Futurism

“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.

Erik Davis on The Ezra Klein Show recently spoke about “high weirdness,” saying that “‘weirdness’ isn’t just a quality of things that don’t make sense to us; it’s an interpretive framework that helps us better understand the cultures and technologies that will shape our wondrous, wild future.”

Affective Foresight begins with the acknowledgement that futures thinking benefits the human emotional state, seeks to understand emotional nuance of the future, and promotes the benefits of foresight as a tool for improved mental health and decision making

As futurists we look for signals—small, often weird things. They are usually new technologies, new behaviors, new narratives that don’t fit into the mainstream, but that are often precursors of important transformations. We then try to discern the larger patterns that these signals herald to understand where they might lead ten or more years down

Neither of these individuals are saying that we should not be working with organizations, businesses, governments, for-profits, non-profits, or any other entities where people work and live — and neither am I. What we are saying is that our thinking and acting toward the future must challenge the systems that would seek to short-circuit the very