Participatory futures for democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a very exciting development.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Where do you stand?

A crucial part of foresight work, whether it's in a corporate boardroom or an undergraduate classroom, is helping people surface and test their assumptions about the future.

The Polak Game offers a simple, powerful, and generative way of doing just that.

Introducing the Polak Game (with Jake Dunagan) at our first Design Futures Masterclass at CEDIM. Mexico City, 02015 (Photo: Jorge Camacho)

Named after the Dutch sociologist Fred Polak whose work inspired it, the game is also alternatively called "Where Do You Stand?" Aided by the facilitator, players are invited to use the physical space they are in to demonstrate their understandings of the future, in terms of expectations, on one hand, and their sense of personal agency to effect desired change, on the other.

The heart of the activity is a guided conversation aimed at understanding diverse perspectives across these dimensions, including the way that people's different views are grounded in their different experiences of the world. It helps us make explicit the importance of certain aspects of our thinking about futures that are always present, yet almost always invisible. The discussion can often become quite profound.

Playing the game as part of a course in the Media Design Practice program at ArtCenter College of Design. Los Angeles, 02016 (Photo: Stuart Candy)

Participants on a sound stage for a feature documentary film shoot, directed by Shannon Owen, about Australia's South Sudanese community. Melbourne, 02017 (Photo: Stuart Candy)

It is now over a dozen years since Peter Hayward (until recently the coordinator of Swinburne University of Technology’s futures program in Melbourne) ran the game for us in Honolulu, at the University of Hawaii at Manoa futures program. Since learning it from him there, I’ve staged it many times, for classes, workshops, and even a feature documentary shoot on a sound stage; with participants in different kinds of organisations, communities, cultures, and parts of the world. The game has also begun to spread, appearing in the toolkits of more and more practitioners, as useful tools do; changing as it goes.

People sometimes ask whether there are any published works to reference that describe and unpack the Polak Game. Until now, the answer has been no.

But we have just co-authored a piece aimed at filling this gap; precisely because "foresight craft genealogies often escape not only documentation, but even our explicit notice". For collective learning in the field there's a value to capturing how, where, and why these tools of the trade emerge and evolve. The same reason applies for sharing the work here in this post.

The article is in two parts. Hayward's deals with the "Origin and Orientation" of the game, and mine focuses on its "Exploration and Evolution" as it has played out in my experience over the past dozen years.

I'll finish this post with his conclusion:

It is when I have used it with groups trying to create a vision of a shared future that I think the power of the Polak Game has become most apparent. Humans construct narratives from their own experience and sense of the world. You could say that we stand on our individual ontology. What the game can reveal to players is that we each need to meet others where they are, and listen to their ontologies, before we have any chance of creating a shared one. During the game, it often becomes obvious who in a group feels that they have power and opportunity, and who does not; who has been treated fairly in the past, and who has not. By bringing these hidden dimensions to light, those with power may feel humbled by their privilege, and those with disadvantage can feel acknowledged and heard. And from there, an enduring sense of what "our" future could be starts to emerge.

The full article, including detailed instructions for facilitation of the game, appears in the December 02017 issue of the Journal of Futures Studies: The Polak Game, Or: Where Do You Stand?

Related:
> Dreaming together
> Brand runner / Colonising the future on film
> The technology of public imagination
> Design fiction is a fact

The act of imagination

Artwork: Imaginary Foundation [source]

The imagination can create the future only if its products are brought over into the real. The bestowal of the work completes the act of imagination. ... [W]hen we refuse what has been offered to the empty heart, when possible futures are given and not acted upon, then the imagination recedes. And without the imagination we can do no more than spin the future out of the logic of the present; we will never be led into new life because we can work only from the known. ... The artist completes the act of imagination by accepting the gift and laboring to give it to the real (at which point the distinction between "imaginary" and "real" dissolves).

~Lewis Hyde, The Gift

An outstanding book, by the way. As is Hyde's follow-up, Trickster Makes This World.

Music City runs out of gas

Officials displeased.



Late in September, the city of Nashville, Tennessee temporarily ran out of petrol, following rumours that it was about to run out of petrol. Offhand, I can think of no clearer example of the productive (that is, reality-making) impact of images of the future. See for instance this report from CNN, "Nashville pumps dry after panic about rumor of no gas", 20 September 02008:

Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy: An estimated three-fourths of gas stations in the Nashville, Tennessee, area ran dry Friday, victim of an apparent rumor that the city was running out of gas.
...
Hearing the rumor, drivers rushed to fill their cars and trucks.

The above video is a simply brilliant hack (à la Woody Allen's 01966 comedy What's Up, Tiger Lily?, which dubbed an old Japanese movie) of a scene from Downfall (Der Untergang, 02004) a deeply serious cinematic account of a certain German dictator's final days.

Sure, it's not a future scenario, but a dramatisation of a past one, redeployed to satirise the present in, er, a rather different context. Still, such a format could serve as a terrific way to evoke, satirically or not, a future scenario by analogy. As Prof Ira Rohter asked, when posting the clip to the HRCFS listserv today, "Could this be Pres McCain in 2012?"

[Video via Nashville Scene.]

Related posts:
> World Without Oil photo essay
> Oil and water

(Thanks Ira!)

In memoriam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The futurists' panel was... weird.

No, scratch that. It was freaking bizarre.

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

Life's ironies can be pretty extraordinary.

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

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

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

Future-jamming 101

Poster design by Media/Continuation group
Students from Introduction to Political Science 110 and Beginning Digital Imaging 400
University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Spring 02008

Design and installation: Media/Continuation | Photo: Claire Schulmeister

A text-heavy entry, this one, but the need to document my recent experience teaching futures and design has been hounding me of late, so I wanted to get something out there before the dissertation commitments nipping at my heels sink their teeth in.

In the leadup to last semester (Spring 02008) I was invited to teach an introductory political science course at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, where I’m doing my PhD in the same department.

I inquired about whether there was anything in particular I needed to include, or avoid, and the answer was no: I would have free rein to shape the syllabus my own way.

Irresistible.

So I set myself the goal of constructing the most interesting course possible. I wanted to engage students in the exploration and expression of ideas, in a politically relevant way (broadly construed), and to do it through an alternative futures lens.

After personal introductions done via freestyle rap (which I can commend to teachers as embarrassing but effective), the first substantive task we undertook was to survey everyone’s understanding of "politics". The parade of notions about traditional institutions and processes engaged in the conventional exercise of power was not at all unexpected. But the agenda was to bust open the notion that politics happens only, or even primarily, on the campaign trail and the voting booth.

The way we set about doing that was by considering the whole of our discursive lives -- the "mental commons", to use the phrase of an Adbusters article I set early on (reproduced here); or "mental real estate", in the words of a Hollywood screenwriter -- as politically charged: the stories told or not told, the ideas promoted or occluded, the interests privileged or marginalised. (For those with a theoretical bent, I was drawing on the politics of aesthetics of Jacques Rancière: thinking of the "political" as redistribution of the sensible, i.e. of the perceptual order.)

Together with art instructor Scott Groeniger, who miraculously was scheduled to teach an introductory class in digital imaging in the same timeslot (Tuesday and Thursday mornings), a couple of buildings over, I put together a plan for "Future Jamming 101" which would enable his art students and my politics students to put their heads together and actually intervene in their mental environment, in their own way. (Scott and I had been talking for a few months about a potential collaboration, ever since we’d met when some of his artwork was featured in the same 02007 exhibition as FoundFutures: Chinatown, at Honolulu gallery The Arts at Marks Garage.)

A few aspects of the class were deliberately experimental and may be worth recording for others to build upon. And, since I had asked my students to conclude their semester with a brief "Reflections" paper looking at the approach they had taken in their culminating group projects, and evaluating what they had learned from that process, I figured I ought to do likewise. So here, slightly belated -- the whole summer has passed by now -- are my Reflections on the exercise we undertook together. I've tried to include details here which may assist other instructors to formulate a comparable exercise, so my apologies are due to the general readership, to the extent that such details are less than exhilarating.

The purpose of our "future jamming" project was to teach students futures thinking, in an active, hands-on manner, such that they would have an opportunity not only to master the basics of alternative futures, but also to apply them in a satisfying, and hopefully impactful, way.

It seemed sensible to do this by having them do something like what Jake Dunagan and I had done quite a few times – bring futures thinking and designers together to manifest possible scenarios.

We borrowed the term "future jamming" from Australia-based futurist Jose Ramos (a coinage parallel to "culture jamming"), whose energetic advocacy of the radicalisation of foresight communication -- in conversations a few years ago, as well as in print meanwhile -- has stayed with me. The trick here was, it seemed to me, to scale up the approach Jake and I had developed in collaborating with designers on our series of "FoundFutures" experiential scenario projects (e.g., postcards, Chinatown, South by Southwest, and most recently the Wattis Gallery).

The steps for the project panned out as follows. (These seem slightly more distinct in retrospect than they were at the time.)
> forming groups and selecting topics
> generating scenarios
> devising and producing artifacts expressing those scenarios
> installing materials and recording responses
> evaluating the projects

With about 20 students in each class, the joint sessions would be jam-packed, as neither of our assigned classrooms was big enough to accommodate everyone comfortably, and so we didn't want to risk having an untried format eat up too many weeks. We settled on a schedule which had our two groups meeting for the two sessions in the week before spring break, developing their ideas over that break, and then meeting and working together for the three weeks (six sessions) to follow. Each politics class was 75 minutes long. Scott’s classes ended at the same time as ours, but started more than an hour earlier, which was extremely helpful in production week -- students needed all the time they could get.

Session 1: Briefing. The purpose, aspirations, and timeline of our future-jamming project were set out. This included an introduction to the four generic images of the future [Dator], culture jamming and future jamming, and showcasing similar projects to kickstart thinking around possible approaches.

Session 2: Forming teams. Facilitated by the instructors, students brainstormed a long list domains of interest (futures of "X"), and we used a voting process to whittle it down to two: Energy and Media. The joint group was then split in two, and individuals were assigned more or less at random (with sensitivity to arts/politics representation in each) to one of four sub-groups within their domain; eight groups altogether. So, everyone ended up in a small team of four or five, assigned to a domain (energy or media), and a generic future for that domain (continuation, collapse, discipline or transformation: the "four generic images of the future"). The time horizon for scenarios was put at approximately 30 years.

Sessions 3 & 4: Building scenarios, devising artifacts. The students had two sessions to work with their groups to develop the content of their assigned scenario, with instructors’ troubleshooting as necessary. The main criteria for building these scenarios were that groups should find a story to tell that they themselves found interesting, and that might be ridiculous at first sight, but which would seem quite plausible on closer inspection (following Dator's second law [pdf]). Happily, we were able to access a large art production room with enough space and chairs for all eight groups to convene. By the end of the week they turned in a half-page narrative of their scenario, together with a shortlist of intended artifacts or experiential interventions which could express it. So, for example, the Media/Transformation group submitted the following:

Scenario

It is the year 2038. Multiple devices are no longer necessary for communication. Mobile communication and internet access is consolidated into a chip half the size of a dime that is implanted into the brain. This tiny chip is connected to the neural passages that allow all the senses to be fully integrated into the user’s communication experience. Our newest product has proven physically and mentally safe for several hundred users, and several new features have been added.

The chip was made in 2018 by Hans Fineman of Fineman Universal Corporation initially made as a prototype for the United States Armed Services to be used to communicate during warfare. By 2035 a consumer form of the chip is distributed in select countries and several companies by that time made compatible content available to subscribers.

Materials

A printed business card flyer with a url
A website with information

That's exactly what the group went on to do (whereas the plans of most others, especially the more ambitious ones, changed as time marched by).

Website promo card design: Media/Transformation | Photo: Stuart Candy

Sessions 5 & 6: Production. We moved our operation to a computer room in the art school, since the equipment was necessary for the graphic design of almost every artifact produced. Space was tight but energy high. During this phase, Scott in particular dealt with an astonishing variety of challenges as people sought to translate their ideas into tangible pieces.

Media/Collapse group's posters in production | Photo: Stuart Candy

Poster design: Media/Collapse

Session 7: Installation and recording. Students had resolved to do their installations largely on campus at UH-Manoa. Output ranged from a website selling brain-implanted communication devices (and promotional materials distributed to drive traffic there); to magnets affixed to cars’ gas-cap covers, reminders drivers about the phasing out of gasoline in 02038; to a candle-lit surfboard memorial for a dissident Hawaiian felled by Chinese occupiers. And so on. They were asked to document intensively so their efforts might be preserved for posterity.

Session 8: Conclude installation, group presentations and debriefing. Each group did a powerpoint presentation on their scenario and its manifestation. Everyone who had been steadily immersed in their own project finally had an opportunity to see what their counterparts, assigned to the other domain, or to the other three futures within their own domain, had been doing.

Installation of designs by Energy/Transformation group | Photo: Stuart Candy

Design: Energy/Transformation | Photo: Stuart Candy

Some lessons (not exhaustive):

1. Clear constraints enable creativity. The 22 undergraduates who wound up in my class were on the whole extremely gracious about not getting the standard introduction to politics that many of them had, reasonably enough, anticipated (especially in the midst of an upcoming U.S. presidential election). I wouldn’t change anything there, but I certainly would recommend making clear to students how an unorthodox task like this fits into whatever else they might be expecting. There were occasional complaints about insufficient instruction in the assignment, but I tried to be forthcoming about the reason for leaving so much to the groups’ discretion. It seems to me that for an exercise such as this, the guidelines for scenario-building and deadlines for each phase are best treated as clear and strict, to enable maximum innovation (and concomitant assuming of responsibility) within the degrees of freedom thereby laid down.

2. Randomly assigned groups are a crapshoot. Like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. Some teams needed closer attention than others where, for instance, production skills were less well developed. So it goes.

3. Every installation strategy has its tradeoffs. I would love to see more output ranging beyond print artifacts. Since this was a digital imaging collaboration (rather than, say, a theatre class), output understandably leaned towards print and web. Even so, in previous FoundFutures outings we have found print posters and brochures to be (along with websites) the cheapest, easiest, media to use for future artifacts -- or at least the ones lying squarely on the path of least resistance. More varied and imaginative approaches are possible, but they may require more opportunity for planning than print and web production, which lend themselves to last-minute execution. Tradeoffs emerge. Easy installations are also easily undone (most posters in non-designated areas were immediately torn down; while some of those placed on bulletin boards remained for weeks). Highly visible and impactful setups may also be highly vulnerable (the Media/Collapse group's guerrilla "memorial" installed in the campus centre was short-lived; they were moved along unsympathetically by nearby staff). Permission can clear the way to more striking interventions, but it takes time, and risks a negative answer. Examples: Media/Discipline wanted to display an "official" instructional presentation about “redeeming media rations” in Hawaii, 02030) on flatscreen TVs in the campus centre; meanwhile, Media/Continuation had the marvellous idea of taking over a campus vending machine, or at least one or two of its slots, with their 02038 product, iDream pills (in rebranded tic-tac packets). These were both great concepts that didn’t eventuate: official clearance impossible in the short time available.

4. Under-documentation is a pitfall. Lots of photos don’t turn out, so when you're working in digital, there's no such thing as taking too many. If I did it all again, I’d want to devote more attention to helping students install and record their interventions. (That phase spilled over from the original intended single date, session seven, into the following class -- a time issue, on which see more below.) Not every group will be blessed with an experienced photographer, so it may even be worthwhile bringing in others to follow and document the groups’ work during installation (and, particularly, the encounters of unsuspecting members of the public with the artifacts). Not filming, photographing, interviewing, or actively promoting as much as we might have is a familiar problem from several FoundFutures projects, and in truth even with experience it hasn't become any easier to remedy by our own efforts, because the logistical pressure of performance always seems to push these to the background. Help would be great to have for this phase.

5. Time is always short. This isn’t all we did during the semester: there were 16 weeks, and the project I’ve outlined here took up just four of them. (The spring break didn’t in fact result in any progress. It’s not clear that anything much gets done outside of class time; certainly I would not want to count on it.) Overall, I think it could certainly have been spread out over a longer period, and the quality of the work would benefit from a slightly more leisurely pace. At a minumum, if I were to do it again I’d try for two weeks of production time rather than one. A lot begins to shift, and thus requires room to adapt, as you concretise a scenario’s abstractions.

6. It worked. The interaction of art/design-trained people and newbie futurists (who, despite their newness to the field, brought diverse experience in other areas to the table) generated the kind of energy that I'd hoped for, and that typically characterises creative interdisciplinary work. The end-semester feedback from students was extremely positive, and happily, suggested that our plans (of engaging them via hands-on expression of their ideas) had borne some fruit.

To anyone interested in knowing more, educators in particular, may I suggest taking a look at our class blog "alternativity" (which has been a public document from day one), and I'd be delighted to pass on the syllabus. Let's bring other voices to this ongoing conversation about making futures tangible via design.

Designs, installation and photo: Energy/Collapse

Website: Energy/Discipline

Gas cover magnet design: Energy/Discipline
See also Ka Leo [campus newspaper] report

Poster designs and installation: Media/Discipline | Photo: Stuart Candy

Poster design: Energy/Continuation

Production week in full swing | Photo: Stuart Candy

Thanks to all the students in my Intro to Political Science section; you were a pleasure to teach. A hearty cheers to Scott Groeniger, a willing and highly skilled collaborator, and his intrepid troupe of digital imagers; and also to Jim Dator for setting a fine example which informed so much of what I tried to do in the classroom.

Related posts:
> Design fiction is a fact
> Behold: a disturbing hole!
> Why the language of design must enter law and politics

Imagining Africa

Image via City of Cape Town official website

Over at sci-fi blog io9, Charlie Jane Anders has posted about an award winning short story by South African writer Henrietta Rose-Innes.  "Poison" recently won the 02008 Caine Prize, Africa's highest literary honour. An extract:

The cloud was creeping higher behind her back, casting a dull murk, not solid enough to be shadow. She could see veils of dirty rain bleeding from its near edge. Earlier, in the city, she had heard sirens, helicopters in the sky; but there were none out here. It was silent. Standing alone on the highway was unnerving. This was for cars. The road surface was not meant to be touched with hands or feet, to be examined too closely or in stillness. The four lanes were so wide. Even the white lines and the gaps between them were much longer than they appeared from the car: the length of her whole body, were she to lie down in the road. She had to stop herself looking over her shoulder, flinching from invisible cars coming up from behind.

It's a tightly written, evocative read (find it in full at The Guardian). A day after the award was announced, Rose-Innes spoke with the Saudi Gazette:

Asked whether she thinks "Poison" taps into the wider anxiety pervading the globe, while having a specific South African context, Rose-Innes replies: "I think it’s in the zeitgeist. There’s a trend towards apocalyptic images in popular culture at the moment...The world is a pretty anxiety-ridden place, although at the time of writing the story it felt like it was very much embedded in the South African situation specifically".

Apocalyptic stories have "a weird attraction; part of me is drawn to the idea of everything being wiped away and starting again anew." She was a fan of science fiction when she was younger and "it’s interesting for me that a lot of those classic science fiction scenarios seem to have been discovered anew by mainstream literary authors."

~Susannah Tarbush, "Disquieting metaphor for our anxiety-ridden times", Saudi Gazette, 14 July 02008 [see also the tanjara

Now, while the question of whether this story ought to be classified as science fiction sensu stricto may be debated by some, what's more interesting to me is that its success has helped focus attention on the state of the genre in Africa. The story caught my attention because yesterday, flying out west to San Francisco, I got around to reading an article by futurists Sohail Inayatullah and Ivana Milojevic about a very similar topic ("Futures dreaming outside and on the margins of the western world", Futures 35(5), 493-507, June 02003: via IngentaConnect [subscription only]; via Metafuture). The authors make a case for broadening and diversifying science fiction, both in how we understand the application of the term, as well as in the number and variety of cultural perspectives presented through the genre. Through the former line of argument, they suggest that sci-fi equivalents exist in all cultures, even if they aren't visible or appreciated as such; while through the latter, they lament the actual dominance (presumably, in terms of both volume and visibility) of "western" science fiction.

While there is science fiction in all cultures, it is only the west that has systematized science and fiction, made it into an industrial endeavor, and created a particular brand of literature called science fiction. [p. 500]
...
Taking a paradigmatic view, to assert that science fiction exists only in the west is merely to favor one particular form of a much wider endeavor. Science fiction thus should not merely be about the technological as defined in forward time but the creation of plausible future worlds from a range of civilizational perspectives. Science fiction is not just about debating the consequences of scientific progress. It is also about creating utopian or at least eutopian (the good not perfect) societies of
the future. [p. 495]

I can't help thinking that the term science fiction is itself responsible for some confusion here. As I've argued before:

If virtually all future stories, by default, are science-fiction, and popular discourse around future scenarios winds up being coterminous with that designation, then in effect the future has been colonised -- by an instrumentalist, technology-heavy "science" fiction. To put it another way, the narrowness of our culture's thinking about futures is reflected in the paucity of our vocabulary for stories that happen there. It looks like we have science fiction on the one hand, and the venerable literary tradition of utopias (etymologically: "no place") on the other. Which, analytically and practically, pretty much boils down to a choice between technologised nightmare, or nothing at all.

I find myself in agreement, then, with the drive to encourage elaboration and dissemination of alternative imaginaries, as prescribed by Milojevic and Inayatullah, even if I'm a little wary of "science fiction" as a label. The open-ended, pluripotent future with its endless possible settings and interpretations is an ideal place to call eutopian dreams into discussion.

Having said that, "Poison" is no cheerful portrait of a dream-come-true. Thematically, it wouldn't have been out of place in last year's groundbreaking alternate reality game, World Without Oil, which saw players around the world produce stories, in writing as well as other media, imagining the effects of an oil crisis on their lives. Also, with minimal editing, the action could be transposed to any number of other settings in Australia, Britain, or Canada (all places where I've lived) or the U.S. (where I live now).

This may be African science fiction, but the author acknowledges its roots lie in a global mood of apocalyptic anticipation which is grimly plausible almost anywhere.

So, while we may hope to find in African (or other) science fiction some kind of radical antidote to the limits of "Western" imagination; we may find instead that imagination is most appropriately located within individuals-in-a-context, not in monolithic cultures. In the interest of pluralism, I agree that to have many voices is better than to privilege a few. In the massively collaborative process of future-making, the variety of expression, through specific stories, ideas, and possibilities that play into and reinforce (on one hand) or challenge and undermine (on the other) is enormously important. But to be clear: the key question isn't merely whether a sci-fi story is "Western" or not in origin. It's whether (and how) it addresses, be it in endorsement or in dissent, the array of images of the future that we hold in our hearts and minds. I need scarcely add that "we" are many and varied, readers as well as writers.

No one can force anyone to think outside the box they live in, but given the opportunity, the future will irresistibly beckon to some of the people, some of the time, as a horizon of exploration: where today's impossible becomes a different normal.

Consequently, some African sci-fi is sure to look highly familiar. And some won't.

Kenyan writer John Rugoiyo Gichuki set an award-winning play Eternal, Forever in the year 02410, with the United States of Africa riding the cutting edge of technological advance. Gichuki says:

There is always cyclical development.

The British Empire was big. Now America is there. Maybe in the next 50 years it’s going to be the Chinese. Maybe in 100 years it’s going to be Africa.

A nice concept: Africa as cradle of posthumanity.

Related posts:
> The Darfur Olympics
> Colonising the future... on film
> Neill Blomkamp, visual futurist

(Thanks Rachel!)

Dreaming the home of the future

versus

A scene from PATH Concept Home video (part 3 of 4: "Flexibility").
Top: a scene from Disney Innoventions video

Following a post here recently about Disney's new Tomorrowland attraction, a different take on the same topic...

A "House of the Future," a concept of what tomorrow holds for cutting-edge living, usually tells us more about the dreamers than the dream.

In the mid-1950s, Disneyland, with the help of Monsanto, cooked up its "House of the Future," nearly all of it made of plastic... This was pretty radical stuff, but it was also a vision of living in the future that was based on extending our reliance on cheap oil into infinity.
...
This summer Disneyland opened a new version of living in the future in its "Tomorrowland"... Like the Monsanto house of 50 years ago, this latest Dream Home is a big ad.
...
All of our old habits cultivated in a gluttonous energy culture are given free rein in Disney's version of tomorrow. You can't make a move without consuming kilowatts. This Dream McMansion preserves the suburban model that $4-a-gallon gas has made into a nightmare.

If anything, Disney ought to change the story line: "This is how people in the most resource-consuming nation on Earth dreamed they'd still be living in the future without environmental and economic consequences."

There's another Dream Home out there. It hasn't gotten a fraction of the attention lavished on Disneyland, but it offers a future that we might actually be able to live with. Last year the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development unveiled its "Concept Home."

The ideas behind the home try to come to terms with the energy mess we're in.

~Michael J. Crosbie, "Real House Of The Future Is No Disney Dream", Hartford Courant, 3 August 02008.

Restated in terms of Dator's generic images of the future, we have in these two houses (Disney's and HUD's) a pretty clear contrast between two embodied future scenario types: "continuation" (business-as-usual) and "discipline" (self-restraint on resources).

I'm very sympathetic to the point that Crosbie, an architect and professor, is making: HUD's so-called PATH (Partnership for Advancing Housing Technology) Concept Home is practicable, sustainable, and ethical in a variety of ways that Disney's immersive advertisement for energy decadence isn't, and yet comparatively, the former seems to have been all but ignored.

What gives? That's a question the Crosbie piece doesn't discuss at all; in other words, why this unjust situation might be so.

Well, I'm currently reading NYU media prof (and recent HRCFS futures salon guest) Stephen Duncombe's book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. And I think it might help us out here (pp. 8-9):

Spectacle is our way of making sense of the world. Truth and power belong to those who tell the better story.
...
If we want our ideas to lead and not trail the politics of this country, then we need to learn how to think and communicate in today's spectacular vernacular.

With that in mind, check out their respective websites (PATH; Disney) and take another quick look at the photos above. I know, I know, it's not at all a fair comparison -- the multimillion dollar dream machine going up against the the do-gooding public-private partnership -- but humour me. Words don't cost much to write; let's see how they look side by side. Here are the opening lines of the two projects' press releases:

HUD Unveils America's First Efficient, Sustainable, Affordable Concept Home

PATH Concept Home represents the New American Dream during National Homeownership Month

[6 June 02007]

Omaha, NE -- The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development today announced the completion of America's first PATH Concept Home featuring more than 60 efficient, sustainable and flexible products and systems all in one affordable home.

HUD Assistant Secretary Darlene F. Williams speaks prior to the Concept Home ribbon cutting on June 6. She is joined (left to right) by Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey, builder Fernando Pages, and HUD Regional Director Macie Houston."With the PATH Concept Home, HUD has created a blueprint for the future of the American Dream by using innovative housing technologies that support our goals of sustainability, efficiency and flexibility in an affordable home," HUD Assistant Secretary Darlene F. Williams told the gathering of community and industry leaders. "June is National Homeownership Month and we are excited to showcase a home that is affordable to purchase, maintain and renovate as families and their needs change over time."

[link]

versus

IT'S THE HOME OF YOUR DREAMS! INNOVENTIONS DREAM HOME INVITES GUESTS TO EXPERIENCE THE FUTURE TODAY

New Tomorrowland Attraction at Disneyland Resort Combines State-of-the-Art Technology with the Latest in Disneyland Immersive Storytelling

ANAHEIM, Calif. - June 16, 2008 - Imagine a home so perfectly attuned to the needs of a family that it can anticipate and fulfill them, virtually without anyone lifting a finger. Now imagine that the home offers family members high-tech connectivity, not just with one another but with people, entertainment and information in the world at large.

Guests at Disneyland can soon do more than imagine it. Beginning June 17, the Innoventions Dream Home in Tomorrowland is bringing that world to life as a limited number of guests have the opportunity to preview the home.

[link]

So here's the Pepsi challenge, kids. Who's telling the better story?

Hint: Dream Home (Disney) vs Concept Home (HUD).

I feel a little bad saying it, but in this light, the attentional gulf separating the pair isn't all that surprising.

And lest I should be accused of overlooking or devaluing it, there is indeed far more substance, thought, rigour and ethical engagement in evidence in the concept home's presentation than in Tomorrowland's pile of eye-candy -- but that's just my point. In America today, the nutritious meal that doesn't taste good doesn't get eaten. (Yeah, thought that was a pretty neat analogy too.)

So, *brow furrowing, eyes narrowing*, doesn't Duncombe's dream prescription mean selling out progressive high-ground to crassly commercial ways of operating? In fact he's intensely aware of that risk, and notes (pp. 16-17):

Between arrogant rejection and populist acceptance of commercial culture lies a third approach: appropriating, co-opting, and, most important, transforming the techniques of spectacular capitalism into tools for social change.
...
The challenge for progressives is to create ethical spectacles.

If Crosbie is right, and the "House of the Future" tells us more about the dreamers than the dream, one of the things it may be telling us about the sustainability-oriented dreamers is that we're still learning to dream aloud in a compelling way. It seems to me that creating ethical spectacles that recast the -- perhaps necessary -- austerities of a "discipline" future as more "dream" than mere "concept" is where it's at, for building futures that are both practically inhabitable and aesthetically appealing.

That's where I'd prefer to live, anyway.

Related posts:
> Today at Tomorrowland: yesterday's future
> Sponsors of Utopia
> If they buy in, are you selling out?

San Francisco's awesome future

All images in this post via Steve Lambert's website | Link for this photo

A public art project entitled "Wish You Were Here! Postcards From Our Awesome Future" has just concluded in the streets of San Francisco (press release):

The San Francisco Arts Commission's Art on Market Street Program's new Kiosk Poster Series by artists Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert features visions of a future San Francisco, including transportation improvements and other imaginative urban developments.
[...]
Artists Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert asked Bay Area architects, city planners and transportation engineers, "What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about budgets, bureaucracy, politics, or physics?" Ideas from these conversations were then merged, developed and perhaps mildly exaggerated by the artists to create six imaginative poster designs for exhibition in the Market Street kiosks.

The six original poster designs include a Muni of tomorrow,

expansive new wildlife refuge areas throughout San Francisco,

suggestions for commuter friendly activities on dedicated BART cars,

a farm in the Candlestick stadium,

a new individual commuter line (literally) from the top of the Ferry Building in San Francisco to Oakland,

and suggestions for removing or moving unpopular buildings following a public vote.

Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert, both together and individually, often collaborate with a wide range of people for their projects, which typically engage directly with audiences in public settings about social and political issues.

The artwork combines the schematic line-drawing look of airline safety cards with a warm, whimsical quality which recalls the Victorian-era images of the future associated with writers like Jules Verne. It's really nice to see the too-often sombre, expert-oriented discourse of planners and architects invite engagement with the popular imagination in this way.

It's interesting to compare this project to the Red Cross earthquake awareness campaign blogged here last May. To find such radically different forward views -- shattering vs upbeat -- appearing in different public art projects within the same city begs the question how people reconcile images of the future that are so dramatically at odds with each other... especially at a subconscious level, since few of us are trained to pay specific attention to the competing elements of the futures imaginary.

This is a question to address in more depth as we go along, but I want to mark that as being, in my view, among the primary ongoing tasks of academic futures discourse in general, and this blog in particular.

There remains an open invitation to all readers of t.s.f. who encounter manifestations of scenarios, or images of the future, in any medium, to submit them for inclusion in the evolving gallery of possibilities curated here. On that note, it was NYU media professor Steve Duncombe who emailed Jake and me about this project, which, he said, "seems to resonate with your FoundFutures work" [link]. Thanks, Steve!