possibility studies
Future Design Inquiries. September 2024
Tomorrow morning is a vast realm of possibility. Ten minutes from now is a vast realm of possibility. Both are blooming through a tangle of threads behind this moment that are shifting each other. A change in the tone of voice in a conversation opens the possibility for humor, and a tiny shift and gesture opens the possibility for several future
... See morethe world’s most visible public intellectuals today more often revive or reassert old ideas, rather than generating new ones. The result is that old zombie orthodoxies survive far longer than they should.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
Real possibility, however, is a potentiality that is live precisely because it is rooted in the material here and now (unlike either faux or formal possibilities). Importantly, real possibility can open onto the past just as much as onto the future. The present has the potential to be curiously disrupted along both its edges: the “forward-dawning”
... See morePerry Zurn, Dani S. Bassett • Curiosity and Networks of Possibility
What changes the world in the end is the generative ideas, not the detailed blueprints. But the blueprints are useful tools for thinking with—they help to clarify ideas and can show unexpected consequences. Developing them is part of being positively engaged with the world. It’s easy to be against things and easy to be a critic; much harder to
... See moreGeoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
As a condition of innovation, Johnson (2010) argues, “the adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself” (p. 31)
Perry Zurn, Dani S. Bassett • Curiosity and Networks of Possibility
discourses about human possibility should not be Eurocentric or Western centric but actively invite experiences and ideas that grow out of decolonisation as a position from which we can actively reimagine self, other, and world.
Vlad P. Glăveanu • Possibility Studies: A Manifesto
(4) The dominant notion of reality is deeply related to the fact that we (moderns) believe in science and abstract knowledge as arbitrators of truth, in the autonomous and competitive individual as the kernel of society, and in the economy as a separate domain ruled by “free markets.” These entangled set of beliefs have created the modern idea that
... See more