futures toolbox
“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.
A quote from The Wave in the Mind
- Foresight has a trend problem — today’s trend hunting is largely a by-product of a linear, mechanistic, and extractive system that hopes to profit off of the “next big thing,” and is also mired in a hyper-masculine perspective of what’s important or what should be examined.
- Foresight has a time problem — “This or that will happen in the next 1, 3,
The Future Thinker’s Dilemma
Designers and strategists working toward preferable futures must recognize that technical forecasting and trend analysis are not enough. Imagination is what allows alternatives to emerge—alternatives that are often suppressed by dominant narratives of innovation, growth and inevitability. When imagination is reclaimed as a civic and political... See more
Practical imagination
There is no powerfully constructive technology that is not also powerfully destructive in another direction, just as there is no great idea that cannot be greatly perverted for great harm. After all, the most beautiful human mind is still capable of murderous ideas. Indeed, an invention or idea is not really tremendous unless it can be tremendously... See more
Fred Pohl famously said that the job of the science fiction writer was to predict the traffic jam, not the automobile.
Traffic Jams and Automobiles
Paradoxically, the most reliable method to envision and plan for futures, isn’t just studying and extrapolating scientific facts, historical developments, psychology and demography, but by building stories beyond our wildest imagination.
Marjolein Pijnappels • Designing the Future Using Science Fiction
That's right. I keep going. Something in what you were just talking about reminded me of, you talked about how you're about cultural futurism now. Is that a recent shift or how did you find that place? And what does that mean in how you work?
It is and it isn't. We've always been doing our work like this, where it's always predictive. The whole... See more
It is and it isn't. We've always been doing our work like this, where it's always predictive. The whole... See more
