Around the Future in Eighty Worlds
Collectively, we also need pictures of societal futures that go beyond today’s status quo. They complement but do not replace the necessary work of activism that fights against the injustices of the present. We also need new answers to new problems—the vulnerabilities caused by a more connected world, or by potentially lethal artificial intelligenc
... See moreGeoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
What kind of story do you want to tell about the future? Professional futurists often classify scenarios into one of four kinds of stories or archetypes: growth, constraint, collapse, or transformation.
Jane McGonigal • Imaginable: How to see the future coming and be ready for anything
Strategic Foresight is open to alternative futures, that is, you work with several futures (certainly more than one!) because you know that you can’t predict the future and it most certainly won’t be an extrapolation from the past. It can evolve in different directions and, using Strategic Foresight, you can determine which are possible, which are
... See morePatricia Lustig • Strategic Foresight
Thinking in utopia or dystopia is too black and white. We need to consider transtopian matrices. You know that Tim Urban graph that shows a single line going to the right, forking out into more and more possibilities in the future? While we can’t predict precisely what society will be like in 2045, we can map the categories, questions, and dualisms
... See more“Rather than providing pre-packaged images of possible futures, it is important to encourage do-it-yourself and do-it-together attitudes towards the creation and exploration of futures.”
— FoAM, The Art of Futuring
Keely Adler • Multiplayer Futures
“The Official Future” tells us to “think exponentially, act incrementally,” beckoning us to utilize foresight in service of the ever-expanding present systems of quantifying, micro-analyzing, extracting, consuming, and automating. This way of futuring is at the heart of Epistemic Uncertainty. “The Emergent Future” instead challenges us to “ think t... See more