Participatory futures for democracy

The White House just took a big step towards making futures thinking a more common practice.

As the year comes to a close, some great news for foresight and public imagination from the Biden-Harris Administration: the Fifth U.S. Open Government National Action Plan (NAP) was released this week, and it includes a move for participatory and inclusive futures engagement over the next two years.

The new plan, developed in a collaboration between the U.S. federal government and partners in civil society, has a cross-cutting theme of “advancing equity and inclusion for underserved communities”.

It sets out around 30 federal-level commitments that seek, among other things, to ensure public access to government data, information and research, to involve citizens in the work of government, and to transform service delivery. As the introduction notes, “While U.S. support for open government has always been crucial, it is especially vital today. . . . at a time when the principles of equality and democracy are threatened across the United States and around the world.”

There’s a lot more to the document, but of particular relevance to the foresight/futures community is a specific commitment to “pilot new forms of public engagement to inform policy and program implementation”, with a strategy for pursuing this in the form of a framework that “will engage diverse and inclusive public participation to better define and imagine emerging challenges, opportunities, and possibilities for our shared future”.

The effort is to be spearheaded by the General Services Administration (GSA), an independent agency of the U.S. government set up in 01949 “to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies”.

In other words, the White House has just officially promised to engage the public in imagining alternative futures –– with a view to this feeding into national policy and implementation.

This is a very exciting development.

I have already noted at this blog the “tremendous expansion in awareness of and interest in futures/foresight work”, and remarked on mounting evidence that “the conditions for social foresight are ripening, with experiential and participatory futures approaches migrating and spreading across contexts –– from academia and activism, to arts and culture, to business, politics and governance.”

Futures/foresight as a field, or family of practices, continues to progress on institutional and cultural fronts alike. Some of the most promising steps, I think, come when the strategies of institutionalisation and acculturation coincide. (A hat tip here to my friend Honor Harger, a futures-oriented artist/curator, for helping me appreciate these as a complementary pair.) And as I've been saying for quite some time, the bigger story or context for foresight practitioners, whatever their practice and whoever their clients, collaborators or students happen to be, lies in finding ways to advance futures not solely through formal processes of organisations and governance, but through ordinary thinking and action –– the futures of everyday life.

In this U.S. government plan we find, at the very least, another encouraging signal of progress towards augmented participation, distribution, inclusivity and visibility for alternative futures.

But as the plan starts to be concretised and carried out in months to come, in the ideal, it might just prove to contain the seeds of greater things.

I’m pleased to have played, at the request of a colleague leading the charge at GSA, a modest part here by providing light advisement and enthusiastic encouragement to help get this commitment approved in black and white.

I also find it heartening to note the rationale for this aspect of the plan:

“Stories of possibility can provide opportunities to express emerging challenges and opportunities through creative and engaging narrative. At their best, stories can inform our collective imagination and create inclusive space for meaningful conversations — and then drive action to choose new possibilities.”

Hear, hear. Something long understood to be self-evident in futures circles, namely the central importance of images of the future to shaping the world we end up in, is coming to be more widely grasped.

In related news, a report called Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy, by Suzette Brooks Masters and Ruby Hernandez, was released just a few weeks ago by Democracy Funders Network. I found myself in excellent company as one of the interviewees for the project. And as it turns out, some of the steps now being prepared by the federal government appear very much in line with the key recommendations coming out of that research: to strengthen the positive visioning ecosystem by investing in infrastructure and relationships; model what’s possible and fund experimentation; and strengthen narrative systems and amplify positive, futures-oriented content.

Finally, and in a similar vein, my coauthor Filippo Cuttica and I were thrilled to learn this month that our work to help introduce foresight at the BBC, which culminated in the recent publication of a toolkit called The Futures Bazaar, seeking to bring these ways of thinking to wider publics around the world, has been recognised by the professional futurist community as a Most Significant Futures Work of the year – taking home the award for advancing Inclusive Foresight.

So as 02022 comes to an end, here's to a 02023 filled with inclusive co-creativity, narrative invention, public engagement, meaningful conversation, and concrete action towards the preferred possibilities that result!

***

The full text of the Fifth U.S. Open Government National Action Plan is available in html and pdf. Thanks and godspeed to the public servants responsible for making it happen.

Related:
> Foresight is a Right
> The Futures of Everyday Life
> What Is the Value of Futures and Foresight?
> Where Do You Stand? Or, The Polak Game
> Welcome to The Futures Bazaar
> Introducing Participatory and Experiential Futures at the BBC
> Exploring Technology Governance Futures with the World Economic Forum
> Using the Future at NASA
> UNTITLED: A Bold New Experiment in Public Imagination
> American Futures at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
> Knowledge Base of Futures Studies

Futures on film

A little while back I happened across my first published foresight paper, which I’d thought long lost.

Futures on film: Using movies to explore possible futures is exactly what it sounds like. It looks at using movies set in the future as a basis for futures-oriented dialogue, especially in the classroom.

The collection it appeared in, back in 02004, was paper-only and not in wide circulation, but the text turned up in a trove of files burned to CD-ROM over a decade ago, and recently consolidated on my current laptop.

The piece came out of a workshop I co-ran in Hungary in 02003 at the Budapest Futures Course, a graduate-level summer intensive introduction to the field, supported by the World Futures Studies Federation and UNESCO. My co-organiser of the session and co-author of the paper was Bernadett Szél, then an economics student in the futures program at Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration. (That university has since become Corvinus University of Budapest, and Dr. Szél has since become a member of parliament in Hungary’s National Assembly.)

My first futures conference was in 01997, and by this edition of the Budapest Futures Course I had some hunches about directions worth exploring in the field. I’d also finished as an undergrad the year before (in arts and law), and was living not too far from Budapest –– in the former Yugoslavia, supporting myself with savings from my first post-graduation job back in Australia. I was attempting to produce a feature documentary about Montenegro’s quixotic plan to become the world’s first "ecological state". It eventually dawned on me that this fascinating but ill-fated endeavour, the notion of an ecological state, was at heart a futures project, and that my also ill-fated (for different reasons) doco about it was a futures film project. But that's another story.

Perhaps it says something about the state of play in the field in 02003, its relationship to media other than text, that using movies as a basis for exploratory conversation seemed an experiment worth writing about. I'm sharing this modest article unearthed after so long because, despite its shortcomings, it gestures in a direction that would within just a few years lead on to some exciting new territory in futures.

The notion behind Szél's and my workshop, and this paper based on it –– that futures should engage with other media more fully –– is a precursor to the argument for developing what soon began to crystallise as a new frontier of practice, experiential futures.

The notion of a media-enriched mental ecology for higher-resolution futuring is here in seed form:

One rich set of materials which can be put to use in futures studies is found in the arts, where individual and collective fantasies, fears and hopes are explored. Such exploration arguably constitutes one of the crucial socio-cultural functions of art - and of course all fantasies, fears and hopes implicitly contain a future orientation. ...

Film stories, and film images, can be regarded as a sort of experience which all individual viewers can be seen to have in common, and to which all can therefore somehow relate. While this is true of any work of art available to the general public, there is an important distinction between the written word and the image. From reader to reader a book about or set in the future is sure to inspire very different mental images, but what we see in a film varies much less from viewer to viewer. The way we watch films in the cinema reinforces this point: stories on our screens 'transport' us to other places, offering the audience an experience to which it willingly yields. We pay to sit in a darkened room, to watch light and shadows on the wall, to block out superfluous sensory input, indeed to devote our full attention – one of the few contexts in which this is willingly given or even possible for individuals in developed societies – to a story which will not be interrupted, and in which we can therefore be immersed. We pay to be dwarfed by the larger-than-life figures and tales unfolding on a huge, elevated screen. 

This 'shared experience' can then be used as a starting point for discussion, so the individual adventure of watching a film can be transformed into a team activity. ... The experience offered by a film is of course in a sense vicarious, but as an educational experience it becomes anything but vicarious: it can be thought-provoking, participative, and engaging.

A descendant of this line of exploration can be found in recent work like this piece co-written with Jake Dunagan.

And we’ve continued to use film, on and off, in the years since. We made no-budget videos as "artifacts from the future" in Hawaii back in 02007 to try out some ideas for helping audiences time travel (Neural Rights Management; Aloha Tonight). More recently, the start of the NaturePod project video (02016) starts out with a diegetic commercial. Last spring, I devised and led a course called Future Documentary at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where students were challenged to create their own future film fragments, then put them out into the world. But even the first and simplest of film-based approaches to futures, scaffolding conversation using screenings of existing movies, still comes in handy. A few years ago, I chose Gattaca, Her, and Samsara to show as part of my Duke University TIP summer course for high school students from across the US.

Our experiential futures experiments have included not only film, and not only tangible future "artifacts" (which in the intervening years have often come to be referred to as design fiction, and then more recently speculative design), but also art museum and gallery exhibits, interactive installation, guerrilla interventions, alternate reality games, immersive theatre and live action roleplaying, trade show product demos, mail art, and more.

Now over a decade old, experiential futures has come a long way. Its inspiration may in a sense have begun with film, but fortunately it did not end there.

There's something encouraging and apt about this trajectory, I like to think; this shift of focus from the consumption, appraisal and critique of Hollywood's images of the future, to the active, creative, and critical generation of our own, using every form we can think of to help bring futures more vividly to life. 

Related:
> The technology of public imagination
> Brand runner / Colonising the future
> Death of a President
> The Experiential Turn
> Experiential futures turns ten
> Future documentary
> Gaming alternative futures

A Question of Scale

Diagram by Daisy Ginsberg; original here.

How do you scale experiential futures?

If we're serious about infusing foresight into the culture at large, how can experiences of possible futures reach more people?

The Futures of Everyday Life concluded by connecting the promise of experiential futures to the prospect of social foresight, a distributed cultural capacity for thinking ahead.

This question of scale, then, has been a driver in much of my work over the past several years.

It is in the DNA of The Thing From The Future, a game we created to make concrete futures ideation (storytelling and design fiction) faster, easier and more widespread.

Itt's one of the main motivations behind the series of playful participatory design events that we -- Situation Lab and The Extrapolation Factory -- have run at OCAD [video], New York University [video] and the University of Southern California [post].

Scale via the classroom route has been at the heart of an experiential futures assignment I've developed over the past few years called The Time Machine, written up in 02013, then taught and iterated each semester since. (A Time Machine turns a room into an experiential scenario at 1:1 scale, immersing visitors in a possible future.)

And scale is also the central question I brought to the most recent Oxford Futures Forum, held at the University of Oxford a couple of years ago now. An abstract contributed for that event is reproduced below, by way of a prelude to sharing more here soon about experiential futures practice at scale.

In particular, we'll be taking a look at several dozen Time Machines created so far, as well as the Museum of the Future exhibition which I worked on for the World Government Summit held in Dubai earlier this year.

***

Scaling experiential scenarios 

In recent years a romance between foresight and design has blossomed, with much engaging and media-rich output emanating from the encounter (Antonelli 2008; Sterling 2009; Candy 2010; Haldenby 2013; Dunne and Raby 2013). Notably, hybrid practices such as "design fiction" and "experiential futures" have been entering common currency (Bleecker 2009; Raford 2012; Turney 2013).

I have collaboratively developed experiential futures (a broader term, encompassing design fiction) across wildly different contexts - public art installations, client workshops, massively multiplayer online games, and so on. Hybridising scenarios and design brings visceral engagement into a dry tradition that otherwise threatens to fall short of its culture- and history-catalyzing potential (Candy 2010). 

So what’s next? 

The task of putting design more impactfully in service of scenarios poses two complementary questions: 

* What kinds of scaled-up immersion are possible -- considering, for instance, a transmedia intervention during the Arab Spring whereby multiple Tunisian media - press, radio and TV - reported "from" 14 June 2014, three years into the future, for a whole day? (Candy 2011) 

* What structures of participation are most effective for scaffolding experiential futures design – e.g., what makes a successful brief for students translating textual scenario premises into tangible, immersive form? (Candy 2013, 2014; Candy and Dunagan forthcoming) 

Having been involved in the futures field since 1997 as (variously) a student, researcher, consultant, artist, and educator, my interest in these topics spans all these modes. The work has not always generated the expected results, but it has always been illuminating. 

References: 
• Antonelli, P. 2008. Design and the Elastic Mind. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
• Bleecker, Julian. 2009. Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design Fact and Fiction. Near-Future Laboratory, Los Angeles. http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/03/17/design-fiction-a-short-essay-on-designsciencefact-and-fiction/
• Candy, Stuart. 2010. The Futures of Everyday Life: Politics and the Design of Experiential Scenarios. Dissertation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii at Manoa Department of Political Science.
• Candy, Stuart. 2011. ‘An experiential scenario for post-revolution Tunisia.’ The Sceptical Futuryst. 1 April. http://futuryst.blogspot.ca/2011/04/experiential-scenario-for-post.html
• Candy, Stuart. 2013. ‘Time Machine / Reverse Archaeology: Create an experience or artifact from the future.’ In 72 Assignments: The Foundation Course in Art and Design Today. Chloe Briggs (ed.). PCA Press, Paris.
• Candy, Stuart. 2014. “Dreaming Together: Public Imagination and the Future of Governance”. In Made Up: Design's Fictions. Tim Durfee and Mimi Zeiger (eds.) JRP Ringier / Art Center Graduate Press, Zurich. Forthcoming.
• Candy, Stuart and Jake Dunagan. 2014. ‘The People Who Vanished: Co-creating an Experiential Scenario’. Futures. Forthcoming.
• Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
• Haldenby, Trevor. 2013. Bringing the Future to Life: Pervasive Transmedia Scenarios and the World of Worlding. MDes Thesis. Strategic Foresight and Innovation Program, OCAD University, Toronto, ON.
• Raford, Noah. 2012. ‘From Design Fiction to Experiential Futures.’ In The Future of Futures. Andrew Curry (ed.) Association of Professional Futurists, Houston, TX.
• Sterling, Bruce. 2009. ‘Design Fiction.’ In Interactions 16, 3. http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1244
• Turney, Jon. 2013. Imagining Technology. Nesta Working Paper 13/06, March. www.nesta.org.uk/wp13-06

***

This contribution can be found in the full collection of abstracts from the Oxford Futures Forum, on this occasion dealing with the theme Design and Scenarios.

A recent special issue of the journal Futures guest edited by Thomas Chermack, Cynthia Selin, Rafael Ramirez and Yasser Bhatti features several articles arising from the Forum.

The edited collection called Made Up referenced above is officially no longer happening, unfortunately, but the piece I wrote for it has been posted here: Dreaming Together.

And the article co-authored with Jake Dunagan, listed as Forthcoming, appeared in Futures a few months ago under the title Designing an Experiential Scenario.

Related:
> Experiential Futures in The Economist
> Dreaming Together
> An experiential scenario for post-revolution Tunisia
> The People Who Vanished
> 1-888-FUTURES
> The Futures of Everyday Life

The People Who Vanished

Update 01aug17: The journal article excerpted below, 'Designing an Experiential Scenario', has been named a 02017 Most Significant Futures Work at the annual Association of Professional Futurists (APF) Awards, in the Advancing Methods and Practice category. We are grateful to the APF and jury for this honour.

***

The People Who Vanished is a transmedia narrative project dealing with the prehistory of the Phoenix area, staged at the inaugural Emerge Festival hosted by Arizona State University in March 02012. Jake Dunagan and I designed and led a two-day workshop in which we produced an experiential scenario with 20 festival participants.

Although we had been doing Design Fiction and Experiential Futures for five or six years already by that time, we were excited about the challenges of co-creatively involving a group this size, and especially of the compressed production timeline, both highlighting the need for a shared mental model and clear framework for collaboration.

What follows in this post is a written snapshot of that design process. It's an excerpt from an article we recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Futures.† (File under: better late than never.) The article, or this lightly edited bit reproduced below, can certainly be read alone, although for a sense of the originally intended effect watch this video first; the tale as revealed to a live audience at Emerge (18 min).

† S. Candy, J. Dunagan, Designing an experiential scenario: The People Who Vanished, Futures (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2016.05.006.

***

The name Phoenix invokes the bird of Greek myth which would periodically burn up and rise again from its own ashes. It is a striking but little known fact that the city was so named precisely because it was built atop the ruins of a lost civilisation.

Beneath the streets and sidewalks of today’s Phoenix of four million inhabitants lie the remnants of the Hohokam, a society which flourished from around 0CE to 1400CE; “from Christ to Columbus”.

The Hohokam were expert canal engineers and irrigation agriculturalists. They built a thriving civilization in the desert lasting almost one and a half millennia. They farmed the land and channeled water through massive canals without any of the modern tools and equipment we have today. However, about a century before the arrival of Europeans in North America, they suddenly disappeared, for reasons that are unknown, and that are still debated by archaeologists.

The name Hohokam is an O’odham word meaning “the people who vanished”. Being an oral culture, it is unknown what they called themselves.

A question which we hoped to evoke for participants at Emerge became: “could the people of today’s Phoenix be the next to vanish from the valley?”

In order to push the boundaries of experiential futures, to do justice to the scope of the historical (and future) questions at hand, and to create a unique and fun learning experience for our workshop participants, we were drawn to the idea of executing a project at a monumental scale. We wanted to create something big; something that demanded attention; something that would appear suddenly and without warning — and that could carry deep meaning for the attendees. In our practice we and others often create hypothetical “artifacts from the future”, but in this case thought it could be interesting to create a fictional artifact from the past, in order to enable a reperception of present and future.

Throughout history, there have been breakthrough moments when we humans have been forced to confront our own ignorance and reimagine our collective story about who we are and where we came from. The unearthing of dinosaur fossils revealed a strange and diverse lifeworld on Earth long before human existence, overturning earlier thinking about natural history. Similarly disruptive were cultural discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Rosetta Stone, the city of Pompeii, and ancient technologies such as the Antikythera machine. The rediscovery of ancient philosophy, architecture, or artifacts from time to time has not simply added to a trove of curiosities from the past; but has heralded revolutionary change in society’s self-understanding. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and other epochal transitions have been initiated or accelerated by such archaeological moments.

There are always bound to be, this line of thinking suggests, possibility grenades beneath our feet, primed to explode our fragile certainties and platitudes about the story of our world. As U.S. President Harry Truman once said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” 

What could this “new” and transformative –– if hypothetical –– slice of history be for Phoenix?

Examining the map pieced together by 20th century archaeologists of the extensive network of ancient canals spanning the area... yielded what turned out to be an essential insight: in addition to their obvious practical uses, the Hohokam canals could have had some previously unsuspected symbolic functions.

An idea emerged: towards the end of their tenure, the Hohokam may somehow have manifested a distinctive symbol in the archaeological record – one also appearing in the pre-collapse periods of other cultures. … Now we could recount the fortuitous “discovery” of a transcultural, transhistorical symbol of impending civilisational collapse. It would not be necessary (and in the circumstances would also not be desirable) to try to explain the precise means by which this harbinger of disappearance had cropped up around the world throughout history; the sheer “fact” of apparently concrete evidence of the mystery itself could provide the desired archaeological moment.

We would tell the following story: In puzzling out the fate of the Hohokam, our group had spotted this curious anomaly on the map, and had then been inspired by the thought of a symbolic, and not merely functional, role for the canals. One of our number then had the idea to do a google image search for this pattern and see what turned up (still true –– sort of). Shockingly, this search showed up a range of other instances of the same ‘glyph’ in diverse archaeological records elsewhere: the Harappan of the Indus Valley, the Anasazi, the Nazca, the Polynesian peoples of Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island. All this part was of course completely simulated; photoshopped into found photographs from these places. We would also be able to show how the glyph had turned up subtly but unmistakeably, inscribed in the patterns on Hohokam pottery too. And the kicker: the sole common characteristic discernible across all these disparate cultures, from wildly different eras and geographies, was that they had all disappeared. They were all collapsed civilisations.

***

Bruce Sterling in Wired: "When one walked outside the auditorium afterward, there was a huge mystic glyph installed on the side of a local mountain."

***

Project Credits:

- The People Who Vanished were: Carlo Altamirano, Michael Baran, Rachel Bowditch, Chris Danowski, Tyler Eglen, Erik Fisher, Paul Higgins, Gordon Knox, Oscar Lopez, Blakely McConnell, Julie Rada, Matt Ragan, Reed Riner, Joya Scott, D.A. Therrien, Trish Yasolsky and Bobby Zokaites

- Special thanks: David Abbott, Tain Barzo, Joel Garreau, Jerry Howard (Arizona Museum of Natural History), and Cynthia Selin

See also:
- Aisling Kelliher and Daragh Byrne (Carnegie Mellon University) in Futures journal
- Cynthia Selin (Arizona State University), one of the organisers, situating this work in Futures
- A trove of documentation (still images and timelapse video) from our workshop, via Carnegie Mellon
- Post about the Emerge exhibition featuring The People Who Vanished and other projects at ASU Art Museum
- A terrific design fiction video created by a group led by Near Future Laboratory's Julian Bleecker and Nick Foster in another workshop taking place at the same time

***

The paper excerpted above goes on to describe a framework that we devised during the workshop and have kept developing and using since as a conceptual model for scaffolding experiential scenarios and design fiction; the Experiential Futures Ladder. Implications for the foresight field of this multi-scalar mode of thought, as well as of the experiential turn more broadly (towards design, media, games and performance) are outlined.

The full text of the article in press, "Designing an Experiential Scenario", can be found in pdf here.

The journal permalink is here.

Related:
> The Experiential Turn
> On the eve of Emerge
> Dreaming together
> A History of Experiential Futures 2006-2031

> The Futures of Everyday Life

> Experiential scenarios on video

In memoriam

A priest pays tribute to Dirk Diggler (Eddie Adams) at his memorial service, 11 March 02025
[Image via coquedesign2000's Flickr photostream]

On 11 March, Jake Dunagan and I staged one of four experiential scenarios set in the year 02025 for the annual South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival in Austin, Texas. A trio of fellow future-mongers, Jamais Cascio (Open the Future), Wayne Pethrick (Pitney Bowes), and panel coordinator Michele Bowman (Global Foresight Associates), each devised and presented their own immersive fragment of a different 02025 in the same session. Thus was the audience for "Futurists' Sandbox" serially bombarded with a quartet of alternative futures exploring possible directions for social networking technology.

Together, the five of us had sketched out four very different settings to ensure maximum diversity in the ideas we would present. Jake and I chose to breathe life into the one dubbed "mobilisation", which resembled the generic image of the future that we usually call "discipline" at Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies. Back in March, Jake posted a detailed description of the scenario and its theatrical translation at the HRCFS blog, in two segments, and the quotations below are his:

Combining our concern with expanding IP [intellectual property] rights and their impact on expression and freedom, we decided to integrate elements of the aesthetic economy, IP expansion, and surveillance culture--thus creating a disturbing totalitarian corporate-state.
...
[W]e chose to tell the story of the locked-down Dream Society through a eulogy for Eddie Adams, aka Dirk Diggler from P.T. Anderson's film Boogie Nights [i.e., the central character played by Mark Wahlberg].

Our experiential scenario, a memorial service for pornstar-turned-copyfighter Dirk Diggler, was advertised at SXSW with "in-world" flyers...
[Photo: Stuart Candy]

...dated 02025.
[Design: Eliot Frick]

There was no indication in the SXSW festival materials that our group would be 'performing' scenes from our scenarios, and, after some debate, we decided not to preface the panel with an explanation of the method. This was a risky choice, and with access to the active twitterati and audience members commenting live on the SXSW Meebo chatrooms, we could see that the reaction to the panel was mixed, but passionate. Still, for what might be risked in subverting audience expectation, we feel this performative, immersive technique is much more effective at engaging the audience at both emotional and intellectual levels—creating an unusual, thought-provoking and memorable event.

For those who haven't seen Boogie Nights (01997), the movie chronicles, with documentary plausibility, the rags-to-riches story of a surburban LA busboy whose astonishing endowment in the trouser department leads him to become a 01970s porn icon. Our scenario picked up Diggler's tale where the movie leaves off in the mid-80s, with the protagonist battling alcoholism and impotence. In our hands, his career then weathers a fallow period, during which he sells the rights to the image and likeness of his famous 13-inch member to a dildo company. Years later, in the 01990s, thanks to Viagra he revives his flagging fortunes and re-enters the porn movie business. Things seem to be going swimmingly, until the early 2010s when the long-anticipated technology of teledildonics (virtual sex) comes of age, and his attempt to market the virtual experience of sex with the enviably well-hung Dirk Diggler runs aground. These entrepreneurial efforts are met with a lawsuit by Disney, the company which (in our *hypothetical scenario*) has, via a series of mergers and acquisitions, come into possession of property in his penis. The case drags on for years, eventually finding its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Diggler/Adams fights it with everything he's got. Ultimately, he loses the case, as the court's expansionist reading of the rights he signed away for dildoes in a moment of weakness are deemed also to cover the haptic experience of sex with the "Diggler" character, as well as revenue from his post-contract comeback catalogue of pornographic performances. Eddie Adams, dispossessed of his very manhood by the ubiquitous corporate surveillance and lockdown of intellectual property, dies in 02025, beaten but unbowed. He is a hero of the embattled "copyfight" movement in an America where market logic has come to infuse every social transaction.

It was a lot to try to convey all this experientially in 15 minutes (one quarter of the hour-long session), but we figured it as an interesting twist on a story and character that many in the audience would recognise. By no means was it the stand-and-deliver panel discussion format that many had expected.

So, when people entered the auditorium, they were greeted by sombre organ music, a suitably reverential arrangement of ELO's "Living Thing", from the Boogie Nights soundtrack (arranged and prerecorded by our talented friend John Maus). This was the first element of immersion in our memorial service for Eddie Adams, to be followed by impassioned eulogies by his priest (me), lawyer (Jake), and erstwhile co-star, Rollergirl (the incomparable Sandy Stone, who lives in Austin and graciously agreed to be involved).

The presentation was six months ago yesterday, and this post is long overdue (mea culpa). One reason for that is I'd been hoping, at first, for some video of the panel to surface, since the material shot on an ancient Hi-8 camera by our friends at the back of the hall didn't turn out. We do however have components from the slideshow we produced to accompany the Diggler eulogies, to provide a little more flavour...

Above: some nostalgic shots from Rollergirl's Polaroid archive
[Images: Captured from Boogie Nights by Stuart Candy, composited by Matthew Jensen]

An automated copyright protection system prevents unauthorised / unpaid glimpses of the Diggler jewels
[Image: Stuart Candy, captured from Boogie Nights]

Copyfight Protesters turn out in droves supporting the Adams/Diggler bid to ressert rights to his famous appendage
[Round placards design: Melissa Jordan, PinkergreenFound image: Stuart Candy | Compositing: Eliot Frick]

Outside the Supreme Court, Eddie Adams reflects on the judges' decision
[Found image: Stuart Candy, via Caroline Bonarde Ucci's Flickr photostream
Aged by Melissa Jordan, Pinkergreen]

Eddie Adams, copyfight hero, at the sunset of his life
[Image captured from Shooter by Stuart Candy
Aged by Melissa Jordan, Pinkergreen]

The other three presentations were wildly different, both from ours and from each other.

Wayne's was a slick corporate presentation by Datapoints.net, a shadowy, all-seeing data aggregation enterprise (with a real website that you can find here):

Screenshot from Datapoints.net, a successful personal data aggregation and marketing site in 02025
[Design: Wayne Pethrick]

Michele's took the form of a charity auction benefiting the "Make A Friend Foundation" (for kids who can't afford to join Facebook), featuring a number of coveted future products and services on which attendees could bid.

Some of the items under the charity auctioneer's hammer of Michele Bowman in 02025
[Designs by Pinkergreen | Images via FringeHog]

Finally, Jamais staged an other-worldly ultimatum from a hive-mind called "The Chorus". The question for audience members: will you join, or will you opt out?

Screenshot from "The Chorus"
[Performed by Jamais Cascio
Audio available in full [mp3, 6.4Mb) here, via Open the Future]

Looking back six months later, what Jamais wrote at Open the Future on the day of the show still resonates:

The futurists' panel was... weird.

No, scratch that. It was freaking bizarre.

Indeed it was. From my point of view, that's partly because of the frenzied preparation which took up the entire time from flying into Austin until going onstage. Combined with which, of course, the content was somewhat surreal (twenty-four hours before the panel, our shopping list included dry ice, a 13-inch dildo, and a priest's outfit). Also, more poignantly, although we had decided long beforehand on the memorial setting for this experiential scenario, in the previous week both Jake and I had been obliged to attend funeral services in the wake of real bereavements.

Life's ironies can be pretty extraordinary.

In any case, thanks are due to all who made this possible, including our hosts in Austin; our talented designer friends who helped bring the story to life; guest star Sandy Stone (for her compelling portrayal of Rollergirl, at ridiculously short notice); and of course our fellow futurist panelists who boldly agreed to immerse the audience in these four 02025s, FoundFutures guerrilla-style.

It made for an experience that I, for one, won't ever forget.

Related posts:
> Experiential scenarios on video
> Found futures> More found futures
> McChinatown