the sceptical futuryst: public imagination

Showing posts with label public imagination. 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.

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.)

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

The Power of Utopia

One of my favourite engagements of the past year was a panel about The Power of Utopia with accomplished artistic activists Terry Marshall (co-instigator of Intelligent Mischief, a creative studio dedicated to “unleashing Black imagination to shape the future”), and Cory Doctorow (bestselling science fiction author and journalist whose work includes How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism and Walkaway, among many other titles).

The Center for Artistic Activism (C4AA) hosted the event as part of its Revolutionizing Activism series, a brilliant resource for agents of change to practise infusing radical imagination into present action. Afterwards, the organisation shared some key takeaways from the event under the title How to strengthen the vision of your advocacy.

Video of the full conversation is embedded below.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

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.

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

A new collection on Speculation in Design

The University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design has published the latest edition of its periodical LA+, an interdisciplinary journal dealing with landscape architecture –– and more, as the name hints.

The topic and title this time out is SPECULATION, a multifarious and richly intersectional theme on which contributions appear from Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Javier Arpa Fernandéz, Min Kyung Lee, and Ytasha Womack, together with many others, all marshalled by the issue editor Christopher Marcinkoski and editor-in-chief Tatum Hands.

I had the pleasure of taking part in the project via a conversation with a wonderful transdisciplinary practitioner of landscape architecture and media arts, professor Aroussiak Gabrielian of University of Southern California's Architecture school. As a taste, below is one of my favourite questions posed by Aroussiak, and the thoughts it prompted.

***

AG: I’m wondering how you feel about the pitfalls in speculative design, given the criticism it has received for being speculation for speculation’s sake or that its focus has been very techno-scientific, or product driven – pushing forth the same capitalist system by inventing objects that we might consume in the future.

SC: Yeah, I think that those are definitely ways the work can fail to live up to its potential. Sometimes, especially early on, practitioners might find themselves using an excess of whimsy on one hand, or an excess of capitalist realism on the other. To me, both are ways of missing the mark, but I think it would be unfortunate if that were to lead some observers to think that the whole enterprise of using design and the arts to explore futures is without value. That would be a grand-scale throwing out of the baby with the bathwater. It’s possible to write bad poetry, too, but that doesn’t mean all poetry is bad.

I would say that some of the criticism drawn during the recent wave of speculation in design, while fair enough, is really responding to a sort of belated unleashing of creative energy that was previously stifled by a so-called human centered, but, let’s be honest, capital-centered, paradigm where the use of imagination is highly constrained, and aspirational only within tightly defined limits. You take those constraints off, and people go wild. That is actually kind of cool to watch, but is it the end state for the practice? I don’t think so. Once people have gotten some of that initial rambunctious energy out of their system, there is a sort of getting of wisdom in play. You can see this with [card game] The Thing from The Future. To start with, many players revel in the license to run free, be silly, and have fun. Then, after a while, they start to get a little bit more critical and search for ideas with more substance. The novelty of the very idea of something ostensibly coming “from the future,” perhaps exciting enough in itself to begin with, wears off, and players start to want to know more about what future it’s from, and how it might work, and how it’s different from what they’ve heard before, and whose interests it represents. This is part of why, having created the game, Jeff [Watson, cofounder of Situation Lab and professor at USC School of Cinematic Arts] and I kept adapting and modifying it, and using it with different groups to help push the general vogue for speculation past this initial flare-up of excitement and crappy ideas that we all tend to have when first invited to roam freely in the space of alternative futures.

To try to make the year 02050 matter right now is an important but difficult task. There’s no objective referent for a 02050 scenario – in contrast to trying to bridge into the shoes of someone historically or in the present, where you can at least partially ground-truth things. The inbuilt speculative challenge of futures is that they are not just epistemically but ontologically indeterminate. They are up for grabs. So we need to realize that when we’re making a hypothetical world specific enough to wrap our body-minds around, we’re making it artificially specific, just in order to be able to think and feel into it. We have to take the ability to inhabit this “what if” with a big grain of salt, because it’s not a question of getting it right or not, in a predictive sense; it’s a question of how rigorously and usefully we are deploying imagination to enable new perceptions and possibilities in the present.

***

If you're interested in the theme of speculation, as so many designers have been recently, check out the full piece (Futuring: A Conversation) and the collection as a whole (digital or print).

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Introducing Experiential and Participatory Futures at the BBC

How do you develop foresight capacity inside an organisation, and experiential futures especially?

It's a question that comes up a lot.

Recently I've spoken with government agencies from the UK, Denmark, and Australia, whose leaders all reached out for advice on growing their capability in these spaces.

The RSA (the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has just published a report on "Realising the Value of Futures and Foresight"; I was glad to contribute when the researchers got in touch a few months ago.

These are exciting signals 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.

This post is about a fun project that also represents, I think, an exciting milestone in that journey.

A long, long time ago, in a pre-COVID otherworld –– last year, that is –– I had the privilege of collaborating with the British Broadcasting Corporation on an effort to bring futures thinking and practices into the design side of the organisation.

With the brilliant Filippo Cuttica leading the charge (Filo is BBC's UX Principal for Ethical Experiences; he is also part of art collective IOCOSE), and supported by a formidable in-house design posse, we devised a process for introducing around 200 people to the space of alternative futures.

Since our participants would mostly be designers of various kinds, we were resolved that these ideas should land with folks not just in theory, but in the most embodied way possible. So at an away day for the whole design side of the Beeb, hosted in Manchester's grand old Alfred Hall, I gave a keynote address to get some shared concepts and background into the collective mind, and then we transitioned to bringing alternative futures to life, on the spot.

Being quite excited about the event, I took a *lot* of pictures, including all the photos in this post
(except this one of me speaking, obviously... which was taken by Filippo Cuttica)

Everyone had been invited to bring in junk from home –– old shoes; defunct appliances; all sorts of things that they would otherwise have thrown out –– to serve as raw material. The group spent the afternoon in small teams, reinterpreting these "found" items using our card game The Thing From The Future as scaffolding for imagination, and then physically transforming them into a crazy array of artifacts from alternative futures. At that point they put their wares "on sale", across dozens of stalls set up in the style of a bazaar or flea market, complete with a special currency created for the occasion that let everyone ultimately "vote" on their favourite designs.

Lo and behold: the Futures Bazaar! A surprisingly coherent container for a mad hodgepodge of material ruminations. The video produced by the BBC team (at the top of this post) really captures the glorious chaos of the day.

This co-created centrepiece, the Futures Bazaar itself, was complemented by a range of interactive demos organised onsite by BBC media tech unit Blue Room, including an adapted version (pictured below) of our experiential scenario from a few years back, NaturePod, featuring 3D video footage that the team had recently ventured out to a forest near Manchester to record.

It was exciting to build, in scope and ambition, on previous design jam deployments of The Thing From The Future. And turning household refuse into design fiction gold is an inherently satisfying form of creative alchemy, especially at scale. Scores of people, all playing and making their way into the futures together.

To revisit this work now, after more than half a year of working remotely, I find myself really missing the energy of co-creating in person. (It seems most of the time, I manage to avoid thinking about that; covid-coping reflex.)

But what makes a process like this tick, and how does it contribute to developing foresight capability?

I see two key factors driving it. The first is clear constraint. The second is permission to play. In a sense these pull in opposite directions, and that's the point. There's a productive tension in the middle, a sweet spot for creative, surprising generativity, neither too scripted nor too loose. Military drills have clear parameters, but also a tendency towards the predictable, this being of course among their main aims. On the other side, a young child's doodling may manifest a kind of pure play, but one scrawling sketch can look very much like another, and another, and another. Paradoxically, extremely open processes can produce results comparable in their unsurprisingness to extremely planned ones.

In jazz or theatrical improv, it's when the improvisers consciously adopt or, if they're really skilled, feel their way into a shared set of enabling constraints, "finding the game", that things start to click. The signal-to-noise ratio leaps. Pleasurable surprises appear. Embracing the convergent forces of constraint and the divergent forces of play in balance takes us somewhere interesting –– in this case, a gleefully absurdist and thoroughly engaging mode of co-creation.

Several layers of productive constraints are operating here. These include, naturally, time itself; we broke a fairly complex set of tasks into distinct stages, which sharpened focus, brought urgency, and raised energy levels. Another is the overall premise, "make a future artifact with this thing", paired with the specific semiotic or interpretive potential of any given object: each item that participants had brought from home could plausibly be "cast" as many future things, but not as absolutely anything. More granularly, beneath the "future thing" umbrella, the structure of a Thing From The Future prompt offers a kind of future to consider, as well as a theme, a particular context of society or human endeavour, to help the imagination along. A player might incorporate a found object into a prompt something like the following:

"In a {REGIMENTED} future, there is a {pair of old slippers} related to {JUSTICE}. What is it?"

Which might end up generating something like this:

Okay, you might say. People seem to be enjoying themselves and being creative. But so what? How does this help with the development of an organisational foresight capability?

A general answer is that many, if not most, organisations need play more than they realise. Workplace cultures often implicitly devalue and sacrifice, intentionally or not, anything unusual, subversive, humorous or nonstandard. This makes for infertile contexts, inhospitable to new ideas, and perhaps to diversity on other dimensions too (cultures, backgrounds, values). In my experience it's common for organisations to be more brittle, blinkered, and reactive than they might think they are, and to that extent, more vulnerable to changes in their operating environment that they have not made room to consider.

Foresight practice, a conversation space that's deliberately much broader than forecasting (an important subset of it), requires some openness to the non-extrapolative and non-obvious –– viz. Dator's second law: "Any useful statement about the futures should at first appear to be ridiculous".

More specifically, this particular kind of play arguably helps lower the bar to having more serious, strategically load-bearing conversations about alternative futures. I've written elsewhere about how The Thing From The Future is designed to operate, so won't reiterate that here, but as the celebrated designers Charles and Ray Eames used to say, "Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are the prelude to serious ideas."

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.

The Future Is Now project, which we advised as well as helped implement at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), the world's largest humanitarian network, mobilised experiential futures approaches in a number of important ways, in order to introduce, enable and integrate foresight throughout a vast organisation. It ended up fuelling an unprecedented level of futures awareness and activity, now shaping strategy at the global level, as well as within many national societies. (We can look at that case more in another post to come.)

Well, that all sounds very nice in principle, you may say, but we can't do most of these physical interventions or collaborations at the moment –– what about the pandemic?

So, part of the reason we called experiential futures "experiential futures", since first plotting out and arguing for this much-needed broadening of foresight practice a decade and a half ago, is that the relevant canvas is huge. It's not about a particular medium or context of deployment. As large as the space of "possible future artifacts" may be –– and I have argued that it has to be much larger than the set of "all human artifacts ever created in history"; if history has happened but futures have not, then the latter space is bound to be ontologically multiple, encompassing the aggregated contents not of just one historical timeline, but countless potential ones –– the point is that there's no reason, for our purposes, to be exclusively interested in objects, or even in physical, face-to-face encounters, important as those are. This is tied in with why the frames of "design fiction" and "speculative design", while both valuable vectors for popularising a subset of experiential futures' possibility space among designers and the design-curious, can sometimes get in their own way a little bit.

The relevant issue for organisations or cultures recognising a need to navigate change more effectively than they have in the past is not "how do we make objects that speak about futures?" It is also not, "how can speculative design or design fiction or help with our policy/strategy challenge?" Nor is it even "how can experiential futures help with x or y?", which reifies a constantly-evolving collection of practices that spring from and must continue to be fed by what seems to me to be the key underlying question: "what can we do to navigate change more effectively?" Any experience that helps people to grapple with possible futures and to take wiser action in the present is in scope. Experiential futures simply designates a possibility space where the challenge is ultimately to make better collective choices among all available options, and the means for realising these are whatever you can come up with.

On this view, the ongoing covid-19 pandemic and its limitations are just another set of enabling constraints. It doesn't much matter if you can't meet in person; do immersive future exhibits with social distancing, or for one person at a time. Send stuff through the post, or by email. Or create digital experiences, or audio ones with no screens in sight. We recently did a hybrid drama/design course on devising theatre in pandemic conditions, which included online live action roleplaying games. We've staged Zoom-native, as opposed to in-person, Time Machines (more on that soon, too). A bunch of us around the world just ran the first edition of a decade-long annual festival program of experiential futures, all created and carried out under covid-19 pandemic constraints. And so on.

People ought to be exploring alternative futures in the highest-impact ways available, especially with the devastating consequences of a conspicuous failure of effective foresight rippling, or rather ripping, through our daily lives, globally, right now.

Filo Cuttica says this in his excellent write-up of this foray into experiential futures:

If there’s one lesson to take away from the pandemic, it's the importance of looking ahead. And not just "looking ahead", but "feeling ahead". By imagining together in structured ways, and creating the experience of change before it happens, rather than while it's happening, we have a hope of planning, and even affecting our future. ...
The idea [of this event was] to introduce the team to a seemingly obvious, and yet hard to grapple with idea: that the future hasn’t happened yet, that we can play an active role in shaping, but that before we can collectively choose what should happen, we ought to explore what could happen.

As noted at the top; it's great that more and more institutions are realising how embedding an augmented futures capability might be valuable. At the BBC, with this effort an internationally significant organisation spanning cultural and governance sectors has taken some deceptively playful first steps down an important path, and I'm excited to see where it might go.

If this sounds like something that your community or institution should be exploring, but you aren't sure what to do next, try the links below for a start.

***

Thanks and congrats again to Filo, to his team and their network of wonderful colleagues, and not least, to their awesome bosses at the BBC for supporting these efforts. I also want to mention prior work that in some ways made this delightful experiment possible, especially the series of participatory futures events that Jeff Watson and I (Situation Lab) organised years ago with our good friends Elliott Montgomery and Chris Woebken (Extrapolation Factory); Futurematic Vending Machine at OCAD, Futurematic: Canal St at NYU, and 1-888-FUTURES at USC; as well as the Discoverability Media Jam for the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) with Rich Lachman at Ryerson University, and the Posteridade design jam staged with Marcela Sabino and her team at the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro.

Monday, September 30, 2019

The School of Worldbuilding

Bauhaus Futures is an edited collection just published by MIT Press to mark the 100th anniversary of a short lived but profoundly influential institution.

Founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany in 01919, the Bauhaus was an interdisciplinary and international school of design whose charismatic and encompassing vision has had a tremendous impact on design, architecture and art over the past century. As Tom Wolfe wrote, "“It was more than a school; it was a commune, a spiritual movement, a radical approach to art in all its forms, a philosophical center comparable to the Garden of Epicurus."

This new book's point of departure is a provocation, "What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practising today?"

With my longtime Situation Lab collaborator Jeff Watson (USC School of Cinematic Arts), the point of departure for our own contribution is a kind of playfully manifesto-ish contemporisation of the Bauhaus, whereby "the school of building" becomes "the school of worldbuilding" and the motto "Art Into Industry" becomes "Art Into Reality", tying the ambitious reach of the original to emerging imagination-ramifying practices in transmedia storytelling, cinema and media production, game design (alternate reality games, larp, etc), activism, and experiential futures. A sample:

The School of Worldbuilding responds to the question, “how might we design a better world?” by turning it on its head: “how might we world a better design?”
. . .
The School of Worldbuilding is not as interested in what we can do in imaginary worlds as it is in what we might do with or through or occasionally in spite of them, in this world.

The School of Worldbuilding sees the role of the educator not as a purveyor of content, but as a certain kind of game master. It sees the role of the student not as a receptacle, but as a certain kind of player.
. . .
The School of Worldbuilding is political because the imagination itself is political. Power and authority contour and transform social imaginaries just as those imaginaries contour and transform power and authority. Indeed, domination and liberation alike depend on the imagination. What revolution ever started anywhere but in the imagining of a different world? And what tyranny ever lasted without mastery over imaginal resources?
. . .
The School of Worldbuilding confers no degree. To be a student of worldbuilding is to commit to exploration and experimentation as a way of life. Graduation is not only impossible: it is undesirable. To graduate from the School is to fail out of it.

(And so on.)

Edited by Laura Forlano (IIT Institute of Design), Molly Wright Steenson (just down the hall at CMU School of Design), and Mike Ananny (USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism), the book Bauhaus Futures includes contributions in a wide variety of formats from a fantastic lineup of writers.

The full text of The School of Worldbuilding can be found here.

The book is now available for order and is set to ship within the next couple of weeks!

Related:
> I Design Worlds (Interview with Liam Young)
> Reverse Archaeology / The Time Machine (Assignment)
> Design is Storytelling
> How to Build a World (Video)
> The Thing From The Future