Tangible futures

Victor Lombardi is a design strategist, consultant and lecturer, trained in journalism and music technology, and based in New York City. For a couple of years already, in his consulting practice and at his blog Noise Between Stations, he has been tracking the development of what he calls "tangible futures" -- a cousin concept to future artifacts, experiential futures, ambient foresight, and other ideas at the intersection of design and futures thinking that regularly feature here.

Borrowing an idea from my friend's old column at Salon.com, Mr Rheingold's Neighborhood, I decided to ask Victor four questions via email, which he graciously agreed to answer, after introducing himself...

Victor Lombardi: Stuart, thanks for inquiring about my work. I want to make progress in the world by making technology easier for people, and I try and accomplish that through design, business consulting, and teaching. Lately my focus has been creating educational materials for designers.

SC: How do you define "tangible futures", and what's your history of that idea?

VL: If I remember correctly, the term was coined by Christina Wodtke, a friend of mine. We were partners in a business design consultancy and were exploring ways of helping our clients manage more effectively through awareness of their strategy.

It was around then, in 2004, we saw other firms in our space delivering their recommendations as the proverbial binders of reports, and we didn't think this way of engaging managers significantly changed performance. We saw a lot of fascinating work in the field of futures studies that wasn't on the management radar at all. And we were aware of the work of people like Jeanne Liedtka, from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, who pointed out that strategy is too cognitive; it rarely exists outside of our minds. A purely cognitive expression of strategy makes communication and understanding difficult across an organization.

So we started to consider this problem through the lens of our design experience, asking, "How can we help managers *experience* futures and strategy so that it can more substantially be understood, shared, and acted on?" The working definition became: Tangible Futures are the output of applying design-fueled disciplines like visualization, drama, and film to represent futures and strategies.

Around this time we saw others like The Institute for the Future coming to similar conclusions and developing what they called Artifacts from the Future. This was validating for us.

SC: What are your favourite instances of tangible futures in practice?

VL: Here's two historical examples I love. Imagine it's the mid-19th Century and there are no skyscrapers, much less the giant city skylines we have today like in Manhattan where I am writing this. There are a plethora of issues in helping people understand what a future could be like when we live and work high above the ground. Elisha Graves Otis was responsible for communicating a key part of this vision, that riding in elevators could be safe. He accomplished this through performance...

...during P.T. Barnum's Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York, marked the first time Otis demonstrated his "safety elevator." The invention enabled elevators to travel safely up and down by employing a special spring device that locked in place automatically if the hoisting ropes (later cables) broke. Today's elevators, while far more sophisticated and safer, continue to rely on the same principle.

During the Crystal Palace demonstration, Otis rode a lifting platform up an open shaft. When he reached the top the hoisting rope was cut. The crowd gasped, expecting the elevator to come crashing down, but the safety device held fast. "All safe, gentleman, all safe," he announced.

from http://www.otis.fi/news/newsdetail/0,1368,CLI1_NID16925_RES1,00.html

Another facet of this challenge was helping architects, city officials, business owners, and citizens visualize what those buildings would look like, taking into account building designs, materials, and zoning laws. Hugh Ferriss illustrated these structures through dramatic perspectives and stunning lighting effects to communicate both the architectural details as well as the emotional effects such changes would bring.

See http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/avery/da/ferriss.html

SC: What role does this kind of practice play in a typical organisation, and how can it perform in an ideal situation?

VL: Organizations who do this now are the ones you already know about. The city planners in places like Dubai who need to plan decades into the future and do so by building physical models and simulations. And it's the companies that have already mastered the tangible aspect of this practice, design-dependent companies like BMW. For example, they recently created a concept car covered in stretchable fabric that allows the car to change shapes...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTYiEkQYhWY

As opposed to a product development concept that directly influences what is made in the near-term, this sort of vision concept connects the long-term strategy with the attitudes and practices of the organization. As officials from BMW said, "It is in the nature of such visions that they do not necessarily claim to be suitable for series production. Rather, they are intended to steer creativity and research into new directions."

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/06/bmw-builds-a-ca.html

As rapid prototyping tools become more accessible -- from software frameworks to 3D printing to video editing tools -- more people will naturally adopt them to tangibly express futures and strategies. But, as is so common in media today, individuals may widely adopt the practice before organizations do.

SC: Why do you think this concept has emerged now, and where do you see it going?

VL: Rather than re-invent the wheel, I'll refer you to Alex Soojung-Kim Pang at the Institute for the Future who blogged about five ways that their Artifacts from the Future are valuable:

1. artifacts reach some people who don't feel they have time to closely read long reports
2. their tangible, specific nature forces us to think hard about what we really believe
3. thinking about artifacts makes you think hard about the interrelationships of technological, social, economic, and cultural factors
4. the shift to artifacts reflects our own sense that design is going to be a critical strategic skill in the future
5. many of our clients actually make things. They already communicate with each other in a language of prototypes

http://future.iftf.org/2006/06/artifacts_from_.html

Many thanks, Victor, for sharing your thoughts with us.

Related posts:
> Object-oriented futuring
> Cheap prototypes, valuable insights
> Design fiction is a fact
> Where futures meets experience design

Barbershop futures revisited, part II

/Continued from a previous post.../

There are many well travelled, cosmopolitan, and highly informed people operating in the futures field, but few can claim to have experienced such systematic first-hand exposure to the many views about the future held across different lifestyles, cultures and geographies, as Maya van Leemput. Her post-doctoral project "Agence Future" consisted of riding around the world (on a recumbent bicycle) conducting in-depth interviews on camera, with some 400 people in 20 countries, over a 30-month period. The common thread of discussion was their attitudes and understandings regarding the future(s). I was delighted when my post "Barbershop Futures" about futures-related conversation elicited a detailed response from her, which I posted under "Barbershop Futures Revisited, part I". Here, then, is part II, being further reflections in light of thoughts Maya offered; not a literal response to her, perhaps, so much as another run at further developing a few of the same ideas.

As I suggested in the original piece, to find oneself talking futures with all sorts of people is one of the core aspects of this line of work. There may be nearly as many differing conceptions about what being a futurist means as there are people who label themselves that way (incidentally, a topic touched on in an earlier post, "The meming of futures"). Attempts to codify and generate consensus on the nature of the profession are many, but as they proliferate, paradoxically they seem to contribute as much to the diversity of the field as to its consolidation. The Association of Professional Futurists provides one take on what futuring is all about. Swinburne University's Strategic Foresight FAQ (especially from Q7 onwards) offers another. I think my favourite statement of what it means to work in this field is HRCFS founder Jim Dator's list of "attributes of a futurist", crowned with the wonderful notion of aiglatson -- yearning for the future -- which can serve as a kind of litmus test for one's readiness to embark on futuring Manoa-style. (If you haven't seen Dator's list, do check it out. It may be that if the intellectual jack-of-all-trades, Renaissance woman conception of the ideal futurist that he describes appeals to you, then you have the holistic sensibility, not to mention the kind of grandiose transdisciplinary aspirations, that ought to serve you well.)

Regardless of the details of one's philosophy or outlook, it is surely an inescapable characteristic of being a futurist that one finds oneself constantly in conversation with all sorts of people about the future, whatever that means to them. Typically they have plenty to say, and as Maya points out, when a chord is struck, folks may unexpectedly open up on all kinds of big themes on the nature of life, the universe, and everything.

Accordingly, one of the necessary (but not, I hasten to add, sufficient) steps to becoming a futurist is simply to declare this early in each conversation with a new person. I don't like being -- or at any rate being seen as -- monomaniacal, but part of the "getting to know you" process typically involves discussing what you do for a living. Put a stake in the ground as a futurist, and you can have a conversation with virtually anyone about their conception of the future. If this is something you enjoy, you'll be delighted to find it's one of the key parts of the job. And I want to suggest that there's a give and take here; the trick to communicating about futures lies not only in finding new ways to describe the field, ways to articulate it that are meaningful and useful to others. It is also about the reciprocal process of gradually mapping in your own mind how your particular interlocutor, as well as people in general, conceptualise it. Consequently, an increasingly fine-tuned awareness of the nuances and variations in attitudes, by psychological, temperamental, professional, cultural, and other dimensions, is to my way of thinking a crucial aspect of developing as a futurist, and an important part of what one takes incrementally and osmotically from the body of conversational data. (Of course, if I'm really not in the mood for a detailed discussion, I find that simply telling people I'm a graduate student in political science is a good way to keep the conversation short.)

In the course of having these conversations, you steadily accumulate a kind of expertise on how lots of different people think about the future. But there is an art to conversation, and as the previous paragraph suggests, both give and take are involved. One part is listening and understanding, probing for comprehension of an aspect of someone's world view that has in many cases never been explicitly or carefully considered by them before. The other is a sort of advocacy for more rigorous, detailed, rich, systematic, creative, well considered kind of thinking about futures. Maya referred to Wendell Bell's mention of the role of advocacy in futures. But I sense that at levels both general and specific there's a balance to be struck with the former process -- inquiry. Although the relative importance of the two is bound to vary according to circumstances, I don't think one can advocate effectively without sensitive inquiry.

Someone recently sent me an article (Andrea Shapiro, "Applying Lessons from Public Health to Organizational Change", The Systems Thinker, September 2003) which usefully nailed the distinction between these two as follows:

In The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (Currency/Doubleday, 1994), Richard Ross and Charlotte Roberts describe the value of both advocacy and inquiry. To them, advocacy involves expressing a certain position convincingly, forcefully, and clearly; it requires presenting your own assumptions, distinguishing between data and opinion, and articulating the logic and reasoning behind your conclusions. In contrast, inquiry means seeking to understand another's position by listening well and reflecting back what you heard, as well as seeking to understand the data and reasoning behind their conclusions and avoiding imposing your own interpretation on them.

Maya describes the animation and engagement that result when people warm to their future theme. I share her delight in being able to draw that out. At the same time, my original post alluded to the confusions or preconceptions that we futurists often encounter. These are not mutually exclusive; for instance, my experience with Wally the barber had elements of both. While eager to talk about the future, he was somewhat confounded at first by the idea that I wasn't thinking of it principally as a predictive endeavour.

I have found that plural or alternative futures thinking requires a sort of big-picture paradigm shift that some people don't quite grasp right away. Resistance to the plural view of futures is not incompatible with enthusiasm for "studying the future". I've been struggling with the question of what it is psychologically, educationally, developmentally or temperamentally (to name a few possible factors) that makes the difference between people "getting" futures or not -- and I'd love to hear readers' thoughts on this issue. I'm also currently going through some fascinating material on the psychology of counterfactual thinking (see this post for some remarks on counterfactuality, and expect more on that topic to appear here at the sceptical futuryst). Indeed, many of the thoughts presented here revolve around exploring more effective ways to communicate foresight, alternative futures, and long-termism (three interrelated but analytically separable modes of thinking).

But here's the bottom line, if there is one: inquiry and advocacy are both required in the futures communication process. After the quote above, the author continues;"Balancing advocacy and inquiry is especially important when dealing with apathy or resistance." It has been my observation that alternative futures thinking can be useful and engaging for pretty much anyone. However, apathy and resistance are not uncommon, so being able to deal with them in conversation is essential.

It was my own sense that I'd failed to communicate futures to full effect in terms interesting and relevant to a hairdresser which prompted the original piece. And Maya pointed out that I might have tried moving beyond framing the field in terms of its possible economic value to the barber's business to describe the field's big picture relevance. I take her point and agree completely. Yet the tension will likely to remain between, on the one hand, encouraging a future orientation to do better (or cheaper, or for longer) what we already do; and on the other hand, using conversation about futures to move beyond today's problems, and dream big, and construct idiosyncratic or dissenting visions of the individual, family, community, and planet. In the former case, inquiry trumps advocacy, as futures thinking is brought into the service of existing priorities, and its revolutionary potential to transform thought and action is defused to that extent. In the latter case, advocacy can trump inquiry, and if you push its transformative potential too far on a party unwilling to entertain that, they shut it out; increased resistance or apathy (varieties of the same syndrome -- denial of responsibility?) may ensue.

Hazardous and difficult though it may be, one thing is for sure in all this: we need to keep working on the Great Futures Conversation. Thanks to Maya, and to Wally, for the impetus to continue evolving these ideas.

Barbershop futures revisited, part I

A colleague of mine, an exceedingly perceptive, forthright and charming futurist from Belgium, Dr Maya van Leemput, recently emailed me in response to a post put up in August, "Barbershop Futures"...

I was asked to write about futures thinking for a project here ... that wants to address the general apathy that the organisers believe might underlie the local success of the extreme right.

A wrap in two lines: 2017 is a cultural project in Antwerp, Belgium, with free performances and events in public spaces of the city, playing with the idea that art can save the world. It publishes an old style printed 'Paper of the Future' that tries to give its readers some food for thought about local and global futures.

[T]his organisation wants to encourage people to think for themselves and preferably "a bit further than their noses are long" (a Flemish expression I didn't want to keep from you). So I wrote one introductory piece for their Future Tabloid already and now they've decided to keep up the effort after the elections too and want me to contribute regularly.

When they asked me this I had been reading your blog for a while and thought of an "open letter to a colleague" in response to your Barbershop futures post. Something that would let me be personal and professional at the same time. What do you say?

I said go for it. Here's the open letter, unedited:

Dear Stuart,

Compliments on your blog, motivating stuff.

I can relate to your barbershop futures experience. I like the image of the hairdresser that doesn't need a futurist and the futurist that needs a hairdresser (take this literally, I see your 12-months uncut style in my mind's eye). Your discussion of "the misunderstanding that my interest in the future meant I would be willing or able to forecast" and your thoughts on the usefulness of futures thinking were helpful. I'm confronted with the same misunderstandings and like your conclusion: "As to many of the things that matter to us, we can do something about them. The something (or various alternative somethings) we can do, and why and how, and to what possible ends -- identifying and acting upon these is, to my mind, the purpose of futures thinking."

I have been holding futures conversations with the hairdresser on principle since 02000. I say 'the' hairdresser, but actually there were more than a few: in Antwerp, Brussels, London, Antigua, and like you, in San Francisco. The first time I hadn't planned it, it just happened. It was in my home town in Belgium and when Vincent, who had his shop in a hip and happening street in the centre of town, heard that I study 'what and how people think about the future', he was unstoppable. "So have you heard? You must have heard?" he asked in a complicit tone. "You must know what I mean. It's really important, we're heading for a big change, people are changing, more and more people know, we're moving on to the next level, the energy in Antwerp will turn around soon." He went on to explain the history of the cosmos, the human psyche and the world, in true new age spirit mixing 101 mystic, spiritual, religious and scientific beliefs. The reason he told me this, he said, was that I was in a position to spread the word, people would listen to me more than to him. This particular hairdresser certainly felt he could use a futurist. He wanted me to go out and tell the truth (his truth) about the future.

Advocacy, Wendell Bell sees it as a task of futures studies. How many study the future to explicitly proclaim one and only one future, the true future? There are some. Most futurists advocate futures thinking itself however, I guess that's where I am too.

The kinds of goals you were pursuing with your hairdresser when trying to work out a view of future possibilities in relation with his business, are probably among the most widely accepted and applied objectives of our trade. To take one set of (often economically oriented and as such pre-defined) goals and search for the various ways in which these could be achieved or challenged often makes sense even to those with an otherwise short-range outlook. The survival, growth or decline of economic units (whether they are charming small businesses like Wally's or large corporations) mostly concern questions of change within an otherwise unchanging framework.

You remark that "futures can indeed be helpful, for almost anyone, in clarifying where they may be able to make a difference, and where they are less likely to do so." So in that case, does the hairdresser really not need a futurist? He lives in a neighbourhood (the changing nature of which, by the way, might affect his business). He might have children. He lives in a world that is threatened by human greed. He is part of a nation the leaders of which are trying very hard to determine what the future for everyone on earth will be like, regardless of what futures people might choose for themselves. Does Wally think the fact that the same shampoos he buys in bulk to wash your elegant locks, are being sold in single-use packaging in third world countries, affects the future? And actually, does he give a damn?

I guess you'll be off to the hairdresser again at some point. If the conversation turns to futures, I'm curious to read about it again and hope you can steer it beyond the barbershop perspective. As you suggest, futures thinking is relevant to almost anyone. I see it as part of our job to help people experience this for themselves. Maybe it will turn out to be impossible to escape from being "the proverbial hammer that is constantly looking for a nail to strike" after all.

When futurists start asking difficult questions back, that's when things get interesting. It's certainly a kick. I ask my hairdressers about personal, local and global futures, best-case and worst-case scenarios, expectations and interpretations. We talk about what's needed for an ideal to come nearer and what can be done to avoid the worst. We talk about who's responsible for getting what done, about the means and the paths. Sometimes I draw a complete blank but a lot of the time, people get into telling me all about their hopes and fears as if I'm not some unusual stranger but an old mate that they can confide their secret ambitions to. I recommend it.

I've got carried away thinking about the barbershop and futures conversations and haven't even got round to addressing the matter of the crystal-ball and prediction. That's for next time: I'll get back to you.

It's a pleasure to receive such a thoughtful, extended response to a post. Thank you, Maya! Although I doubt I'll do justice to every point made here, there are a few thoughts I can offer by way of a reply.

/To be continued.../

Barbershop futures

A couple of months ago, I got a haircut, for the first time in over a year. (Stay with me now, there's a perfectly good reason why I'm opening with that piece of pure trivia.)

The gentleman who did the deed, who introduced himself as Wally, was originally from Hong Kong, and having come to America as a young man, had spent the past 25 years cutting hair in San Francisco. He was, he hastened to add, still poor -- but he cheerfully told me about his ambitions, his life, and the likelihood that he would keep cutting hair for many years to come.

We got around to talking about what had brought me to the city, and the fact that I was a student of futures -- no, not the financial kind, but "the future" plural -- alternative possibilities.

Wally's eyes lit up. "You study the future!" he cried. "Tell me about the future!"

Now, while his response was uncommonly enthusiastic, the misunderstanding that my interest in the future meant I would be willing or able to forecast what would happen in the news the following day, or the appearance of the next customer to walk through the door, was not at all unusual. It happens to me all the time. People hear that I'm in futures and, depending on some combination of how credulous they are, and how silly I seem (maybe it's the hair?), frequently an assumption is made that I'm about to make an outrageous claim arising from some cursory crystal-ball based research. They don't know anything about me at that point, so the ridicule is at least pre-emptive (sheesh! at least give me a chance to show how ridiculous I am). There's often a dash of hope mixed in there with the ridicule, too, which is interesting, like there's a private wish that I'll be able to let them in on some secret to predicting the future, even if they're already 95% sure I'm full of shit.

In any event, Wally's interest was genuine, and I was able to explain that my work in the field is not in fact oriented toward predicting The Future, but rather toward helping people consider a range of possibilities relevant to their situation, and thus perhaps to choose more wisely between them. I told him that I and my colleagues work with governments, communities, businesses -- any group interested in thriving in conditions of change -- dealing with process more than content. This is because first, even the broad themes can vary hugely depending on the client or topic in question, and as for the "content" of the future itself -- well, it varies hugely depending on a whole lot of things.

Wally was insistent. How could any of this apply to his business? Ah. This certainly got me thinking. I knew, and still know, nothing about the hair industry. But I ventured that something could happen suddenly to affect the viability of his business. He pointed out that people had been cutting hair professionally for six thousand years, and they weren't likely to stop next week. Touché, Wally.

I ruminated, partly aloud, partly internally, about things that could affect Wally's modest barbershop on Van Ness Street. Fashions could change; people might decide to cut their own hair, or not to cut it at all. Shaved heads, do-it-yourself style, could develop a mass appeal. Military conscription might consign a proportion of his clientele to standard issue, regulation-length buzzcuts. A widespread health problem, such as a lice outbreak, could have the same effect. On a longer timescale, humans might evolve hairlessness -- or elect to disable our follicles through some kind of chemical or electronic therapy. Wally remained unperturbed.

I noticed that he had posted a sign advertising scalp and face massage -- here, then, an alternative business model. We agreed that if, perchance, circumstance should pose an unforeseen disruption to his hair-cutting activities, he'd always have the massage to fall back on.

I left, 45 minutes later, hair a couple of inches shorter than intended (the added toll of engaging your barber in a conversation he wants to prolong) not entirely sure that I had demonstrated to his satisfaction, or to my own, the strategic usefulness of futures thinking for those in the haircutting trade. But he had, apparently, been persuaded that it was worthwhile, interesting and -- importantly -- possible to think about alternative futures. It could open up new avenues of exploration; not all of them, thankfully, based on catastrophic lice infestations or burgeoning military engagements. (Damage control and risk management are merely among the more easily grasped practical applications of futures thinking.)

What this encounter made me realise was, really, two things. The first is that I need to be careful not to become the proverbial hammer looking everywhere for a nail to strike. What Wally really needed after 25 years of steady but unspectacular business was not a futurist, but maybe a bit of local advertising and a more realistic price schedule (charging just $12 a haircut, in San Francisco, no wonder he wasn't getting rich). The second realisation, in contrast, was that futures can indeed be helpful, for almost anyone, in clarifying where they may be able to make a difference, and where they are less likely to do so.

To explain: that occasional dismissive reaction to my chosen specialisation, which I described above, is one end of a spectrum, the "you can't predict the future" end. The other end of the spectrum is the "future is self evident" end. It's possible for people to believe both these things simultaneously, and what's more, to be right. If they believed the former today about the price of oil per barrel in 2020, I'd have to agree. But if they believed the latter about the likely fate of a drunk stumbling on to a busy highway, I'd be inclined to share that view also. There are lots of layers of change occurring simultaneously, and to make sense of them requires sensitivity to the relative momentum and internal dynamics of each. To me, this field is in large part about exploring the massive grey area between the white of complete predictability and the black of complete unpredictability -- which are both categories, I would argue, of phenomena for which one can refuse to take responsibility. No wonder people rely on them so much.

Most change does not occur at these extremes, however. There's a certain amount of regularity in how things operate, and persistence in the patterns of change they adopt, and a certain amount you can do to influence them one way or another. And you might as well act consistently with what you'd like to see happen. As Wally put it; "If you plant roses, it doesn't come up vegetables". This was his own rather beautiful and profound expression of the principle that as ye sow, so shall ye reap. (He was elaborating his karmic philosophy that if he ripped his customers off, he wouldn't be able to sleep so well at night; which was reassuring.)

As to many of the things that matter to us, we can do something about them. The something (or various alternative somethings) we can do, and why and how, and to what possible ends -- identifying and acting upon these is, to my mind, the purpose of futures thinking.

Maybe I should get my hair cut more often.

/Barbershop futures revisited/