully anachronistic entertainment, sent to me today by Zander Rose at the Long Now because "it reminded me of your projects but in reverse": Tweet Capsule is a twitter feed by Amos, "time twittering" from exactly 100 years ago with Blackadderesque snarkiness.  For instance, 6 October 01908:

Happy Birthday Carole Lombard! She turns 0 today!
http://tr.im/carole

Related posts:
> Humans have 23 years to go
> In memoriam
> Experiential scenarios on video
> My first Burn

Dreampolitik

On the political importance of impossible dreams.

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.

Related posts:
> The production of necessity
> Dreaming the home of the future
> How future-shock therapy works
> San Francisco's awesome future

* 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.

Found: Redux

A U.S. bumper sticker in 02018
An element of "Found" from Wired 16.10* slideshow

In the latest issue of Wired, Found is back; owing, it would seem, to popular demand.

The magazine has also decided henceforth to use a "wisdom of crowds" approach to generating content for the feature.

For the past six years, Wired magazine's Found page has presented our best guess at what lies over the horizon, from touchscreen windshields to organ farming. Turns out, this little exercise in futurism is one of your favorite pages (as we learned recently when it took a short sabbatical). So we've decided to turn Found over to our readers — what do you think our world will look like in 10, 20, or 100 years?

Each month, we'll propose a scenario. Then it's up you: Sketch out your vision, then go to wired.com/wired/found to upload your ideas, see other submissions, and vote for your favorites. We'll use the best suggestions as inspiration for a future Found page (giving full credit to the creators, of course).

Turning to readers for ideas rather than killing the feature for want of internally generated ones is, in my view, a very positive move, and probably overdue.

Still, I find the first assignment a little disappointing: "Imagine the future of the McDonald's Happy Meal."

Not to be a wet blanket, but this is not a "scenario". It's an open ended brand-based brainstorming task. No problem there, necessarily, but it's liable to be more interesting to that particular company than to anyone else. (And why McDonald's? I'd have thought that such a comprehensively culture-jammed entity would be better avoided, to reduce the odds of barrage of clichés. Now, granted; I used McDonald's myself just recently in a scenario to illustrate possible changes in the food system over the next decade. I did however select it freely from among a wide variety of possible approaches.)

Why am I making a point of this? Because in my experience pitching the design brief at the right level of abstraction makes a lot of difference to the quality of what people produce, especially across the set of submissions. The trick is to find enabling constraints, such that the hard edges set down are walls for the imagination to push off from, not tight lines to colour between. Ask the right question, and the variety of responses generated in parallel should be illuminating in its own right, yielding a crop of alternative images of possible futures, not just fodder for an "official" interpretation later. You want the variations in response to be meaningful and interesting. So permit variation along interesting dimensions: different futures for an established brand are likely to start cute, and get boring fast (except, as I've said, for the owners of the brand); on the other hand, variations on what comprises a meal is an incredibly rich site of human diversity. Think of all the wildly differing cultural responses to that problem: now, applying that kind of anthropological thinking over time is key to the art of futuring. Helping other people do that is also an art.

So what? Well, for a future artifact design task, unless this is an exercise in product placement, in which case brand is all important, I'd suggest that the Happy Meal assignment both underspecifies and overspecifies at the same time. Solution to the latter problem: a looser (less constrained) subject, more open to an interesting multiplicity of interpretations (e.g., the future of fast food; or lunch; or snacking; or ways to spend five dollars). Solution to the former problem: a more specific timeframe (e.g., a meal in 02019, as in the warmup task for Superstruct) or hint about the type of scenario (e.g., fast food in a post-Singularity world).

Also, the display format for entries (squashed into a box inset at the bottom) does not display readers' contributions to their best advantage. How about them getting their own page, collectively if not individually? Should the new strategy for generating contributions prove successful, I would expect that to change.

Still, meanwhile we can welcome this encouraging sign that Wired realises where some of its best ideas are likely to come from in future.

Related posts:
> Is Found really lost?
> Future-jamming 101

(via Metafilter)

* 16.09 on the header seems to be a typo, the October edition is 16.10.

Superstökt

Image: Screenshot from Superstruct

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

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

See you in 02019...

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

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

Open Source futures and design

Image: Adaptive Path

Fellow futurist Jamais Cascio recently blogged on working with San Francisco design consultancy Adaptive Path to build scenarios for the future of the web (which can be found here). The end result of that work was a set of concept videos portraying a web browser, dubbed "Aurora", in the year 02018.



The clip above is the second of four illustrating Aurora's use in different settings. (NB The time horizon isn't foregrounded, but watch for a geeky hint in the events menu.) Its development is described in detail at Adaptive Path, and Lead designer Jesse James Garrett helps dispel any possible confusion:

This is not a demonstration of a real product. What you see in the video is a visualization of our ideas created by animators. Technologically, much of Aurora would be difficult or impossible to implement today. However, we expect everything you see to be possible in some form in the future.

The project was instigated by open-source software org Mozilla (makers, among other things, of the Firefox web-browser which I'm using at this moment), as part of Mozilla Labs' Concept Series, which aims "to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole."

Adaptive Path's Dan Harrelson elaborates:

The Aurora browser concept video is our first venture into the new world of open source design and, in keeping with both Adaptive Path’s and Mozilla’s core philosophies, we are sharing our insights into the design process and providing much of the original source material. Our hope is that others will be inspired to try their hand and release their own vision of the web browser of 2018.

Mozilla Labs' call for participation, released 4 August 02008, notes that Concepts submitted may take the form of Ideas, Mockups, or working Prototypes, but emphasises that all should be set loose for others to tinker with, via a Creative Commons license (for Ideas and Mockups) or the Mozilla Public License (for Prototypes).

Some viewers may find the explanatory video clips a little contrived (like, um, every instructional video ever made) but regardless of what you think of them, or the specific design features of the Aurora itself, what's exciting to me here is the emergence, and potential, of this mode of collaboration: design thinking and futures thinking coming together in a forum deliberately established on the commons model. It makes an intriguing complement to the Superstruct strategy (noted here yesterday) of crowdsourcing scenario fragments through the medium of a game.

I ended an earlier post about a similarly outward-facing concept project from Adaptive Path (the Charmr) with these words:

Encouragingly, it seems, companies prepared to share their "reimaginings" with the wider world -- preferred futures , in the form of ideal design concepts -- stand to do well, and also to do good, at the same time.

They've done it again.

Related posts:
> Public service and self-promotion meet on the adaptive path
> Humans have 23 years to go

Humans have 23 years to go

Do not be alarmed. Continue swimming naked.

Image: NASA† (via astroThink)

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

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

Humans have 23 years to go

Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's mine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing Space Collective

From the gallery at Space Collective
(AquaJelly by Festo)

Space Collective is, according to itself, "Where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today."

Or, put another way, it's a designery, membership-based web portal for futuristic stuff, spiritually and aesthetically guided by three wise (albeit deceased) men: media maestro Marshall McLuhan, psychedelic prophet Timothy Leary, and astronomy star Carl Sagan.

The site, which is very sleek, highly eclectic, somewhat haphazard, and a little coy about giving you a clear idea up-front of what it's doing, is however explained elsewhere -- by its founder, filmmaker Rene Daalder, in a 02007 interview [rtf] for Volume magazine #10:

Our initial metaphor was to use the Internet to create updates of Carl Sagan’s time capsule on board of Voyager and by the end of each month beam them up into space.

Web designer Folkert Gorder adds:

Besides the episodes and the relating meta text, the additional contents of the monthly Payload are generated both by the site's registered members and Space Collective's writers, curators and designers, providing the front page with a blend of public and "native" content, feeding into the site's continuously updated information and entertainment digest, loosely inspired by Sagan’s time capsule.

It's an intriguing concept and, since being launched late last year, with quite a bit of content already, is great to poke around. The impression I get is of a highly literate (in the broadest sense of the term), technologically informed, future-oriented social network. Some nice examples of user-provided content:

> Wild dinners in 2019 (by Wildcat)
Five chow-time vignettes from 11 years into the future, written for IFTF's upcoming alternate reality game Superstruct.
> The world without us: Chernobyl (by A0013237932294)
Featuring some astonishing, unphotoshopped post-apocalypse photos from the still-deserted ex-Soviet nuclear reactor site.
> Summery Books Too Far Out For Johnny Depp (by wilfriedhoujebek):

[A] list of books I can wholeheartedly recommend you to dive into this summer. They are all completely bonkers and they all start from first principles. [...] Only two of them are fiction and this is no coincidence. [...] One can imagine only a few things, one can belief a whole lot more.

As for the site's "official" content, Daalder's monthly video dispatches, gathered under the modest title The Future of Everything, are rather sensationalistic, but have an ambitiously broad thematic sweep, by no means confined to space (so to speak). There are seven posted to date, but no permalink, so to find them visit the homepage, and under "The Future of Everything" click "View all chapters". (Incidentally, as these videos have been pieced together from existing footage, I really like the fact that the clips' sources are referenced in a sidebar at right -- it would be great to see this more often in documentary filmmaking.)

Daalder's bio states "He is currently lecturing at major universities and art schools in America and Europe about The Future of Everything." I'd love to find out more about these lectures, but multiple searches (Daalder + "future of everything" + lecture, lecturing, university, college, school) have yielded a paltry handful of hits, none of them pointing to any transcripts, recordings or even promotional fare. Oh well.

(Thanks Jesse!)