What happens when 200 architects visit the year 02099?

Spoiler alert: more music and dancing than I expected.

Mithun, an architecture firm known for beautiful, environmentally thoughtful design, turned 75 in 02024. They might easily have contented themselves with the most obvious way to mark the moment; looking back on three generations of proud achievements. There was, after all, plenty to celebrate in their past, including recently winning the AIA (American Institute of Architects) Award for Architecture Firm of the Year.

But as a dedicated community of systemic thinkers and creatives, they resolved to use the occasion to focus less on times gone by, and more on times to come. How might the celebrations be tilted 75 years forward instead of 75 years back?

That’s when they reached out.

I offered some initial ideas, and we soon landed on an approach. Summoning everyone from across the firm to their Seattle headquarters, we would spend a day thinking, feeling, and ultimately, physically making our way 75 years into the future. But we would not confine ourselves to a singular theory or vision of change; we would make room for the whole vast, messy possibility space of future pathways.

The result was an initiative, a gathering, a celebration, a collective hallucination – a time-travel party of sorts? – called Design 2099.

On a Thursday evening, a presentation by Leonard Forsman, Chairman of the Suquamish Tribe, set the stage, by providing a historical context delving into the deep time of First Nations lifeways in the region; followed by me introducing some of the foundations of foresight and experiential futures practice, and foreshadowing, just a little, what we were about to get up to.

As it turns out, even I wasn’t fully prepared for the glorious madness that would unfold next.

On Friday, we had most of the day. Supported by a great in-house project team, I led on the order of 200 folks through the process: scaffolding people playfully into experiential futures practices for concretely imagining; then forming small groups to dive deeper into particular “what ifs”. Each group received an envelope containing two divergent kinds of future, capsule scenarios to choose between; from a collection developed with the Mithun team which in aggregate spanned a terrific variety of worlds. (Sample: an ETHICAL A.I. future; a CARBON-NEGATIVE future; a MEGA-CITIES future; a PEDAL-POWERED future; a SURVEILLANCE STATE future; an ELDERLY-CENTRED future; a GRAVITY PLAYGROUND future; a WATER WARS future; a SPACE RENAISSANCE future; a CORPORATE future; a POST-GENDER future; a RADICALLY CREATIVE future; and on and on.)

Every group was then tasked to create a stall, a participatory encounter with their chosen scenario, by thinking through its implications and distilling these into an interaction, making use of any and all materials at hand, including junk brought in from home as well as other bits and pieces found lying around the office.

The result was a sort of worldbuilding extravaganza; an explosion – or collision – of what-ifs, comprising dozens of conceptually parallel yet physically co-present versions of 02099, dreamt up and manifested by each group of participants for others to step into.

In truth, the resulting experience is a bit challenging to describe, for the best possible reason: it was among the most joyously unhinged and surprising unleashings of human energy I’ve ever had the good fortune to witness in daylight.

With all hands on deck – architects, designers and staff from all three Mithun offices; Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle – the gorgeous open-plan office space of historic Pier 56 on the Seattle waterfront was filled to bursting, with weird, wonderful, and unexpected future experiences from end to end.

Those of you familiar with past work shared here at The Sceptical Futuryst might sense a resemblance to what we did several years ago to introduce futures practices to designers across the British Broadcasting Corporation. If so, you’re right on track.

From my side “Design 2099” drew on experiences I’ve had co-designing processes for high-speed co-creation which include the trio of “Futurematic” events that we at Situation Lab ran with our friends from the Extrapolation Factory a decade ago (in Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles); supplemented with countless deployments of The Thing From The Future with imaginers from around the world; and not least, the wonderful Futures Bazaar project with the BBC, originating in collaboration with Filippo Cuttica and colleagues in Manchester, England, then adapted for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and more recently, held in half a dozen cities across Mexico simultaneously.

I’m sharing this project now for two reasons.

First, what happened at Mithun HQ was one of the most narratively and experientially diverse explorations of alternative futures I’ve seen at this scale. By “narratively and experientially diverse”, I mean that the process design/brief was geared toward producing not only a wide array of future narratives, or ideas about what could happen by the end of the 21st century, but also an equally wide array of experiences, or vernaculars or genres of interaction that would make sense for a big face-to-face gathering, happening all at once within a single giant space.

The former dimension of narrative diversity is probably self-explanatory, but the latter, experiential diversity, might not be so intuitive. To put it another way; at a bazaar or market, filled with objects for sale, the commercial transaction is the coin of the realm. In this case though, rather than translating or funnelling each future premise into an object-oriented, satirically sales-based interaction, the brief was aimed at opening things up. The more encompassing format or metaphor of a “futures fair” was employed to invite as many types of face-to-face encounter as folks could conceive of. So the interpersonal aspects of the event, by design, were able to emerge as more central than the future artifacts.

The resulting interactions ran the gamut from fortune-telling booths to investment pitches, from educational institution showcases to community gatherings, and from product demos to dance lessons. Accordingly, the forms of social energy expressed in these interactions was just as diverse.

When we all had a debrief chat about everyone’s experience at the end of the day, the very first reflection that anyone offered was a remark on the impressive speed with which people had come up with ideas, and on how so many of the interactions produced had been “non-transactional”.

In terms of the Experiential Futures Ladder, you could say that participants wound up staging situations – containing but not confined to stuff – as diverse as the scenarios they were thinking about.

(The relationship between this sort of work and the nearly 100 immersive scenarios / situation designs or Time Machines that I’ve visited at this point, we’ll save to explore in due course. I also plan to share more at some point about other variants we’ve explored in the design space of participatory futures.)

Second, although I’ve been delayed in finding time to write about it, this remains a vivid, notable example of an organisation “using the future” – as my friend Riel Miller might say – in a really fun and inspiring way.

Mithun deserves to celebrate, and be celebrated for, their many years of contributions to architecture of course, but also for taking some of the effort and resources associated with that anniversary milestone, and doing more than just patting themselves on the back about it. By investing in imaginative capacity, they did something unusual and generative and worthwhile; something that ought to be normal, but isn’t yet.

My experience has been that even brief bursts of emancipation from our current everyday, via entertaining potential everydays-to-come (see the “mundane turn” in The Futures of Everyday Life p. 89), are a great way to expand an organization’s horizons of the imaginable. And they offer something essential in the present, too; a way of strengthening bonds of connection and community between participants. Making space for joyful co-imagining is a kind of prefigurative politics in its own right (see TFOEL p. 220), which I think we should want to see a lot more of in these fractured, often alarming times.

As I noted in relation to the BBC’s pioneering use of a co-imagining process that later spawned THE FUTURES BAZAAR toolkit:

Am I saying that this is “the right way” to introduce futures thinking into organisations? No. It was, however, a great way to do it here, partly because this specific organisation is full of creatives, makers, and storytellers. Also, the context of an away day made a bit of fun welcome, even essential. We understood that participatory, playful and hands-on elements needed to be foregrounded here, and so they were.

In a more corporate, bureaucratic, or self-serious context, such as strategic conversation for a government department, supranational outfit, or large business, other approaches might be more suitable. Less out-on-a-limb for the participants while still inviting their engagement with future possibilities physically, emotionally, and narratively.

For a different example, consider the World Energy Council’s embrace of experiential futures as part of its triennial Congress and 100th anniversary celebrations last year. To my mind, this channels a different version of the same delightful impetus.

Many thanks then to all at Mithun, and their bold and creative leadership, in particular President Dave Goldberg; as well as a wonderful support team drawn from across the firm’s staff, especially Annie Rummelhoff, Christian Runge, Nate Smith, and Naoe White. Much appreciation also to Danielle Engelman of The Long Now Foundation for joining the dots; and to my fellow event invitee, Chairman Leonard Forsman, for a beautiful welcome and orientation in both time and place, which provided the best possible portal to an open-hearted exploration of alternative futures. Last but not least, a grateful hat-tip to Sam Auster, whose excellent video documentation (my condensed re-edits of his footage above) somehow managed to bottle the lightning of the futures fair at Design 2099.

Related:
> Tomorrow’s Energy Today – for the World Energy Council (Medium)
> Dreaming Together – from the book Made Up: Design's Fictions (pdf version)
> Introducing experiential and participatory futures at the BBC
> THE FUTURES BAZAAR public imagination toolkit
> 1-888-FUTURES with Extrapolation Factory
> The School of Worldbuilding (pdf version)
> Using the Future at NASA (pdf version)
> On Getting Started with Experiential Futures – with The Omidyar Group
> What is the value of futures and foresight? – for the RSA
> The Futures of Everyday Life (pdf version)

Building Time Machines at California Institute of Technology

I haven’t posted here for ages – a story for another time.

Today, I’m writing to share something I’m focused on right now.

This weekend I’m starting a stint as Artist in Residence at Caltech Theater. This is tremendously exciting to me – a chance to bring experiential futures, worldbuilding, and high-speed co-creation to a remarkable and storied institution. For example, one of the spaces we’ll be working in is the Feynman Room, named for the legendary bongo-playing Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate who was active in the theatre community there.

Our first event coming up is called “Immersive Futures Jam” – IFjam for short.

With a select group of participants, including undergraduates, graduates, alumni and staff from Caltech, as well as folks from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the wider community, we’ll be embarking on an ambitious co-creative process; producing immersive, you-are-there experiences of various futures, at the scale of a room, over the span of a weekend.

In a hat-tip to H.G. Wells, I call such room-scale future immersions “Time Machines”. Without quite meaning to, we essentially piloted a highly adaptable format two decades ago in Hawaii, and I’ve since modularized and sharpened it through numerous iterations – in Canada, Mexico, the UK, Singapore, and various parts of the US – with hundreds of students, colleagues, and intrepid volunteer time travellers. This is the first time I’m running it in California.

The very possibility of this edition of IFjam comes down to the vision and will-to-experiment of the unique creative force that is Brian Brophy, Caltech’s long-serving director of Theater Arts. We got to know each other over the past few years while working together on the NASA JPL show Blended Worlds; JPL’s contribution to the most recent instance of Getty Museum’s once-a-decade initiative PST.

A fuller treatment of Time Machines is in the pipeline. But for a sense of how they can look and something of the underlying process, a few starting points: A Pecha Kucha talk given years ago in Chicago. A short piece from The Futurist (the periodical of the World Future Society, as was). And another one from The Economist.

Stay tuned.

Related:
> Experiential Futures for NASA JPL (Library of Possibilities)
> A Time Traveller's Story
> Experiential Futures in The Economist (pdf version)
> Time Machines in The Futurist (pdf)
> Bringing futures to Stanford d.School
> Futures for Bristol
> Ghosts of Futures Past (Hawaii 2050)
> Time Machine / Reverse Archaeology (pdf)
> Using the Future at NASA (pdf version)

La Chose du Futur à Paris

A special edition of The Thing From The Future was distributed to 500 delegates at the UNESCO Youth Forum in Paris last week.

Since 01999 the Youth Forum has been the institutional mechanism for youth (which in the UN system means people aged 15 to 24) to make recommendations to the UNESCO General Conference.

This 9th edition of the Youth Forum incorporated, for the first time, a process aimed at improving participants'  futures literacy, developed by UNESCO's head of foresight Riel Miller. The Future Literacy Knowledge Lab, or FKL, is described in outline here and in detail here [pdf].

From my perspective as an advisor and senior facilitator for the Forum, among the most notable elements of the experience was the juxtaposition of this process, aimed at exploration and emergence, with the formality and fixity of international diplomacy's default settings. Ingenious workarounds were required in order for delegates to be able to converse and co-create in small groups given the geometrically pleasing, but collaboratively disabling, furniture arrangements. The literally nailed-down meeting room configurations reflected a firm expectation of centrally managed, as opposed to open or peer-to-peer, conversations.

How does such an architecture shape what happens, and what doesn't? An instructive contrast may be found in the opening and closing circles of Open Space, a meeting format which both symbolically bespeaks and practically enables something very different; a fluid and participant-driven flexibility (see, for example, Harrison Owen, Expanding Our Now, pp. 82-83). Maybe someone has already compiled a pattern language of meeting spaces. There's much to learn from such cases.

In any event –– despite its best efforts, here the furniture's expectations were not allowed to triumph! Far-reaching futures discussions were had, assumptions were surfaced and questioned, alternatives were articulated, expressive future artifacts and prototypes were created.

And at the end of the Youth Forum futures workshop, a special bilingual English / French The Thing From The Future / La Chose du Futur * was distributed to all attendees, a concrete expression of the intention to democratise and distribute futures thinking far and wide. Now these hundreds of delegates have made their way home to communities all around the world, cards in hand.

Thanks to UNESCO, to Youth Forum delegates –– and especially to Riel Miller and team for their efforts to open space for possible futures, not only in the proceedings themselves, but through providing an experience and a tool to use again in days and years to come.

Of course distributing cards and rearranging spaces are fine ways to begin; meanwhile I wonder about working with the deeper cultural currents in play. How may we make a habit of inviting fuller versions of ourselves to show up in these formal and ritualised settings? How might we offer better hospitality to the unusual, the creative, the crazy and playful and magical and wild and unborn in each of us?  For when it comes to "serious" conversations about the future, these voices too seldom find any place at the table.

Related:
> The Thing From The Future
> The technology of public imagination
> Whose future is this?

* Very special thanks to Cedric Flazinski of N O R M A L S design lab, and to Sandra Coulibaly Leroy of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) for their invaluable translation assistance. And on a semi-related note: bilingual Emglish/French Playsheets for the game are available via the UNESCO website [pdf, A4].

Design is a team sport

I was interviewed recently for Architecture Australia by editor Timothy Moore about the importance of collaboration in foresight and design for the built environment. The conversation grew out of an AA Roundtable we did on related themes in Canberra back in May.

Photo by Lisa McKelvie courtesy of Architecture Australia
From left: Hal Guida, Catherine Townsend, me wearing a slightly pugnacious expression for some reason, Ben Hewitt, Timothy Moore

Both exchanges highlighted for me the great extent to which my work as a futurist within Arup, a global design and engineering firm, consists in providing opportunities for people to share and negotiate disparate perspectives of futures possible, probable and preferable -- as opposed to simply cranking out supposedly futurogenic collateral. I keep thinking of my friend and fellow futurist Jamais Cascio's line, "With enough minds, all tomorrows are visible", a riff on the Open Source dictum known as Linus's Law. The kind of practice that these times call for, especially in the massively multiplayer game of the 21st century city, is built upon a fundamentally Open Source sensibility, a collaborative structure and intent: the meshing of many minds. That means not only that foresight itself should be treated as a team sport (the apt phrase of my former CCA teaching collaborator Jay Ogilvy), but also that for all sorts of design activity, be they explicitly foresight-themed or not, we need to enable significantly more participatory and bottom-up approaches than have traditionally been the norm.

An edited version of the interview appears in the current edition of AA (vol. 101, no. 5, Sept/Oct 2012, pp. 70-76), alongside related discussions with two other "strategic designers". I haven't ever used that label on myself, but it's a handy lasso bundling us together here. The others are Ben Hewitt, South Australia's Government Architect, and Rachel Smith, a transport planner at AECOM in Brisbane, who has also been a curator at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in Berlin. (The piece also runs opposite a great article on "multi-scalar thinking" in architecture by my colleague Michelle Tabet.)

Thanks to Timothy Moore for making both the original panel and follow-up interview happen. Below is the text as published, with some links I've taken the liberty of adding.

***

The future is coming - but there are several of them. As a leader in foresight at Arup Australasia, Stuart Candy's task is to enable people to make considered choices about these potential futures, in the face of the complexity of the environment around them and its rapidly changing context. While he cannot predict what will happen, Candy works out various scenarios for the future by bringing people - and all their anxieties and aspirations - together.

Timothy Moore As a part of Arup's Foresight and Innovation team, you identify and monitor the trends and issues likely to have a significant impact upon the built environment and society at large. You literally look into the future. How do you do this?

Stuart Candy The heart of this work is about serving as a catalyst to enable, encourage and exemplify different ways of looking at things. It is about inviting and at times seducing people into a certain way of thinking, rather than mandating it. As the pioneering corporate futurist Pierre Wack put it, foresight is "the gentle art of reperceiving" - looking at the present in terms of the alternative potentials that it contains, to inform wiser action today.

We set a process in motion whereby people can discover for themselves the choices they face, and the future implications of various paths that might be taken. It's a different philosophy from that of the guru who distributes pearls of wisdom. It's intrinsically collaborative.

An example of this approach in action is the Drivers of Change cards, which the Foresight and Innovation team created. Each set of twenty-five cards looks at a theme - ranging from climate change, to poverty, to oceans - and each card encapsulates a trend or issue that will have an impact on the built environment as change unfolds. The cards cover a huge range of social, technological, environmental, economic and political issues, and we use the cards both internally for our own research and externally to help our clients and partners. (The cards are also publicly available.)

TM How do you go about getting people to see possible futures in terms of making people realize that everyone plays a part in making architecture; that everyone is, in fact, building?

SC There's a 1958 essay, "I, Pencil," written from the pencil's point of view. The pencil says, "not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me." Now, a pencil seems a basic enough artefact, but this pencil has a point: there's far more to it than meets the eye, so no individual knows every detail. It's a complex synthesis of different skill sets and knowledge bases. If that's true of a pencil, its obviously the case for the scale and complexity of things produced by architects and engineers. Nobody can know everything about any project, so what matters is the process of bringing the elements and expertise together to make it possible anyway. We're co-creating these highly complex design outcomes.

And this is also true of the future overall. What we get is the product of everyone's actions, which is just one of many imaginable pathways.

TM By going into the future, there is more uncertainty because of the increasing number of unknown variables. The Long Now Foundation, of which you are a research fellow, looks ten thousand years into the future in order to encourage tong-term thinking.

SC The "long now" is an invitation to see the whole of human history, past and future, through a wide-angle lens. That time horizon comes from the approximate birthdate of agriculture, about ten thousand years ago. It's a seriously big-picture challenge, a time span three or four orders of magnitude longer than most of us are used to thinking, and a terrific provocation to the culture at large. But in most organizations, the relevant version of this challenge is to stretch our collective time horizon out even a decade or two. Certainly, multi-decadal time spans are directly relevant for the buildings, infrastructure and urban environments that we at Arup help to shape, but they are well beyond the typical attention span of most businesses, politics, media and even education.

One thing that a "long now" view makes clear is that different layers of change occur at different rates. For instance, you can't really see or say anything meaningful about climate change on the timescale of a few months or years, so you have to tune your attention in to different timespans, like different radio frequencies, in order to pick up the signals.

TM Do people mistake you as a prophet, because you are far-forward thinking?

SC I think there's a pretty deep atavistic impulse towards prophecy in our culture, which we're very slowly coming to outgrow. The fact that nobody can predict the future should be a clue to the fact that the future is not predictable. Still, some people want bold predictions to act on (or argue with), and hope against hope that you'll provide them. And some so-called futurists are happy to oblige. For now, it seems being a guru is easier to sell than being a thought partner or catalyst. The former is philosophically and politically dubious. The latter is a harder sell, but it has the advantage of being true.

The greater service is to help people towards their own deeper and more thoughtful understanding of change. We provide opportunities for them to become comfortable explicitly acknowledging the degree of ambiguity and uncertainty that's really in the system. And this is surprisingly empowering. Seen this way, the future is a landscape of potentials, and the result of thinking about futures in plural terms is that you can prepare for multiple outcomes and (within your domain of influence) act towards those possibilities you'd like to see happen. This is common sense, but we need to be reminded of it regularly.

TM How is this philosophy demonstrated in your work at Arup?

SC The first external project that I did with Arup in Australia (after moving from the US in late 2011) was for the CEO and executive team of the Sydney Opera House (the original design and build of which was the project that put Arup on the international map). This engagement was about considering some upcoming renovations in a broader context of change. They have three years worth of performances booked already. So when a facility like this wants to change any physical aspect; for example, if they want to do a renovation or a new build, they must factor in significant lead times, and it can take up to five years from planning to project completion. That's half a decade of rapid change, and for a cultural organization in the midst of a technological revolution in how people access and consume cultural artefacts - consider that the iPad didn't exist three years ago - this has big implications for how any renovation process might proceed.

Generally, we shouldn't simply plan for today's problems (and opportunities), because by the time we've solved those, there will be different ones. You can be sure that the people, businesses and places you're designing for will keep changing. Especially when you talk about a design with a life expectancy of decades or longer, down the track that design may be part of a world that's radically different from today. In this light, it suddenly becomes obvious that thinking systematically and creatively on these longer timeframes is not just a nice thing to do, it's crucial to doing good work.