A Time Traveller's Story

This talk provides a short introduction to the experiential futures practice of designing and staging what I call Time Machines - immersive scenarios of possible worlds at 1:1 scale.

I've now run the Time Machine as an assignment with many groups in cities around the world – Singapore, Mexico City, and Toronto, among others. A short piece which appeared in The Economist describes several Time Machines created in experiential futures courses. A longer article from The Futurist provides a bit more background, although there have been four more years of experience and iteration since then.

Background to the talk: I spent last year as a visiting professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and this presentation was given at the 40th edition of the city's PechaKucha Nights in March 02017. (As some readers may know, PechaKucha is a format in which 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each, advancing automatically, which keeps things nice and brisk.) Why am I blogging this now? I received this video months ago, but it had an audio issue that I finally had a chance to fix yesterday before posting.

Background to the topic: Time Machines have their roots in the four parallel experiential scenarios which we created for the Hawaii 2050 kickoff back in 02006. The process was subsequently modularised through teaching, first via a guerrilla futures experiment with undergrads at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 02008, then projects in the Strategic Foresight course of the Design MBA at California College of the Arts in 02010 and 02011, and then a prototype assignment culminating the intensive futures course at National University of Singapore in 02012. In mid-02013, I contributed an assignment to a published collection about the cutting edge of art and design teaching, and first used the Time Machine framing there. Later that year, having started as a professor in OCAD University's Master of Design program in Strategic Foresight and Innovation, we introduced Time Machines as an end-of-semester studio project, where it became a staple. At SAIC last year, I ran two design/futures courses; one was on making documentary films from the future, and the other concluded with the 02016 election-related guerrilla futures project that's described in the talk (it went on to win an award from the Association of Professional Futurists last summer). I've had the privilege of being in something like 50 Time Machines to date, most recently at Carnegie Mellon School of Design during the academic year just ended.

A proper effort to capture the practical lessons from all this for design and futures is on the way.

Special thanks to PechaKucha Chicago organisers Peter Exley, Sharon Exley, and Thorsten Bösch. An alternative recording for the same talk, focusing on the slides, is at the official PechaKucha website. My previous PechaKucha talk, from 02012 in Melbourne, is posted here.

Related:
> Build your own Time Machine
> Time Machines in The Economist
> American Futures
> The Futures of Everyday Life
> Future documentary
> Travelling without moving

Transforming the Future

Last week a book was published by Routledge and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) called Transforming the Future: Anticipation in the 21st Century.

Assembled by my colleague UNESCO futurist Riel Miller, it documents an ambitious effort to develop a framework for Futures Literacy, via dozens of engagements with diverse communities all around the world over several years. The research is ongoing; this volume presents the story so far.

What it means to be ‘futures literate’ …[is] emergent. People’s fictions about the later-than-now and the frames they use to invent these imaginary futures are so important for everyday life, so ingrained and so often unremarked, that it is hard to gain the distance needed to observe and analyse what is going on.
…
[Anticipatory assumptions] are the most basic component of anticipatory activities: these assumptions are necessary for all ‘uses-of-the-future’ because ‘imagination’ can only be elaborated on the basis of the underlying assumptions.
…
The research is concentrated on how to define and assess the extent to which someone has or can become futures literate by collecting evidence of her capacity to understand the nature and role of the [anticipatory assumptions] needed to ‘use-the-future’ in practice.

My own contribution to the collection, 'Gaming Futures Literacy: The Thing From The Future', springs from our work with UNESCO a few years back, which included producing a special (bilingual French/English) edition of The Thing From The Future to distribute to delegates at the Youth Forum held in Paris in 02015. The introduction, condensed:

Amid pervasive uncertainty and accelerating change, one of our great challenges, and opportunities, is to make high quality engagement with the yet-to-be more widespread.
…
The good news is that our repertoire of uses of the future, the set of available ways to map and manifest possible paths or waypoints ahead, is far from exhausted. Exciting vistas have recently opened up with foresight’s ‘experiential turn’ towards fuller exploration of design, media and games.
…
This chapter presents a case study of an experiential futures card game called The Thing from the Future, reflecting on it as a method for popularising and demystifying futures, and explaining the design mechanisms that make it tick. While undoubtedly a limited tool (like all tools), its potential significance as part of a wave of efforts to spread Futures Literacy which are actually enjoyable to use may give heart to those in search of new ways towards distributed anticipation and social foresight.

The whole chapter ‘Gaming Futures Literacy’ is available here.

A short video about the larger Futures Literacy Labs project was released by UNESCO last year, and can be found here.

And finally, thanks to Innovation Norway, the book Transforming the Future is available in full here.

Related:
> La Chose du Futur à Paris
> The Thing From The Future
> The Polak Game, or: Where do you stand?

Quality in futures thinking

Diagram by Lloyd Walker

I recently received an email from my friend Steve Lambert, an artist whose work we've previously touched on here, here and here. (Also the co-founder with Stephen Duncombe of the Center for Artistic Activism.)

Steve was writing with a question – a good one. Characteristically his message got right to the point.

Subject: Futurist question

Hey Stuart,

Who, besides futurists, think long term about the future? And specifically not in the frame of capitalism and how they can make money – but about how to shape the world for the better? Who does a good job?

SL

I felt this could make an interesting topic for wider conversation and put it to the Association of Professional Futurists email list.

A lively discussion followed, but two contributions stood out, and their posters gave permission to share them more widely. (By default, these conversations are private to encourage participants to speak among themselves more freely.)

One fantastic contribution was the diagram above, offered by the brilliant Austin, Texas-based consultant, designer, and futures veteran Lloyd Walker.

The other highlight came in response to someone wondering aloud about the relationship between the academic and professional variants of futures practice. Futures professor Jim Dator replied:

Futures practice without academic underpinning is smoke and mirrors.
Academic pretense of futures without practical experience is mirrors and smoke.

Related:
> The Tao of Steve
> Designing Futures
> Guerrilla futurists combat war on terror
> San Francisco's awesome future
> Dreampolitik

Design is Storytelling

Design is many things: it's the giving of form, the shaping of experiences, and – oh, alright then – the solving of problems. In a broader sense, it is the distribution of ingenuity, translating ideas and intentions into realities. And in this light, design is also a matter of mapping and expanding possibility's horizons: telling new stories, and so conjuring paths to new worlds.

Design is Storytelling understands this. It's a new book by Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at Cooper Hewitt (the Smithsonian Design Museum in New York), which is also the publisher of this slim and skilfully curated volume of ways to practice design in narrative mode.

At Situation Lab we're delighted that our imagination card game The Thing From The Future appears in the book as a key example of a design fiction tool. Design fiction is an object-oriented speculative idiom long developed and documented here as part of the wider transmedia landscape of experiential futures, which in turn deals with bringing future narratives to life by all means necessary.

In Lupton's words:

Many design projects are conceived as speculative proposals for the future. Exotic concept cars and lavishly art-directed videos for tech companies celebrate the wonders of growth and innovation. Other veins of design fiction are more critical. ...

The Thing from the Future, created by Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson, is a game that helps teams and individuals build stories about the future. ... The game can be played with groups of students or in community-based workshops as a co-creation activity.

[It] is a storytelling machine. Turning the design process backwards, it uses signals from a distant world to inspire new thinking. Candy calls this process reverse archaeology. [link] The results can be humorous or provocative as well as practical. The game stimulates serious conversations about social and environmental sustainability.

Design is Storytelling shares several examples of #FutureThing prompts, generated using the original four-suit edition, together with some witty sample responses that are playfully illustrated by Jennifer Tobias (see p. 51).

The book is filled with useful tools, and this game is not the only explicitly futures-related one: there's also the cone of plausibility (aka cone of possibility, aka cone of uncertainty; pp. 43-45), and the 2x2 matrix, a widely used process for scenario generation (pp. 46-47).

I want to acknowledge the relevance of Lupton's storytelling-centred collection to work that we've plotted here since 02006, and take the opportunity that the book presents to consider, from a personal vantage point, how I've seen design's self-understanding evolving to take advantage of the potential in the design/futures intersection which has been our focus throughout that time.

It's heartening to take stock of how things have changed.

When I first started teaching futures to design students, as a guest lecturer in Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby's Royal College of Art program early in 02009 (while completing a PhD on futures and design), there was precious little awareness of futures thinking or methods apparent in design education anywhere. Except for some pioneering hybrid practitioners, such as Lloyd Walker, Cindy Frewen, and Jason Tester, there seemed scant overlap between the two worlds (although no doubt precursors and parallels will keep coming to light). My introduction of foresight concepts and methods to design students at the RCA –– not least the cone of possibility itself* –– tapped a kind of latent energy on both sides that heavily influenced my decision to bring futures thinking more systematically to designers.

The next year, Nathan Shedroff asked me to create a foresight course in the Design MBA at California College of the Arts. Strategic Foresight is now a core part of the curriculum (the class is usually run by Jake Dunagan). The scenario-generation phase for that first time I ran the course was led by Jay Ogilvy, a former Yale philosopher professor and cofounder of Global Business Network, who at GBN had created a step-by-step process for teaching 2x2 scenario generation. Thanks to GBN's influence, and I believe in large part to Jay's pedagogy, this had become the most widely used way of creating scenarios for organisations around the world. It's gratifying to find Jay's methodological contribution recognised in Design is Storytelling (p. 47). Readers interested in the approach of a hybrid consulting futurist and philosopher should seek out his excellent book Creating Better Futures (OUP, 02002) and more recent journal article Facing the Fold (Foresight, 02011).

At the end of 02011 I delivered the closing keynote at AIGA's annual conference, a terrific platform for bringing futures-related ideas to wider attention in the design community. The talk was a little weird, but it helped opened up multiple continuing conversations and collaborations.

And meanwhile, OCAD University took the groundbreaking step of offering the first foresight-focused program in a design institution, the MDes in Strategic Foresight and Innovation (SFI). In 02013, OCAD U lured me away from Melbourne and a full-time consulting role at Arup, to Toronto, where I was the first external tenure-track SFI faculty hire, brought on as the program doubled in size to accommodate both full- and part-time cohorts. There, collaborating with wonderful colleagues Greg Van Alstyne and Suzanne Stein, I integrated experiential futures approaches (design fiction, live action roleplaying, etc) into the core curriculum, and led seven iterations of the Foresight Studio over three years. SFI is easily the largest graduate program at Canada's biggest art and design school, and it has by now unleashed well over 100 hybrid design/futures folks into organisations around the country and the world.

At the same time, Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design has been integrating a form of systems literacy throughout the curriculum, under the banner of transition design. This effort, initiated by Head of School Terry Irwin with Gideon Kossoff, Peter Scupelli and Cameron Tonkinwise (who is now at UNSW), has incorporated a futures perspective since its inception [pdf link]. It has been gradually rolled out across the CMU design curriculum, top to bottom, over the past several years. December wrapped up my first semester on faculty, where I taught the Senior Design Studio alongside Terry Irwin and Stacie Rohrbach, and we formally brought transition design ideas to undergrads for the first time.

Our students tackled a variety of wicked problems (food, water, gentrification, air quality, and so on), mapping their contours historically and in the present before using futures tools to examine alternative pathways for the coming decades, and generating stories (visions) for the year 02050 to inspire design interventions for the long term. Methods and heuristics we covered included the cone of possibilities, scenario generation, and design fiction / experiential futures (i.e., methodological staples that have found their way from futures to the pages of Design is Storytelling); as well as some others as yet less widely known in the design world, like environmental scanning and three horizons.

Currently, working with colleagues including Peter Scupelli (who has now taught futures at CMU for some five years), Dan Lockton, Molly Steenson, Terry Irwin, and many others, I'm working on braiding a foresight thread through the undergraduate design curriculum. The intention is for it to become part of the standard repertoire of competencies used by and expected of 21st century designers.

So it's nearly a decade that my colleagues and I have been working to deliberately infuse futures methods into design education; and there are of course many other strands in this bigger story alongside the ones I can recount from first-hand experience. But this is a personal story that reinforces Ellen Lupton's core insight: design's storytelling – and worldbuilding – potential, though always present, has lately been moving from marginal to something much more central.

There's a wealth of further fuel for that fire in Design is Storytelling, both futures-flavoured and not, and the book manages to be both highly attractive and, in the best sense, utilitarian, while documenting a moment in time where design's recognition of its narrative possibilities and responsibilities only continues to grow. Check it out.

Related:
> The Thing from the Future
> TFTF UNESCO French/English edition
> Reverse archaeology 02013 / 02008
> Object oriented futuring
> Strategic foresight and the Design MBA
> Introducing futures at the RCA 

Where we begin and end

Last week, I got married. My darling and I floated down a river outside Melbourne with two of our oldest, dearest friends.

We each chose something to read aloud to mark the occasion.

Of all the things I might have thought to read, I'd selected part of a personal essay by the great Ursula Le Guin.

On the morning of the ceremony, immediately on waking I found a different idea in mind, and ended up writing something myself to say later that day instead.

But Le Guin's words came back to me yesterday when I learned that she had died.

They seem appropriate to share now.

Dogs don't know what they look like. Dogs don't even know what size they are. No doubt it's our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother's dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart.

Dogs don't notice when they put their paws in the quiche. Dogs don't know where they begin and end.

Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat's way of maintaining a relationship.

A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don't know what size we are, how we're shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people who have the most accurate, vivid sense of their own appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do.

For old people, beauty doesn't come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.

We're like dogs, maybe: we don't really know where we begin and end. In space, yes; but in time, no.

When I was thirteen and fourteen I felt like a whippet suddenly trapped inside a great lumpy Saint Bernard. I wonder if boys don't often feel something like that as they get their growth. They're forever being told that they're supposed to be big and strong, but I think some of them miss being slight and lithe. A child's body is very easy to live in. An adult body isn't. The change is hard. And it's such a tremendous change that it's no wonder a lot of adolescents don't know who they are. They look in the mirror—that is me? Who's me?

And then it happens again, when you're sixty or seventy.

My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain, her spleen enlarged so that her body was misshapen. Is that the person I see when I think of her? Sometimes. I wish it were not. It is a true image, yet it blurs, it clouds, a truer image. It is one memory among fifty years of memories of my mother. It is the last in time. Beneath it, behind it is a deeper, complex, ever-changing image, made from imagination, hearsay, photographs, memories. I see a little red-haired child in the mountains of Colorado, a sad-faced, delicate college girl, a kind, smiling young mother, a brilliantly intellectual woman, a peerless flirt, a serious artist, a splendid cook—I see her rocking, weeding, writing, laughing—I see the turquoise bracelets on her delicate, freckled arm—I see, for a moment, all that at once, I glimpse what no mirror can reflect, the spirit flashing out across the years, beautiful.

That must be what the great artists see and paint. That must be why the tired, aged faces in Rembrandt's portraits give us such delight: they show us beauty not skin-deep but life-deep. In Brian Lanker's album of photographs I Dream a World, face after wrinkled face tells us that getting old can be worth the trouble if it gives you time to do some soul making. Not all the dancing we do is danced with the body.

Ursula K. Le Guin, 2013. The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Boston: Shambhala, pp. 163-170.*

* My abridgment. No words altered.

Related:
> The act of imagination
> Dreaming together

> The weight of alternatives

> Auld Lang Syne (aiglatson edition)

Where do you stand?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll finish this post with his conclusion:

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

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

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