the sceptical futuryst: process design

Showing posts with label process design. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

What happens when 200 architects visit the year 02099?

Spoiler alert: more music and dancing than I expected.

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

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

That’s when they reached out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m sharing this project now for two reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am I saying that this is “the right way” to introduce futures thinking into organisations? No. It was, however, a great way to do it here, partly because this specific organisation is full of creatives, makers, and storytellers. Also, the context of an away day made a bit of fun welcome, even essential. We understood that participatory, playful and hands-on elements needed to be foregrounded here, and so they were.
In a more corporate, bureaucratic, or self-serious context, such as strategic conversation for a government department, supranational outfit, or large business, other approaches might be more suitable. Less out-on-a-limb for the participants while still inviting their engagement with future possibilities physically, emotionally, and narratively.

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

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

Thursday, October 09, 2025

Building Time Machines at California Institute of Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned.

Tuesday, July 09, 2024

What if we could sing better futures to life?

Notes from our collaboration with Brian Eno on using music to grow public imagination.

This post is about a new initiative in progress – something I’ve really enjoyed working on, and have great hopes for as it unfolds.

Sing Wild Seeds is a project about having musicians and audiences pre-enact preferred futures together.

Conceptually, it springs from a question along these lines: how might music-making be combined with experiential futures towards developing our collective ability to imagine and shape desired change?

Institutionally, it’s a collaboration between the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and Earth/Percent, both independent UK-based social change organisations, dedicated respectively to accelerating the “transition to a more equitable and just future”, and “unleash[ing] the power of music in service of the planet”.

Also centrally involved is Earth/Percent founder Brian Eno, a celebrated musician, producer, and expert collaborator in multiple artforms, whose extensive experience facilitating individual and group creativity has helped form the foundation for this effort.

To say a bit more about the idea behind the experiment – or series of experiments, really, as I’ll explain – the focus is on harnessing the promise and pleasures of worldbuilding on one hand, and musical co-creation on the other, to help people not just think or imagine but play and perform their way into future possibilities.

If this strikes you as different from the commonplace framing of futures in support of “strategy” or “decision-making”, you’re right. In a sense, this is upstream of those, aiming at some of the background or cultural context within which conscious decision-making occurs. And in a different sense, it’s downstream, in the detail of lived experience, a part of what I call the futures of everyday life.

This goes to a motivation that’s long been key to our practices of and arguments for experiential futures, towards developing a distributed cultural capacity, social foresight.

As I wrote in The Economist many years ago:

Driven by the irrepressible human urge to bring our inner worlds to life, the culture of public imagination is set to make a leap: in coming years we can expect to see more and more companies, governments, advocacy organisations and communities creating and sharing experiential futures. The sooner we learn to use and democratise collective imagination to dramatise our alternatives, the more powerful will be our capacity to shape change towards just and worthwhile ends.

Sing Wild Seeds could be seen at once as a datapoint exemplifying this forecast coming to pass, and as a conscious contribution to taking it further.

It’s a matter of what my collaborator Cassie Robinson of JRF, who initiated the project, has inspiringly framed as imagination infrastructures, a kind of “soil work”, gardening towards conditions favourable for certain kinds of things to grow. (I also find the cognate idea of acculturation a helpful rendering of this approach, and an important complement to organisational reflexes towards institutionalisation.)

We’ve worked together on several occasions over some years, but Cassie and I began talking about this particular project late in 02023, on the back of a series of conversations about social foresight and collective imagination.

We launched Sing Wild Seeds in March this year, with a hybrid online / in-person event in two parts: I gave an introductory presentation on foresight and experiential futures practices for a cohort of interested musicians, assembled from Brian’s network, then he and I had a conversation to begin exploring a bit more of what the possibilities might look like within our chosen design space.

Cultivating public imagination through music is an appealing creative prospect, and also a good practical challenge.

Our approach has been not simply to have musicians integrate richer or more deliberate futures imagining into their existing creative practices – because while helping professional music folks make “songs from the future” is super interesting, Sing Wild Seeds has a more ambitious and fundamentally more participatory notion at its heart.

The idea is to expose musicians to futures ideas and methods, and then to support them in devising site- and event-specific experiments where they in turn will engage live audiences in real time, co-creating and performing songs from the futures that they’d like to see (and hear) come to pass.

This comes with an inbuilt complexity; synthetic and nested.

Nested because the project has entailed devising and running a participatory process to help prepare the musicians in turn to devise and run their own participatory processes, particular to them, with later audiences elsewhere.

Synthetic because it has meant figuring out a way to mesh the musical gifts and creative preferences of a cast of songwriters / performers with two other sets of practices that in most cases are unfamiliar; one to do with the granular imagination and articulation of preferred futures, and the other to do with facilitation and process design.

Tackling this combination was an exciting prospect, and maybe just a little daunting, since not only were the particulars of the musicians’ own sensibilities and orientations impossible to plan for in advance – the ways artists write songs varies enormously – but the ultimate design parameters, practical elements of context in which they would eventually run something themselves (location, duration, format, audience size, cultural composition, etc), would not be found out until later either.

Last month, then, while I was in the UK, we held two in-person workshops at Brian’s studio in London, to try out some ways of helping folks navigate and identify the most promising sectors, for each of them, within the vast design space of potential project-experiments.

The wonderful designer Sarah Drummond was enlisted to co-facilitate, and to support the musicians going forward as they craft their experiments to carry out with festivals and other partners over the next few months. (Sarah is an exceptionally intuitive and adept facilitator; we’ve known each other for well over a decade but hadn’t a chance to work together directly before – and what a pleasure!)

I’d suggested that we offer this face-to-face project development workshop not once, but twice, on different dates, in order to reach a wider pool of potential collaborators, and also to enable a bit of reflection and iteration between runs. This structure worked well, allowing Sarah and me the chance to simplify and better integrate our process for take two.

It’s too early to start talking outcomes, but I doubt if it’s ever too early to start trying to learn from an ongoing process, so I’ll just remark briefly on a few aspects of the foresight part of the project.

I chose two contrasting points of departure for engaging our musician friends in futures imagination and songwriting ideation. One was quick, and deliberately time-pressured; a combinatorial prompting activity using The Thing From The Future card game (second edition). The other was more leisurely, taking the form of a guided meditation or daydreaming exercise; the sort of approach that my colleague Oliver Markley calls mental time travel.

The pair of contrasting tempos aimed to elicit different kinds of creative response: imagining fast and slow, you might say.

From the outset, in relation to the mental time travel exercise, I was specifically interested in going beyond guided visioning. The sense of sight often implicitly overrides all others when it comes to imagining alternative and preferred futures, so we invited guided listening, too – having folks attend especially to their auditory experience, along with other senses, during their inner journeys.

We used a time horizon of 30 years (02054) the first time, and 50 years (02074) the second. Although we were able to give the activity a bit more breathing room in workshop two, on both occasions, from the reams of notes that people took upon returning to the here-and-now and opening their eyes, and the animated conversations that followed, there was clearly much more to explore.

In relation to the card game, both meetings were highly generative, but the second provided an opportunity to fine-tune the prompting a bit.

With participants clustered in small groups of 2–3, one member was asked to select a card on behalf of their group, to indicate the type of preferred future or world that they would be creating a song from (e.g., a “fair” future, a “decolonised” future, and so on). The theme or aspect of that world which each person would focus on for their song was individually drawn from the deck at random (e.g. farming, the ocean, love, cities). And finally, I assigned to the musicians not just the generic output “song” as the future thing for them to create, but instead gave each one a particular kind of song to make from within their chosen future (e.g. anthem, show tune, folk song, etc).

(The Thing From The Future has been compared to, and at its inception over a decade ago was directly influenced by, Brian Eno’s own classic creativity-enabling card deck, Oblique Strategies, so there was a highly satisfying coming-full-circle quality in getting to deploy it with musicians in his studio!)

In addition, following one of Brian’s specific creative mandates that arose in workshop one, we ventured to insist on strict parameters: people had to finish a song corresponding to their personalised prompt within five minutes, then actually sing it.

While obviously the product of a highly compressed creative process, the resulting first-draft compositions from both gatherings truly exceeded expectations. They included a chanted exchange between different species seeking to peacefully inhabit the same planet, a future ballad about farming, a children’s song celebrating science, and a call-and-response performance recounting how humanity saved the oceans.

Modest as these beginnings are, there’s something potentially significant here as a kind of prefigurative politics (see TFOEL p. 220) in the use of music, not just as a social medium – which thankfully has been part of human society since time immemorial, and which has nothing necessarily to do with futures content per se – but on top of that, as a way into shared imagining of new possibilities.

We can make out a kind of double prefiguration: the desirable-in-itself investment in solidarity or community-making by creating and performing in a group, coupled with the roleplay-like composition and singing of lyrics deliberately formulated to bespeak, concretise, and summon the futures we hope to bring into being.

Politics is perhaps too small a word. If this doesn’t sound like a recipe for magic, I don't know what is.

The very first public deployment for Sing Wild Seeds has just taken place – at Britain’s legendary Glastonbury Festival, in an experiment led by the marvellous Genevieve Dawson (pictured at the top).

Many thanks are due to Cassie Robinson, Sepi Noohi and Magda Maculewicz from JRF, to Cathy Runciman and Becky Young from Earth/Percent, to my star of a process design and facilitation partner Sarah Drummond, to Brian Eno for generously hosting these gatherings, and to all our musical participants to date.

No doubt there will be more to say as these wild seeds take root.

Related:
> Experiential Futures: A Brief Outline
> Introduction to Experiential Futures in The Economist
> Dreaming Together (from the book Made Up: Design’s Fictions)
> What Is the Value of Futures and Foresight? (a Q&A with the RSA)
> Imagining Transitions (interview by Rob Hopkins)
> The Futures of Everyday Life
> Inside a bold new experiment in public imagination (on UNTITLED Festival)
> Participatory Futures for Democracy (see “acculturation”)
> Gaming Futures Literacy (PDF – from the book Transforming the Future)
> The Thing From The Future (see also Situation Lab website)
> Anything but Text (post anticipating XF from 02006)
> Historical pre-enactment

Note 1: All photos by the author. Note 2: A bookmark: to write up an assignment I once set for my (non-musician) graduate students at KAIST – creating and performing songs from various futures for Korea.

(Update 08aug2024: This post was also published on Medium.)

Monday, October 21, 2019

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

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)

Monday, November 02, 2015

La Chose du Futur à Paris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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