Augmenting Cities

Augmenting Cities image via.

Niantic CEO John Hanke opens the event | Photo: Niantic / Knight Foundation

We were excited to take part in an invitational symposium a few weeks ago, Augmenting Cities, that brought together under one roof 150 game designers, artists and urbanists from a number of countries "to reflect on how people, cities, and technology will evolve and be shaped through augmented reality (AR)".

The gathering was convened by groundbreaking AR games company Niantic –– the folks behind Pokémon Go, Ingress and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite –– together with the Knight Foundation, a leading urban philanthropic fund. It was hosted at the Oakland Museum of California, itself part of a city that has recently seen rapid and far-reaching transformation through the Bay Area's latest tech boom.

As the event description notes, "Just as mobile communication and computing has altered the evolution of cities over the last 20 years, AR technology stands to fundamentally change how we connect with each other and experience communities for decades to come." But what might that fundamental change look like?

USC Situation Lab director Jeff Watson (centre) speaks on a panel with (left to right): Ina Fried (Axios; moderator), Gene Becker (Samsung), Ross Finman (Niantic), Ilana Lipsett (IFTF), and Kevin Slavin (The Shed) | Photo: Stuart Candy / Situation Lab

So on the back of two days of presentations and panel discussions by game and experience design luminaries, including Felix Barrett (founder of Punchdrunk), Sarah Brin (Meow Wolf strategic partnerships director), audio artist Duncan Speakman, game designer Katie Salen (UC Irvine), and Niantic founder John Hanke –– as well as our own Jeff Watson (director of USC Situation Lab) and Sitlab collaborator Jen Stein (creative lead at Experimental Design) –– we were asked to devise and run the culminating session, an afternoon's activity for all participants to explore possible futures in this area.

Our mission was to come up with a hands-on, playful, and collaborative intervention that would help develop not only deeper social connections among attendees, but also potentially actionable initiatives in this fast-changing urban AR design space. With around 150 participants and only two hours to get through generating, refining, selecting, and sharing out concepts, it was a worthy challenge.

I led process design and facilitation with a fantastic team made up of Stein, Watson, and CMU Situation Lab associate Ceda Verbakel. We realised that thanks to the venue's particular layout and the number of attendees, players would have to take these co-creative steps at the same time while sited in different locations. This helped to birth, at last, a project that had been gestating for some time; a self-contained facilitation kit.

Participant teams proceed through the Urban Playshop staged by Situation Lab at the Augmenting Cities symposium | Photo: Niantic / Knight Foundation

Photo: Niantic / Knight Foundation

Photo: Niantic / Knight Foundation

In teams of three or four players, future-artifact ideas were incepted using combinatorial prompts from a modified version of our game The Thing From The Future, with ideation rounds timeboxed at 3–5 minutes. This first phase allowed folks to explore in relatively open fashion to start with, and produced a wide variety of imaginative responses. In the second phase, each team selected two of their most promising ideas from the collection that they had generated together, surfacing some of their most thematically relevant concepts and provocations. They then partnered up with another team, to receive feedback and discover which of the two candidate concepts should be developed, in the third and home stretch of the Playshop, into a pitch or advertisement to share live on stage with everyone in the last session of the conference.

We at Situation Lab don't always have the time to write our projects up for sharing more widely, although we have featured at our website some of the gameplay approaches and variations developed over several years, and we continually partner with groups around the world, with a focus on values-aligned initiatives and organisations, to offer customised processes that scaffold rigorous imagination, co-creative exploration, and strategic conversation.

Last year for instance, we ran sessions or whole events in this design space with, to name a few, the Omidyar Group, Pennsylvania's Department of Education, Alaska's Cook Inlet Tribal Council, Mexico City's Laboratorio para la Ciudad, the Association of Professional Futurists, and Institute for the Future (IFTF) with the World Bank Climate Investment Funds. In 02019 so far, Sitlab has collaborated with, among others, the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Stanford d.school, the Obama Foundation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the brand-new Pittsburgh high school City of Bridges, and (in collaboration with IFTF's Governance Futures Lab) United States Conference of Mayors gatherings in Austin and Honolulu.

This post is prompted by a desire to share a bit more of what we've been doing, and more particularly by the terrific energy generated in this initiative. For more information on Augmenting Cities check out the event webpage, overview (pdf), and recap.

Participants devise and share ideas using a specially adapted version of The Thing From The Future | Photo: Stuart Candy / Situation Lab

Photo: Stuart Candy / Situation Lab

Many thanks to our fantastic Playshop participants, to our awesome facilitation team, and to Niantic and Knight Foundation for spearheading the initiative.

We look forward to further developments in this exciting and fast-moving area, and find it hopeful that processes like these –– supporting rigorous imagining in emerging design spaces, as they are being explored and mapped –– are rapidly finding their way into many organisational and community toolkits, to help new ideas and their implications come into focus.

(Report also posted at Situation Lab website. This version updated 22oct19.)

Related:
> Bringing Futures to Stanford d.school
> On Foresight in Organisations
> On Getting Started in Experiential Futures
> The Thing From The Future / Sitlab project page
> Gaming Futures Literacy (article)
> Transforming the Future (book)

What if unions were software?

On this day, Canada and the United States commemorate the contributions and hard-won rights of workers, which began to be recognised in the late 19th century.

Noting the significance of the annual Labour Day holiday (or Labor Day, if you insist), the former President of the Canadian Labour Congress once observed, "Lots of people lost their lives in order to establish the right to refuse unsafe work and the right to be treated fairly and without discrimination."

Still, today discrimination in hiring persists and equal pay for women remains elusive.

But what if the role and goals of unions were to be embedded in the algorithms pervading the operations of 21st century organisations? If, as Lawrence Lessig declares, "Code is law", what if unions were software?

This full-page advertisement from the year 02035 appears in the current volume of MISC, "a journal of strategic insight and foresight". The issue's theme is Women.

The ad copy reads:

In just a decade, Mortal Labour’s blockchain-certified algorithms have quietly revolutionised working conditions in North America. 

Since 2025, our automated hiring, teambuilding and compensation tools have brought Fortune 500 companies and government agencies across the continent to unprecedented levels of workplace equity and parity. So today, whatever your gender, appearance, or background, you can be confident of getting placed in the right role, at the right time, and with the right pay rate. Bye bye, bias. 

This is not your grandmother's Union. We're the original blockchain "Younion" – admired and copied around the world. With automated dues and dividends, you may not even realise that you're already a member.

This is the work of Christine McGlade, founder and creative director at Analytical Engine Interactive, and Ryan Taylor, a practising impact designer. Both are MDes candidates in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University, and they cooked this up while taking my class in Experiential Futures last semester.

The following page in the mag's print edition explains:

In light of the trends currently unfolding in the fields of artificial intelligence, workplace culture, and social values, we hypothesize a version of the year 2035 in which gender equality in compensation, distribution of power, and recognition are realized – finally – by taking flawed human decision-making out of the equation. On this basis, we generated an office artifact from the year 2035: an advertisement for the Union of the Future. 

In this version of 2035, education, placement, recruitment, hiring, and team formation are all controlled by an algorithm. The “Younion” perfectly matches tasks that need doing with individuals who have demonstrated the competencies suited to doing them. Blockchain-certified, the Younion guarantees team diversity, optimum innovation, and absolute wage parity based on value and not gender. The Younion takes the bias of the bottom line.

The ad does indeed start to look like a fragment of a possible, and in some ways quite upbeat, future, considering the rapid rise in workplace automation reducing availability of human jobs; the integration of algorithms into hiring processes to offset human bias; the emerging use of blockchain technology to enable independent verification of a candidate's qualifications (such as university degrees); and the potential of labour organisations to accept the challenge of developing new models for protecting workers in the face of technological disruptions.

By the same token, we would be wise not to overlook the potential for these variables to net out the opposite way –– with more elaborate, technologically black-boxed bias, at least as opaque as analogue decision-making has ever been. The notion of a blockchain-enabled, bias-busting "Younion", then, is perhaps a positive vision of what law professor Frank Pasquale calls for under the banner of algorithmic accountability.

***

The choice of "Women" as the theme for this issue followed a widely read article in The Atlantic last year claiming a dearth of women in futures, which prompted a valuable discussion among members of the profession, and the appearance of at least two lists of female futurists practising around the world.

MISC is out now on newsstands, and available to order here.

A pdf of the special feature "The Future According to Women" can be found here.

***

Special thanks to Franz Steiner of Steiner Creative for permission to use the image appearing in the ad.

Much appreciation to Ashley Perez Karp and Emily Empel of Idea Couture for sharing the published material back with us.

And well done to Christine and Ryan for a deft and timely piece of experiential futures work.

I find it pleasing to contemplate the in-world (diegetic) advertisement as a next-generation twist on Wired's long-running and creatively inspiring feature Found: Artifacts from the Future, which sadly was consigned to the past in 02013.

Related:
> The Future of Church
> Wired artifacts gallery
> Found Futures
> Future jamming 101
> If women ruled the world

Journalism from the future

(List below last updated 04may21)

***

I recently joined the advisory board of a startup called Scout, a crowdfunded project out of Seattle that's "accelerating the creation of a better future through stories, conversations, and prototypes". In other words, the initiative is about developing a platform combining journalism and science fiction. A discussion with Scout's co-founders Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath about how those two traditions come together reminded me of something I've been meaning to share here.

Every now and then, there surfaces a piece of writing that uses the formats and tropes of nonfiction reportage to explore a future scenario diegetically. Such writing can dramatise a point of view on the future(s) to great effect. To say it's diegetic means that it's framed "from" or "within" the hypothetical, as opposed to the more common, and literal-minded, mode of explicit speculation about what could or "will" happen from the vantage point of today.

Conventional prospective or speculative journalism holds the future at arm's length, pontificating. Diegetic reporting actually goes there. It's journalism's version of the "artifact from the future".

Now, scenario writing for formal foresight processes often uses a similar communicative gambit. Still, I find it refreshing when real journos and writers use their skillsets and bully pulpits around the mediascape to tackle this territory. Not to denigrate the efforts of *cough* well-meaning futures types, but when a writer has mastery of those forms and genres which authoritatively mediate developments in the wider world (or seem to), it gives an enormous boost to their readers' capacity to entertain a hypothetical context.  This can range from breaking-news reports to long form historical analysis. In any event, part of what makes future journalism tick is the same thing that can make asserting possibilities in materiality so effective: it brings the future to life.

Another vector to this post comes from The Economist, which a few months ago launched The World If..., a welcome (nay, overdue) effort from a mainstream media brand to systematise some kind of imaginative engagement with possibilities. But in selecting the format they missed a big opportunity. Instead of using their own journalistic idiom to perform future events and analysis, compellingly demonstrating to readers the cultural, commercial, political and strategic implications of each "what if", the articles peer at the possibilities from an armchair planted firmly in the present.

So for those occasions when scenarios are best communicated in writing, we should seek to get a better handle on what works, and why. Below is a starter list of diegetic "journalism from the future" articles. What could be called "future longreads" are starred. *

By the way, let us distinguish what's covered here from a cloud of related approaches which deserve examination elsewhere:
- Newspapers from the future: a classic, even clichéd way to mediate a future scenario, but with good reason. Cases range from the Yes Men's brilliant 02008 real-world intervention The New York Times Special Edition, to Near Future Laboratory's recent paper about the future of football, to the famous prop in Back to the Future Part II [as per the pic at the top of this post; and while it's true that this isn't exactly an example of what this post is about, BTTF Day was just recently – so there we are].

- Scenarios: Stories produced by futurists specifically for strategic conversation-prodding purposes often incorporate diegetic, and frequently first-person, accounts of future events. Like this.
- Future headlines: These are a staple of shorthand scenario-writing (see Ogilvy and Schwartz, Plotting Your Scenarios, p. 9).

- Video/audio news reports: there are a lot of these around, the main lesson of which to date appears to be that they are super hard to do well. The best might still be Orson Welles's brilliant 01938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which is very nearly an experiential scenario (it's discussed at length in terms of its effectiveness and ethical calculus here, pp. 272 ff).

- Diegetic future documentary: see here.
- Entire books framed as documents of a future or alternative present: a favourite example, offhand, is Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain, the verisimilitude and plausibility of which are bolstered with in-story textual artifacts such as scientific journal references. Five centuries earlier, Thomas More's Utopia did something similar (see here pp. 266-267).

***

Kate Aronoff, The Intercept
With a Green New Deal, Here’s What the World Could Look Like for the Next Generation†
Set in 02043 (published 02018)

† Note: This piece illustrates a fairly common halfway measure, starting with a future vignette then reverting to present-day analysis. (Frum's article below is similarly structured.) This particular example is notable because it went on to inspire a widely-viewed "video from the future", narrated in the first person by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Todd L. Burns, Music Journalism Insider (Substack)

Music Journalism In The Year 2221, 02221 (02021)

See contributions by Dan Ozzi and Luke O'Neil; the rest are non-diegetic

Alan S. Drake, The Oil Drum
USA 2034: A Look Back at the 25th Anniversary Year, 02034 (02007)

Stephen Eisenman, Newcity (Chicago)
Pussy Hat Project, Black Lives Matter and the Brady Campaign Demand Repeal of Gun Control Laws, 02018 (02017)

Mohamed A. El-Erian, Bloomberg
Imagining the U.K. and the EU Three Years After Brexit, 02019 (02016)

James Fallows, The Atlantic
* Countdown to a Meltdown, 02016 (02005)

Niall Ferguson, Time
* The Nation That Fell To Earth, 02031 (02006)

David Frum, The Atlantic
How to Build an Autocracy, 02021 (02017)

Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone
* Goodbye, Miami, 02030 (02013)

Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal
Hillary's Concession Speech, June 02008 (May 02008)

Damon Linker, The Week
After Trump loses: An ominous American future imagined, 02019 (02016)

New York Times Op-eds From The Future (Series)
Ted Chiang, It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning, 02059 (02019)
Hannu Rajaniemi, Keep Your Augmented Reality. Give Me a Secret Garden., Unstated (02019)

Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic
How American Politics Went Insane, 02020 (02016)

Michael Rogers, NBC News
Synthetic actors: an interview from the future, 02022 (02005)
What is the worth of words? 02025 (02006)

Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch.com
* The Age of Mammals: Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century, 02026 (02006)

Alex Steffen, TheNearlyNow.com (Series)
This Earthly Sphere, 02026 (02017)
California's Heroic Future, 02027 (02017)
* In San Patricio, a community struggles with transformation, 02025 (02017)

Bruce Sterling, Wired
Dispatches from the Hyperlocal Future, 02017 (02007)

David Wasserman, FiveThirtyEight
You’ll Likely Be Reading One Of These 5 Articles The Day After The Election, November 02016 (October 02016)

***

This is a stub; no doubt there are many more instances around. I'd be happy to add (and credit) suggestions that readers may share.

***

Updates:
> 04may21: added Burns's Music Journalism Insider special edition featuring diegetic future dispatches from Ozzi and O'Neil
> 03jun19: added NY Times Op-eds From the Future as well as the Aronoff piece
> 03mar17: added Eisenman article on gun control and third Steffen piece
> 03feb17: added Frum article on Trump's authoritarianism; opens with a future vignette

> 31jan17: added Henninger piece; also blogged here at the time of publication in 02008

> 28jan17: added two Steffen articles; the first entries in an anticipatory journalism series

> 04nov16: added Wasserman article on the US election

> 19oct16: added Linker article on Trump; thanks to Jake Dunagan

> 12aug16: added Rauch article on American politics; only a partial example

> 30jun16: added El-Erian article on Brexit

Related:
> A history of experiential futures
> Death of a President
> The New York Times Special Edition
> Video reports from the future
> Four future news clips from MIT
> Humans have 23 years to go
> The Future of Church
> Foresight is a right

Found: The Future of Church

An unearthed future artifact, and the story behind it.

A few years back I worked with Wired magazine on their wonderful monthly feature "Found". I had been inspired by this series during our early work developing experiential futures practice, about a decade ago now, and by 02011 had done a fair amount of "artifact from the future" creation (especially with Jake Dunagan via our jointly-run public art outfit, FoundFutures, staging live encounters with future artifacts and scenes in everyday life).

It was an honour to be involved as a freelance contributor to the magazine, helping to flesh out these playful snapshots of possible futures, and seeing where we might push the envelope a bit.

Each month editor Chris Baker and I would hop on a phone call and iterate on possible concepts to inform image production. One time he brought the idea of the "Health Spa of the Future", and I excitedly proposed making a future spa brochure to tuck inside the magazine; a sort of diegetic insert, and a twist on the SOP of using the back page. Unfortunately, the cost of a separate print run was prohibitive. (The Future Health Spa still ended up being a pretty neat image.)

The concepts Chris brought to the table were usually part-developed already, but one I eagerly initiated for us to explore together came from a news item I'd seen in May 02011:

[N]euroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people. (CNN)

According to this research, "Apple was actually stimulating the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith." (BBC News)

The Future of Church!

Here was a different cultural register from the Future of Health Spas, Yard Sales, Sporting Events, Doorbells, etc. And this image could come, I suggested, from the mashup of a house of worship and the Apple Store, playfully reworking the architecture and symbology -- altars, icons, stained glass, and so on.

Chris persuaded me that a stained glass window alone could be equally evocative but easier to execute (a better tip of the iceberg). We brainstormed its contents and then in the summer he set to work finalising these and getting the thing physically made to photograph for the feature. The resulting illustration by Sam Gilbey, and glass by David R. Forte, made for one of my favourite future artifacts ever produced for Found. It seemed to dig beneath the usual tech preoccupations and invite some deeper questions.

However, Steve Jobs was unwell at the time. The world famous inventor and CEO had been battling cancer, and a "Found" artifact referencing this notion of Apple fans' religiosity through a beatified Jobs could be poorly timed, and in light of his health situation might be misinterpreted. 

So the feature was done, but unpublished. At that time I thought Wired might have been taking an overly cautious view, but the final nail was driven home on October 4th, 02011: that was when Chris told me that, as far as the magazine was concerned, this stained glass window would not see the light of day.

I remember the date because 24 hours later, Steve Jobs died.

Holding off had of course been the right decision. If the piece had run as planned in the October 02011 print issue it may have caused unintended offence, and drawn unwarranted criticism, since the thinking behind the artifact had had nothing to do with Mr Jobs's illness or mortality, and everything to do with the neuroscience research published earlier in the year -- and beyond that, with the far-reaching admiration Jobs inspired, the iconicity of the brand that he had grown, and the enduringly religious character of American society, ever a culture of true believers.

In any case, sure enough, the Future of Church never made an appearance, and "Found" ceased to run in Wired in 02013.

Still, with the back story in view, perhaps this once lost, now found artifact can be seen as food for thought on how the future appropriates the past, as well as fair tribute to an icon of contemporary culture.

Update 6 Nov 02015: Wired's Chris Kohler got in touch to report that the image was later repurposed for another feature comparing the resignations of Jobs and Pope Benedict XVI.

Related:
> The Thing From The Future

> Wired's gallery of Found artifacts

> The Futures of Everyday Life

> FoundFutures postcards
> More found futures
> The Darfur Olympics
> Anachronisms
> Artifacts from the present 

1-888-FUTURES

"Dial a future, deliver a present."

Want to put systemic challenges on the radar of your local Congressman? Help a relative living on the opposite coast to prepare for climate change? Send a 30th anniversary gift to the couple just now celebrating their 10th? Share a dream for a brighter world with your kid?

1-888-FUTURES is a service that takes a future dream, vision or problem, renders it tangible as a "future present", and delivers it to a specific individual.

You, the visioner, call the hotline and place a request for delivery of a future present based on some image of the future that you describe in your message. Our dedicated staff retrieves the message, finds a way to make the dream into a specific artifact, boxes it up, and sends it to your chosen recipient.

The future present recipient – whether it's you the visioner, or someone else – may choose to keep the package as a mystery box until the stated opening date, or may instead open it sooner, and be duly delighted/horrified/provoked/touched/nonplussed by the contents. A transcript of the original dream recording will be posted together with the artifact inspired by it.

A lot of work in the design fiction / speculative design mould is created, it seems, for no one in particular. Even if produced only once (like an artwork), often in effect it's a mass consumption object rather than something made for one. So 1-888-FUTURES is a small experiment in making such future design more personal and personalised; a true gift, connecting the imagining and creation process to a named individual, an audience of one.

This is the third "Futurematic" design jam jointly run by Situation Lab (Jeff Watson and me) with New York-based design collective The Extrapolation Factory (Elliott Montgomery and Chris Woebken). Graciously hosting on this occasion is the University of Southern California's Visions and Voices series, with the priceless collaboration of Professor Jen Stein from USC's School of Cinematic Arts.

Futurematic events riff playfully on commercial and industrial making processes, while focusing on the very non-industrial, not-yet-massified design space of imaginary objects. At the first event, participants filled up a vending machine with future artifacts in a day last spring at OCAD U. For the second, last summer at NYU, people created and put future street merchandise on sale at Canal St and Broadway in Manhattan. Both those events used Situation Lab’s imagination-boosting card game The Thing From The Future as the creative engine. This time, the ideation engine is the public's imagination itself. With that as the driving force, workshop participants will send out as many "future presents" made to order as we can, from our temporary 1-888-FUTURES fulfilment center in Los Angeles to all over the country.

The whole thing is free: so long as the delivery address is in the U.S., callers from anywhere can participate by calling 1-888-FUTURES from skype.

But this offer is limited - so call now! The lines are open 24/7 until midnight on Saturday, September 19th.

Browse the catalogue of future presents, designed, sealed and delivered, at 1888FUTURES.com.

Thanks to Jen Stein, Jeff Watson, Danyel Copeland and Josh McVeigh-Schultz, and the rest of our hosts and helpers at USC. Thanks also to our Futurematic collaborators Chris and Elliott, aka The Extrapolation Factory, and not least to our wonderful workshop participants!

[Originally posted at the Situation Lab blog.]

Links:
> Project website: 1888FUTURES.com
> Feature at Core77
> Feature at Tech Insider
> Feature at Medium

Related posts here:
> Big shifts, small change
> Participatory cli-fi
> More found futures
> Design fiction, emerging
> Object-oriented futuring

A film from the future

One of the more interesting and humbling aspects of getting older is seeing things you have imagined come to pass, or not. No doubt this is true for everyone, but such moments perhaps carry an extra charge when you imagine possibilities for a living.

Sometimes it's a matter of provocative notions materialising sooner than expected. In 02006 Jake Dunagan and I featured corporate candidates running for public office as part of our continued growth scenario for 'Hawaii 2050'. We were taken aback when a public relations company called Murray Hill Inc announced its plans in early 02010 to run for Congress in Maryland. Apparently they were making a satirical point in the wake of a recent Supreme Court majority decision which seemed to pave the way for corporate voting in elections. Our scenario had played in the same satirical territory 3 1/2 years before – only set 44 years into the future. Too far, perhaps?

An even more striking example of the future arriving early came with a project called Coral Cross, a 'serious game' about a flu pandemic, which I was directing for the Hawaii Department of Health. (The CDC was funding it as an early experiment in using games to engage the public for serious health promoting purposes.) Just weeks before the game's scheduled launch date, the game's hypothetical near-future scenario was pre-empted by an actual pandemic – H1N1 swine flu. To this day it's still a little bit hard to believe that actually happened. The project went ahead, incidentally: we turned on a dime and redesigned it from the ground up to make what we dubbed an Emergent Reality Game as opposed to an Alternate Reality Game.

Sometimes, the opposite occurs. A thing you expected doesn't happen, or happens otherwise than anticipated. We could perhaps file the following story under that heading.

Back in April 02007 when I was in grad school, a number of us in the Dept of Political Science at UH-Manoa made a short film for a 48-hour film comp in Honolulu called 'Showdown in Chinatown'. The way these things work is that certain creative constraints are provided at the start of the period, which both helps to inspire projects and to verify that submissions are authentically tailor-made for the occasion. You then run around like headless chooks for two days trying to make a short film using those parameters.

Readers will be unsurprised to learn that I was interested in making a film from the future. (On which theme more in another post soon, but meanwhile anyone keen to understand where I'm coming from may begin here.)

The given constraints called for referencing the topic 'addiction', using the line 'that's it', and incorporating an apple and a pencil as props. During our Thursday afternoon beer-and-brainstorm session, Ashley Lukens (now Dr. Lukens) made the outlandish and frankly inspired suggestion that the addiction in question could be someone 'addicted to being a dog'. The film pretty much made itself from there.

Why do I blog this now? It's not that it was an especially serious bit of forecasting or rigorous future-date-selecting, but when I edited the short together, the excerpt from our fictitious news magazine show Aloha Tonight happened to be post-dated seven years: April 14, 02014.

Which is – holy crap – today. Time flies when you're meddling with it.

Related:
> On Death of a President, and other films from the future
> Hawaii 2050 kicks off

> Coral Cross is coming

> This is not a game
> Coral Cross concludes
> Hawaiian shorts

Whose future is this?

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

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

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

Video of the talk itself was recently put online.

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Grand designs

From Canberra to Currumbin, and beyond, Australia's spatial strategy for governance could be very different in the future from what it is today...

The year 02013 marks the 100th anniversary of Canberra, Australia's famously planned capital city. Its location, decided in 01908 (seven years after federation), was a compromise between perennial rivals Melbourne and Sydney. An international design competition for the layout of this seat of the newly minted nation was launched in 01911, and in 01913, the submission of Chicago-based husband and wife architect team Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin was selected. The name Canberra, which comes from the word for "gathering place" in the local Aboriginal language, was given in a ceremony on 12 March that year.

A century later, an historically resonant element of the celebrations now underway consists in "a design ideas competition for a hypothetical Australian capital city", called CAPITheticAL (= hypothetical + capital). The comp was launched in 02011 and an exhibition of the top entries has just opened at Canberra's Gallery of Australian Design. I'm writing this because I was on a team which produced one of the exhibited designs.

Our team, "The Engagement Studio", was a diversely trained group of urbanists based in Melbourne, and practising internationally in fields including architecture, town planning, urban design, research, sustainability, and environmental consultancy.*

So, if an Australian capital were to be designed today, what should it be?

Since its purpose was to enable new perspectives rather than rehearse existing conventions, the competition put some big questions up for grabs: "Of what should our national capital consist? Would it be a city in the conventional sense or not? If not, what form might it take?"

In the spirit of designerly curiosity, our group wanted to venture upstream of the usual architectural and masterplanning preoccupations with built form and visual representation of space, focusing instead on a more provocative and, perhaps, futurohistorically potent proposition at the intersection of politics and design. Our idea was a nomadic seat of government, changing from one location in Australia to another every generation: a Roving Capital.

The essential notion is simple. Capitalhood can be decoupled from geography. It's not only that permanence need not be assumed, but impermanence can actually be embraced. Consider the Olympics, which is effectively a temporary sporting capital of the world for a fortnight every four years. Or look at the Burning Man festival, which emerges in the emptiness of the Nevada desert, for a week each year suddenly becoming one of the state's largest cities, before vanishing without a trace. The essential temporariness of these important community events manifesting tangibly in the built environment begins to point to a model for a capital that moves. The Olympics belong to the world, so they move around the world (the World Expo, ditto). Burning Man is notable not so much as an analog to capital function per se, but as a temporary city -- population circa 60,000 last year. It's a living rejoinder to the presumption of urban fixity.

The key to this idea is not mere novelty; it's evolvability. There's no such thing as a perfect, once-and-for-all political solution in a changing world. A polity not wedded forever to a single location within its geographic footprint gives itself more space, both to reflect diversity in the population and to adapt to rapid change. At the national level, such a proposition may be near unthinkable, at least for an old-world pillar like London or Paris. But Australia's geographic vastness and relative political youthfulness together make capital transience a surprisingly apt avenue to explore.

And so, from thousands of kilometres away in Melbourne, we had chosen, for argument's sake -- and somewhat whimsically -- the beachside town of Currumbin on the Gold Coast as the first port of call for our new nomadic capital. Inside the scenario we were weaving, this was the result of a democratic three-stage process for capital selection which we'd dreamed up.

Below you can find The Engagement Studio's first round submission. Wrapped around the usual visualisations (site plans, artist's impressions, etc), the Roving Capital idea was mediated primarily through a set of four newspaper articles from 02016, 02023, 02030, and 02040 -- a slim but evocative cross-section of primary documentary "evidence" from a hypothetical swath of future history.



The team's work was honoured by being shortlisted, which came with an invitation to provide a second round submission late in 02012. But simply to revisit and polish the same material didn't feel like quite enough. On reflection we had become intrigued by the real possibilities behind what had started out as simply a thought experiment. So the most interesting next step we could take with this design idea, we decided, was to "groundtruth" a notion that hitherto had been totally speculative.

We carved out a weekend and traipsed up from Melbourne together, to investigate the actual prospects for the seemingly outlandish premise of making Currumbin on the Gold Coast -- temporarily -- the next capital of Australia. And we made a video to tell the story of what happened:



Through meeting with representatives from the local authority (the Gold Coast City Council), with citizens, and with other designers, we discovered that despite reflex responses of bewilderment or trepidation, people soon began to suggest modifications which could help the idea work in reality.

Putting the hypothetical to the test in situ was a chance to tie the grand, schematic, conceptual layer of thinking down to the human scale and prosaic concerns of everyday reality. (How often does that happen in a design ideas comp? Probably not often enough.) For instance, we'd started out positing that, not unlike the experience of an Olympic city, a stint as capital would provide the basis for a generation-long infrastructural upgrade to the built environment -- the legacy of new public buildings and improved transportation, for example.

But in visiting Currumbin, we were attending to it as a real place, and particularly to the sorts of cultural dimensions which would otherwise have been all too easy to overlook from the remove of Melbourne; not to mention the conceptual distance of an abstract political design conversation. This meant learning some things that may not have come to our notice any other way.

First, we came to recognise more deeply that revolving the political apparatus and meshing the lives of representatives with those of their hosts and neighbours would entail a constant renewal of the democracy; a bottom-up counter to the top-down tendencies inherent in a representative system. Although our own visit was necessarily brief, each encounter with locals, occasioned by going there to groundtruth or reality-check the cencept, was in a sense a microcosm of that same process; a partial corrective to the risks of design and governance from afar.

Second, the charms of Currumbin itself, and the reluctance of residents to entertain its transformation into a bustling urban centre, drew out a version of our proposal which had been latent in the initial idea: rather than a capital city, the notion of the capital place came to the fore. It would not be necessary, and neither would the residents want, to compromise the natural beauty of their home by developing the crap out of it. Many of the functions of government could be well served by facilities elsewhere (and increasingly virtually of course); the essential symbolic and functional requirements of capitalness turn out to be more cultural than physical and technical. (I think my favourite moment was in the meeting with the Gold Coast City Council when we concluded an afternoon discussion by going around the room and brainstorming possible rituals on the beach befitting the inauguration of Currumbin's time as capital.)

Third, while our earlier thinking had emphasised the effects upon a given location of its turn as capital, we came to recognise that influence would, and should, flow the other way too. Legacy was reciprocal, not one-way, so the temporary capital's culture could be rubbing off on the country at large during its generation-long tenure as national gathering place.

Our second round submission also included a mocked up magazine article reflecting on the Roving Capital design and the learning process by which it had come together:



Not only was the concept less crazy on reflection than it may have appeared at first (even to us), but in fact even the seemingly far-fetched launchpad of Currumbin looked like it had legs. Certainly other places could equally have served as the Roving Capital's point of departure, but it was the specific contours of this place which came to offer the necessary grounding to both show and tell a new story about Australian governance.

It was also a pleasure to spend time with and learn from such a diverse and switched on group of collaborators, around a really thought provoking idea. (Ammon Beyerle and Michelle James especially deserve credit for an enormous amount of the work involved.) The content and especially the form of our contribution to this design conversation were fun and interesting to work on, and both the means of representation in round one (artifacts from the future) and research strategy for round two (ethnographic investigation) were, as far as I could see, unique among the entries.

The direct impact of our intervention was no doubt modest -- but for those who met the idea at our design meetings or in other conversations, there's also little doubt that it started them thinking about their home, and their place in Australia, in a different light.

And I suppose the key connection in all this to the ongoing themes here at The Sceptical Futuryst is that our efforts sought to map the plane of abstract novel ideas onto the plane of lived reality, and to expand people's sense of possibility through a participatory design process.

Although hypothetical, it was nonetheless real in all the ways that mattered.

* The Engagement Studio consisted of Ammon Beyerle and Michelle James from Here Studio; Kathryn Cuddihy, Tadgh Daly, Rupert Dance, David Klingberg and Amruta Pandhe from David Lock Associates; and Svenja Keele, Andrew Wisdom and myself from Arup. The wonderful video was shot and edited by filmmaker Natalie James.

CAPITheticAL is a Centenary of Canberra project supported by the Australian Government and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government, together with the Australian Institute of Architects. The exhibition is on until 11 May -- winners and finalists are all on show, and there's some really nice work there -- worth checking out!

Related posts:
> Architectural time travel
> Why the language of design must enter law and politics
> White House Redux
> Evidence
> The Unthinkable and the Unimaginable

The compleat Wired future artifacts gallery, 02010

Please find attached herewith, sirs and ladypersons, for your perusal and delectation, another year's harvest of 'Found: Artifacts from the future', Wired magazine's perennial back-pager and, if I may make so bold, its star feature; edited lo these many moons by the one and only ChrisBaker1337.

[wildlife] | Wired 18.01

[pet toys] | Wired 18.02

[medicine] | Wired 18.03

[athletic gear] | Wired 18.04

[children's books] | Wired 18.05

[camping equipment] | Wired 18.06

[medical bills] | Wired 18.07

[in-flight entertainment] | Wired 18.08

[playground] | Wired 18.09 | Prior photoshop contest in 18.06

[dive bar] | Wired 18.10

[taco truck] | Wired 18.11

[retirement home] | Wired 18.12

For a while there, these features were gathered under a single page at Wired, but at the time of writing, said page had not been updated since April 02010. (This post is arguably more over a year in arrears itself, so no accusatory fingerpointin; just sayin.)

Meanwhile, interested parties can delve into the compleat annals of Found dating back to 02002, right here.