Adding Dimensions to Development Futures with UNDP

(Update 28jun22: It was announced today that this project has won at the 02022 Core77 Design Awards in the Speculative Design category! Ceda and I are grateful to Core77 and want to give thanks again to our indispensable collaborators, listed below.)

***

Last week I helped to launch the United Nations Development Programme's annual innovation event, Istanbul Innovation Days (IID), using an experiential futures process and format created for the occasion.

Back in January, they had come to me with a challenge: how might experiential futures practice be brought to bear for the event's Opening Session? Due to Covid everything was to be run online this year; this kickoff was planned as a panel conversation about global development's futures, live in video chat, with the head of UNDP and invited speakers around the world.

Mission accepted: I proposed to interview all the panelists in advance, one on one, then design and send an artifact from the future to each, to arrive at their homes by the week before the event. After more than a year on Zoom, thanks to the pandemic, my hope was to breathe some dimensionality into our talking-head squares.

Each artifact would draw inspiration from ideas about the future shared with me by the speaker in our pre-conversation, and would try to picture a far-reaching shift in relationships and power, manifested institutionally, affecting whatever we mean when we say ‘development’.

So, what happened? 

Sophie Howe, Welsh Commissioner for Future Generations, the first person in the world to hold that remarkable cross-cutting role, emphasised the critical need for a “holistic view” in governance. I wondered: how might next-level holistic, inclusive decision-making look?

Sophie received a bilingual Welsh/English mailer from Wales’ Parliament of All Beings in 02056, notifying her that animal wellbeing data indicated consent to move to the next phase of Rewilding in her neighbourhood in Cardiff.

Nanjira Sambuli, a powerhouse tech justice advocate from Kenya, when we spoke registered the absurdity of a few Silicon Valley tech bros ruling platforms that mediate our relationships all around the world, noting “the dream to democratise, decentralise” and “take on the giants”.

At home in Nairobi, she received a letter written to her as a Board Member for RECODE Africa (REclaim community, COoperativise platforms, DEvolve governance), with a T-shirt for its 3rd Annual Festival in 02030, after Twitter ownership has been taken over by users & workers.

Roman Krznaric, author of The Good Ancestor, told me about the importance of “political innovation” dealing with the “decision making structures” underpinning development at all levels. So what might such transformational change look like on the ground?

Based in Oxford, Roman received a thank you for serving in the 02032 Oxfordshire Ancestors’ Assembly (modelled on Japan’s current “Future Design” process), and a robe as ritually worn by participants when deliberating the potential impacts of their decisions on future generations.

Marcela Sabino, Head of Innovation at Brazil’s Museu do Amanha (Museum of Tomorrow), evoked a scenario in which we relate to corporate entities as legal persons very differently: “Companies have to be held accountable for what they're doing.” The question becomes –– how?

In Rio de Janeiro, Marcela received a screenprinted poster, one in Portuguese and one in English, advertising the public execution/dissolution of a corporation that in 02036 has been convicted of ecocide by the International Criminal Court.

Achim Steiner, head of UNDP, observed that by the later 21st century what we currently know as the United Nations “will have to be significantly different. . . . But the fact that we will need a governance platform on which to come together is absolutely essential.”

At home in New York, he received a hand-calligraphed copy of “The Words Spoken Before All Others”, aka the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, adopted in a ceremony at Onondaga Lake as the Opening Invocation for the General Assembly of the United Peoples, on 22 April 02070.

When the day of the panel itself arrived, I had the pleasure of moderating the conversation, with Luciana Mermet, UNDP Resident Representative in Bolivia. The speakers didn't know yet what the others had received, so we had everyone use their future artifact as a portal through which to introduce themselves and their ideas to the conversation.

The Deputy Foreign Minister of the Republic of Turkey, Faruk Kaymakci, also joined the session, as a distinguished “Future Steward”, sharing remarks on and helping draw connections among the perspectives offered.

It’s a minor miracle how it all came together. The future artifacts arrived in multiple locations around the world, our Internet connections held up, and almost 700 people joined in to listen, chat and ask questions. If you're interested, the Opening Session is available to watch in its entirety here:

This was an exciting piece of a much bigger conversation, about decolonising and reimagining development for the 02021 edition of IID. It was also an encouraging way for a new experiential futures* format to add both a third dimension (physicality) and a fourth (direct engagement with time) to a 2D medium. I half-jokingly dubbed the format a "4D Panel", and it would certainly work as a replicable structure –– if anyone decides to give it a go, please get in touch.

The other thing to mention about the format is that it is scaffolded using Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) –– a framework that my colleague Kelly Kornet and I derived from a set of precedents for exactly this sort of purpose –– to make it easier to generate customised projects that pair culturally-specific futures research with design-led experiential outcomes. There's more research in the pipeline, so stay tuned.

This post is a quick one based on a thread shared on Twitter earlier today, and I plan to include more details of the project in a proper write-up in due course. For now, though, much gratitude to the many amazing folks who made this possible.

* * *

UNDP Objects of the Future (4D Panel) –– #IID2021 Opening Session –– Project Credits and Acknowledgments

Co-designer and lead artist:
Ceda Verbakel

Robe co-design and construction:
Lindsay Goranson

Calligraphy:
Catherine Marsceau

Welsh translation:
Angharad Withers
Sarah Elizabeth Siân Withers

Portuguese translation:
Jacques Barcia

Screenprinting:
Max Emiliano Gonzales

Documentation photography:
Matt Geiger

Special thanks to the following research informants, advisors and sounding boards:

Jacques Barcia
Ginny Battson
Cennydd Bowles
Jonathan Chapman
Jake Dunagan
Jasper Grosskurth
Jonathon Keats
Michelle King
Peter MacLeod
Sheila Ochugboju
Ollie Palmer
Hannah Muthoni Ryder
Ella Saitta
Wendy Schultz
Sian Sheu
Danny Spitzberg (@BuyThisPlatform)
Maya van Leemput

None of these fine people are responsible for my misunderstandings, errors or other sins

Thanks for generous logistical assistance:

Leonard Kinyanjui (Nairobi)
Sheila Ochugboju (Nairobi)
Siri Krznaric (Oxford)
Kate Raworth (Oxford)
Nina Barbuto (Pittsburgh)
Rich Pell (Pittsburgh)

Thanks also to Jill Chisnell, Trebor Scholz, Brad Towell, and Cameron Tonkinwise

Thanks for additional design explorations to Myrna Rosen and Amrita Khoshoo

Framing by Carol Whitehead

T-shirt production (PIT) by Clockwise.io
T-shirt production (NBO) by Mattel Printing
Shipping by FedEx East Liberty & Monroeville PA

4D Panel members and artifact inspirers:

Sophie Howe

Roman Krznaric

Marcela Sabino

Nanjira Sambuli

Achim Steiner

4D Panel Future steward:
Faruk Kaymakcı

UNDP Innovation liaison:
Milica Begovic

Thank you to Kelly Kornet for co-authoring the Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) framework which scaffolded this project

Thank you to Robin Wall Kimmerer for inspiring the artifact for Achim through her brilliant book Braiding Sweetgrass (see “The Sacred and the Superfund”)

Thank you to John Stokes for kind permission to use the text of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address. © 1993 Six Nations Indian Museum and The Tracking Project. ISBN 0-9643214-0-8

Extra special thanks to Ceda Verbakel, wonderful partner, fellow traveller, and problem-solver-in-chief

* * *

* Or design fiction, speculative design, etc –– call it whatever you like really –– but know that experiential futures, more recently dubbed design futures in some quarters, has its own genealogy and contours grounded in decades of futures work; lots to dig into for the curious!

Related:
> Foresight is a Right
> Dreaming together
> The Spirit and the Letter
> Design is storytelling
> 1-888-FUTURES
> Introducing experiential futures at the BBC
> Ethnographic Experiential Futures article / KBFS / original post
> Syrian refugee girls imagine their futures
> Using the future at NASA
> Bringing futures to Stanford d.school
> Wanted: 25,000 Miles of crime scene tape
> Design and Futures open access book / intro to Vol. I

Knowledge Base of Futures Studies

Just published this month is The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies 2020, the latest in an edited series collecting key works in foresight over time.

The original version of KBFS was released in 01996, the same year I first encountered the futures/foresight field; the most recent update came out in 02005, the year I went to study with Jim Dator at the University of Hawaii's 'Manoa School' of futures. So it's been a long while, and a huge amount has changed in the field over that period.

I'm excited to have two pieces in this collection, both coauthored with terrific colleagues –– Kelly Kornet and Peter Hayward. Both articles are adaptations of work previously published, and speak to aspects of how the field has evolved over the past decade and a half towards more participatory, playful, experiential and inclusive modes.

The Polak Game (aka "Where Do You Stand?"), written with Peter, is about a classic workshop and classroom game in the futures field, which Hayward invented, inspired by the remarkable work of Dutch sociologist and proto-futurist Fred Polak. The game offers a user-friendly structure for facilitating far-reaching conversation among foresight students and clients, introducing "images of the future" as a basic property of both cultures and individuals, thus helping pave the way to more advanced tools and frameworks. It first appeared in 02017 as a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Futures Studies (JFS).

Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF), written with Kelly, introduces a framework for hybrid design/futures research and practice that is all about making images of the future more legible and concrete, and seeing what one can learn from doing so. The piece sets out a practical structure and set of prompts for devising projects and interventions, with a view to promoting the availability of a more diverse and deeper array of scenarios for consideration, in all sorts of contexts, ultimately in service of developing a social capacity for foresight. It first appeared in 02019 as a peer-reviewed article, Turning Foresight Inside Out, in the JFS special double issue on Design and Futures co-edited with Cher Potter.

Fifteen years is a long time, and to be fair not all of the changes that the futures/foresight field has seen are (or could be) reflected in a selection which, as this version's co-editor Andy Hines points out, was subject to real constraints. But there are over 500 pages of material from contributors around the world, and I'm looking forward to digging in! Meanwhile the next edition, we might hope, will appear sooner rather than later, and will also seize the opportunity to push even further in surfacing the tremendous diversity of views and approaches to futures research, scholarship and practice from all corners of a burgeoning and multifaceted global conversation.

Well done to the three dozen contributing authors, and to editors Richard Slaughter and Andy Hines, for this valuable contribution! While previous editions were sometimes hard to find, this new collection is electronically available directly from the publisher, the Association of Professional Futurists.

Related:
> Ethnographic Experiential Futures / full-text pdf from KBFS 2020
> The Polak Game / full-text pdf from KBFS 2020
> Design and Futures book release / full-text pdf
> Transforming the Future book release / full-text pdf
> Ghosts of futures past
> A History of Experiential Futures

Ethnographic Experiential Futures

We shape our images of the future, and meanwhile they shape us.

A Field Guide to Ethnographic Experiential Futures, version 1.1, June 02017 (pdf)

(Update 03june19: This post and framework have attracted quite a bit of interest over the past couple of years. We've now published a peer-reviewed academic article, in open access, laying out EXF in the Journal of Futures Studies special double issue on Design and Futures. That full piece is available in pdf here.)

***

At the Design Develop Transform conference in Belgium last week, design researcher/futurist Kelly Kornet and I presented this framework we've been developing on and off for a couple of years.

Ethnographic Experiential Futures, or EXF, is a design-driven, hybrid approach to foresight aimed at increasing the accessibility, variety and depth of available images of the future.

It puts together two modes of futures research and practice which have grown up separately, for the most part, but which have complementary goals, and turn out to pair quite well.

Ethnographic futures research, EFR, is a protocol for surfacing and documenting existing images of the future. (Our starting point was the late Stanford anthropologist Robert Textor's formal EFR interview process, an overlooked contribution to futures literature which should be much more widely used.) Experiential futures, XF, is a family of approaches for vivid multisensory, transmedia, and diegetic representations of images of the future (a focus of mine for the past decade).

Put another way, ethnographic futures is more descriptive; looking for what's present but often hidden in people's heads. Experiential futures is more creative; rendering these notional possibilities visible, tangible, immersive and interactive, externalising and concretising representations of them for closer inspection and deeper discussion.

EXF offers a way to take the invisible and make it senseable.

We've suggested a series of steps for an EXF process:

1. MAP: Inquire into and record people's actual or existing images of the future (e.g. possible; probable; preferred; a combination).
2. MULTIPLY: Generate alternative images (scenarios) to challenge or extend existing thinking (optional step, but recommended).
3. MEDIATE: Translate these ideas about the future/s into experiences: tangible, immersive, visual or interactive representations.†
4. MOUNT: Stage experiential scenario/s to encounter for the original subject/s, or others (or both).
5. MAP: Inquire into and record responses to the experiential scenario/s.

The Field Guide explains the logic and highlights some of the main design choices available at each juncture.

Instead of starting from theory, this step-by-step process has been derived from already completed projects, carried out over a number of years, which turned out to have much the same structure under the hood. In our conference presentation we reviewed four project precedents dating back to 02007. While demonstrating very different goals, outcomes and contexts, they basically describe the same research arc.

A full article is forthcoming, which will include more detail to situate this work in the landscape of futures ethnography and experiential practice, including related methods and projects. However, since the one-pager refers to the specific projects from which we distilled or abstracted this framework, for reference those are briefly outlined below:

Candy and Dunagan, Foundfutures: Chinatown, 02007.

About ten years ago, Jake Dunagan and I started experimenting with the deployment of experiential futures in unscripted environments. We would send postcards from the future to the home addresses of community leaders around Hawaii, and 'droplift' future artifacts in local shops for people to stumble across during their lunch break, for example. However our most ambitious early guerrilla futures project aimed to be more systematic; more rooted in place and history. In Honolulu's Chinatown neighbourhood, we interviewed a range of residents and business-owners, and then devised a culture- and site-specific scenario set, incorporating a combination of future possibilities as described to us, and new ones calculated to resonate with what we had heard. With collaborators we created a set of experiential scenarios, producing a cross-section of fragments from each hypothetical future history, and installing these in the streets. Responses were captured via direct observation, at a free community futures workshop, and in the press.

Artwork by Matthew Jensen / Photo by Stuart Candy

Artwork by Mark Guillermo / Photo by Matthew Stits

Kornet, Causing an Effect, 02015.

For Kelly Kornet's culminating research project at OCAD University (which design professor Helen Kerr and I supervised), she spoke to several lifelong environmental activists, living in heavily polluted industrial areas, about the future hopes and fears motivating their efforts. She generated written scenarios based on these (using Textor's EFR interview format), then created a physical exhibition comprising artifacts from the futures that the research participants had described, and subsequently spoke with them again to capture responses to how their own private imaginaries had been brought to life. The project, which won a student award from the Association of Professional Futurists, is available in pdf here.

Designs & photos by Kelly Kornet 

Situation Lab/Extrapolation Factory, 1-888-FUTURES, 02015.

Jeff Watson and I (Situation Lab), together with Elliott Montgomery and Chris Woebken (Extrapolation Factory) designed and staged a series of design jams in 02014-15 called 'Futurematic'. The third of these, held at the University of Southern California, invited anyone interested, across North America, to call a toll-free number and record their future dream in a voicemail. On the day of the event, we had participants retrieve these voicemails, then create a "future present" –– a tangible artifact distilling (or, as Chris would put it, 'tangibilising') each dream. The maker/s then recorded a video about their making process and the correspondence between the artifact and the dream that inspired it, and boxed up the future present to send to whatever postal address had been left with the original voicemail. Thereafter, on social media, recipients responded to the future presents they opened up. The project is detailed here, and was covered by Core77 and Business Insider among others. Artifact documentation and videos are archived at 1888futures.com.

Photo by Stuart Candy

Photo courtesy Extrapolation Factory & Situation Lab

Greyson, Making the Futures Present, 02017.

Designer and interactive narrative professor Maggie Greyson, for her final MDes project at OCAD, created a "personal experiential futures" process. (Social entrepreneur Sarah Schulman and I supervised.) Maggie interviewed research participants, using Textor/EFR, about a range of futures they could imagine facing on a 20-year time horizon –– positive, negative, expected, and also unexpected. The 'unexpected' future is not a usual part of EFR, which traditionally has a strict descriptive intent; this was a deliberate addition to expand participants' thinking (see Step 3, 'Multiply'). She then worked with them to co-create rapid prototypes of artifacts from those futures, and went on to develop higher-resolution artifacts as a basis for deeper conversation in the next session. The project can be found in pdf here.

Photos by Maggie Greyson

Whether your aim is to dive deeper into the images of the future in a culture to which you belong (even your own personal 'futurescape'), or to facilitate a process for a client organisation, or to partner with a community group historically marginalised from meaningful futures conversations, the framework is intended to be capable of being customised and put to diverse uses.

As we noted in the conference presentation, purposes of projects to date have spanned the educational, documentary, activist, personal, and playful; and could readily be extended or adapted to the organisational, governmental, and cultural.π

EXF may be applied at the scale of a short workshop or design jam, up to a multi-year large-scale process involving thousands of people or more. It may be used as scaffolding for a robust, imaginative strategic conversation within a company, or as the basis for a public, guerrilla futures intervention at election time, or as a quasi-therapeutic support structure for examining an individual's options in life.

Most futures research is not as disciplined as it could be in its inquiry into how people currently think about and conceptualise futures: Ethnographic futures research can help with that. Meanwhile, most communicative or scenario-sharing interventions are likely not sufficiently vibrant to change or expand how people think: Experiential futures practice can help with that.

Putting them together entails bridging the descriptive and the creative (and potentially, though not necessarily, the normative).

Our hope is to make this work a bit easier and more common, by providing a flexible framework that has served diverse purposes before and could be put to many other uses.

Also, we note that this arc of activities, which in the original projects may have appeared linear, can be usefully recognised and imagined instead as circular. The first and last steps are the same. In principle, then, EXF could be used, where appropriate, in an ongoing, cyclical fashion.§

We've received a number of requests for a pdf of the draft Field Guide to Ethnographic Experiential Futures: you can download it right here.

We invite you play with this structure and share your variations, innovations and results!

***

Notes:
[†] Those new to experiential futures may find this recent peer-reviewed article published in Futures journal useful. There's an abridged overview for the especially time-pressed (downloadable pdf). The Experiential Futures Ladder, to help carry out Step 3, Mediate, is described there too.
[π] The Adopt-a-vision experiential futures class project recently outlined at this blog could very easily be tweaked towards an EXF cycle –– and the resemblance is not pure coincidental; it emerges from some of the same thinking.
[§] The insight that an ethnographic, grounded-in-place futures process could be usefully developed as a generic method owes an enormous amount to over a decade of conversation and collaboration with Jake Dunagan (whose background includes an MA in visual anthropology). Early in 02016 we developed a project proposal called 'Nextloop', which aimed to offer "a next step in a much-needed renovation of the conditions for public imagination. We wish to use this opportunity to demonstrate how forward-looking design research, pairing ethnography with tangible speculation, can enrich individual and collective consideration of our social, cultural and technical choices. We intend to close certain loops too often left open – bringing potential downstream consequences powerfully and concretely into awareness today, and to bring in certain other loops – diverse public involvement in those same discussions – too often left out."

Related:
> Adopt-a-vision (report from a recent XF class)
> 1-888-FUTURES (speculative design jam event overview)
> Foundfutures: Chinatown (XF /guerrilla futures project overview)

> Build Your Own Time Machine (classroom activity instructions)

> The Thing From The Future (card game)
> The Futures of Everyday Life (doctoral dissertation)