What is the Future?

And there is what is called ‘face-crime’ – this is the adoption of an improper expression on one's face when watching the tele-screen as ever more improbable facts get transmitted (Orwell 2008[1949]: 65).

Consultants McKinsey and Company and yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur championed 3D printing in a report on the potential of the ‘circular economy’ presented to the 2012 World Economic Forum in Davos (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2012). David

Moreover, time is not viewed as a dimension along which systems move. Rather, systems are constituted through their becoming, through process, through what the philosopher A. N. Whitehead and others termed the ‘arrow of time’ (1929).

He presents SF prototyping as an emergent tool within forecasting – a ‘prototype’ in this context is ‘a story or a fictional depiction of a product’ (Johnson 2011: 12). SF is not just a resource to draw upon for possible imaginings of future worlds, but also a technique for generating scenarios through developing characters, plots and narrative sto

As media futurist Marshal McLuhan once said, ‘First we build the tools, then they build us.’ Exponential change brings the future so much closer.

Futures are multiple, contested and complex. In

Futurist Buckminster Fuller explained that it is very difficult to change and innovate what lies in the future: ‘You never change anything by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’ This

Porritt sees crisis as the basis for innovation, especially as organized through the ‘global cooperative movement’ in relationship to finance and capital markets.

Such forecasting involves seeing some feature of the present as the key mechanism in how people's lives will predictably unfold in the future.