Futurism

Try as we might to utilize reason and logic for our arguments, the human race is first and foremost an emotional species. On a base level, I might even say that the most important aspect of foresight is the ability to create emotional connections between people and their possible, probable, preferred, and preventable futures.

Also above and beyond other “candidates” – and in line with futures studies - metamodernism promotes an anticipatory and proactive thinking about alternative futures (Baciu et al., 2015), and is interested to convey a newly born optimist metanarrative that would unite and reconstruct the broken identity pieces after postmodernism (Abramson, 2015b).

“Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future,” Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie, told The New York Times in 1977.

At the Institute for the Future we believe that the value of futures thinking is not in predicting the future (something no one can do), but in imagining possibilities of what the future could be. And if there was ever a time we needed such imagination, it is today.