Whose future is this?

In 02010 and 02011 a series of earthquakes devastated Christchurch, New Zealand's second-largest city, and left large parts of the downtown core in ruins.

Last October I gave a talk at TEDxChristchurch called Whose Future Is This?* Without presuming to comment specifically on the official plans now afoot for the rebuild, I urged Cantabrians (and others) to recognise that, as a matter of principle, the future we get is co-created in community – it is a story that we tell together – and should not be treated as scripted or predetermined.

Here's an interview I gave for The Press in the leadup to TEDx.

Video of the talk itself was recently put online.

This was the fourth annual TEDx gathering curated by the Ministry of Awesome's incomparable Kaila Colbin, who brought me over from Toronto to contribute. I was honoured (and a bit dumbfounded) by a report in Christchurch's daily newspaper the following day that listed my talk as the highlight of the event.

The author of that roundup, journalist Will Harvie, subsequently got in touch to say that he had begun thinking about what it might be like to create an edition of his newspaper from a future year, perhaps 02031 or 02036. His interest came in the wake of a story I had recounted during the talk, about the extraordinary #16juin2014 cross-media experiential futures campaign in Tunisia during the Arab Spring in 02011, which helped get the country back to work following the turmoil of revolution, painting a vivid portrait of how the next phase of national life could look.

I have now learned that the idea of news reports from various Christchurch futures has made its way into reality, with a series of articles by various contributors, set exactly 20 years after the worst of the earthquakes – in parallel versions of 22 February 02031.

This is the first case I can think of, offhand, of a newspaper bringing to life the stakes of today's choices by reporting diegetically from alternative futures (i.e., mutually exclusive logics rendered in the same medium, cf. our guerrilla postcards from the future intervention). There are of course more instances of papers or magazines – either officially, as here, or 'unofficially' – issuing reports from a single scenario.



It is most encouraging to see these strategies for experientialising multiple futures spreading and impacting how people imagine and discuss their options: steps towards a participatory platform of public imagination.

Well done, then, to Will Harvie and colleagues at The Press – I hope the experiment was a success, and that this forward-looking exploration continues.

Update (23mar14): Will Harvie got in touch last week to provide pdfs of the original publication – now embedded above. He points out that much credit for this journalistic experiment is due to Press editor Joanna Norris who 'risked her reputation much more than anyone else involved and had the cojones to see it through.' Also, 'Full credit to Camia Young for allowing us to publish her students’ work.'

[I'm grateful to Kaila Colbin both for the invitation to speak, and for the video, and also to Gapfiller's Ryan Reynolds for the tipoff about the future news.]

* This title is a riff on Ken Kesey's famous question to the Merry Pranksters, "Whose movie is this?" – for more background see page 128.

Related posts:
> Tunisia, 16 June 2014
> FoundFutures: Postcards from the Future
> New York Times Special Edition
> Designing Futures
> Travelling without moving

TEDxFutures

"Possibilities are a whole area of mental activity which lies between truth and total fantasy. It is a very rich area because for any one truth there are many possibilities."

~ Edward de Bono

Source image via.

TEDxFutures is an independently-organised event that takes place entirely in various alternative futures.

One talk could be about the geoengineering consortium that succeeded in turning the tide on climate change.

Another could be by the woman who won the landmark courtroom battle to have her artilect-human marriage legally recognised.

There might be a demo of the pioneering "full-body broadcast" from Australian Olympic swimmers via neural interface.

Or we could hear from the Chinese-African co-op that crowdfunded an independent settlement on the moon.

These are examples I've just made up. Whether or not these specific ideas resonate, plenty of other futures are possible; that's really the point.

There are at least three reasons to explore this approach to a live event.

First, it's wide open. Any presenter could play out their greatest concern or fondest dream with compelling immediacy. Unlike a talk about the future, of which there are a great many already, these would speak from, and recruit the audience into a particular future. It would be framed and offered as reality, just like today -- good, bad, or outlandish -- and richly illustrated with whatever collateral, such as video or photographs, may be required to corroborate that world. Regular readers will recognise this as an extension of themes covered at this blog for years (see Related Posts below), but as far as I know, nothing quite like this has been attempted before. (Feedback about relevant precedents would be most welcome.)

Second, it'd be incredibly fun and exciting. The presentations wouldn't tell us what we may want people to accomplish, but show us how we did it, and help us understand how it felt. They'd manifest a possible future and take us there. Bringing these ideas to life would be a worthy challenge for speakers both established and new, and plausibly doing so would actually require a synthesis of best practice from across all the elements (t, e & d) that the event is intended to showcase; tied together, as always, by the timeless art of spinning a damn good story.

Third, it'd be useful. We're not talking about the follies of prediction here. We're talking about concrete narratives with which people can think and feel future pathways. This is in fact the implicit intention of every scenario ever produced. But scenario documents rarely work really to engage people, while well-told stories rarely fail to do so. In our culture, medium to long term futures, decades or more away, are still largely unimaginable to most people. An event like this could make them feel real.

A variant of TEDxFutures could be TEDxTimeMachine (or TEDxAtemporality, if you prefer). Here's a talk about the Second World War by Churchill. Da Vinci on the Renaissance. Darwin on the research that led him to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Forays into dissident, counterfactual and parodic histories and futures could be fair game, too. Reflections on low-tech innovation from the prehistoric R&D team that discovered fire? Or more seriously, a first-hand view of President Jefferson's household at Monticello from Sally Hemings.

Again, these are just illustrations of a generative conceptual platform with ample scope for invention, as intellectually stimulating as it would be theatrically curious.

Why do I blog this now? Two reasons.

I've just returned to Australia from Phoenix, where last weekend a wonderful, landmark event took place: Emerge, at Arizona State University. (Here's the post I wrote on the night before Emerge began; watch this space for more.) It was, more or less, the world's first festival of design fiction.* Works of design fiction are similar to experiential scenarios, but the latter are about evoking possible worlds through experience in any form, rather than focusing primarily on technological artifacts. What unites them is that both are a step or two along the spectrum of immersion from traditional storytelling. We could call them storyshowing. And in the wake of Emerge, the enormous potential of this form of exploration is fresh in my mind.

The other reason is that a short video was released the other day, "from" TED2023; a viral promo for director Ridley Scott's (Alien; Blade Runner) upcoming movie Prometheus. It is super cool: if you haven't already, watch and enjoy. I was delighted to note everywhere in it the clever little fingerprints of LOST's Damon Lindelof, a man who appears to understand as well as anyone alive the value of diegetic -- in-world -- narrative.

The idea for TEDxFutures came to me a year ago during a lunchtime conversation in San Francisco with Danica Remy (a longtime TEDster who, among other notable achievements, used to direct the Worldview program for scenario planning pioneers GBN). The month previous, through my work with Arup I'd helped design and run a workshop at TED2011, together with folks from Autodesk and Singularity University. No doubt this laid some groundwork for the notion of TEDxFutures, which surprised me as much as it did Danica when I suddenly found myself describing it. I didn't pursue it at the time, because discussions had already begun about moving back to Australia with my company. But the concept kept returning to mind, and after noodling on it here and there over the last year, I clearly see how it could work.

By now the TED Talk as a genre has a well established structure and conventions (including lessons as to what makes a good one). These would serve as a basis for venturing into uncharted territory around content -- viz. the rest of spacetime. How so? Over years of developing and staging experiential scenarios, we've learned  that strong conventions of genre and medium provide a marvellous backbone for crafting experiences of other worlds. Whether the real-life reference point is a ritual, such as a eulogy; a media object, like a video advertisement; or a physical artifact like a bronze plaque; a familiar format provides indispensable scaffolding. On both the production side (as a model to work with) and the reception side (as a basis for audiences to comprehend what's going on) these reference points enable productive encounters with some pretty wild ideas.

The TED talk format would provide just such an anchor -- and there's plenty more potential for embodying futurity in other elements alongside the talks themselves. The mammoth variety of available worlds-to-be would, I think, militate against trying to make the whole event speak from a single, canonical future. Rather, the curation process would be about bringing to life a thrilling cross-section of human possibilities.

So TEDxFutures, and even TED itself as a platform for experiential futures and design fiction -- practices on the frontier of speculative culture today -- seems to me a meta-idea worth spreading. In the same way that the more than one thousand talks recorded and shared online to date have come to serve as conversation fodder for millions of viewers, ultimately our collective vocabulary of possibility could be enriched in the same way.

I'm happy to speak with anyone who wants to talk about making something like this happen. As I argued in The Futures of Everyday Life, this is where forward-looking public discourse needs to go (and is going, just not fast enough). It also ties directly to the urgent practical and ethical imperative of learning how to dream new worlds aloud, together. Hence the one-line manifesto of experiential futures:

Be the change you can, and simulate the rest.

Related posts:
> The act of imagination
> The Futures of Everyday Life
> In memoriam
> Hawaii 2050 kicks off
> Design fiction, emerging
> Found Futures

* In case you haven't previously met design fiction, here's some introductory reading: 1, 2, 3 [pdf].