| Next revisionBoth sides next revision |
| future_fabulators:antipodean_musings [2014-03-05 07:25] – created maja | future_fabulators:antipodean_musings [2014-03-05 07:28] – maja |
|---|
| Our romance with the futures has always been entangled with storytelling, but also more eclectic practices as meditation, divination and invocation (that most futurists are careful to stay very clear of nowadays). Not having a professional futurists’ background, we have not shied away from these fields - we see them as different aspects of knowing-, relating to- and having agency in the world. So, with this weird collection of conceptual and practical baggage, in the beginning of February 2014 we embarked on a journey through the unwieldy terrain of the futures studies. We had less than a month to do something that could take several PhDs (I guess we have never outgrown Alice’s plans for doing six impossible things before breakfast). Luckily, we had two very useful filters: a set of practice-based questions that we collected from various debriefs from future preparedness workshops and a more or less defined direction for the Future Fabulators pre-enactments we’re planning to design in the coming months. Whatever we researched had to be furthering our practice, in one way or another. | Our romance with the futures has always been entangled with storytelling, but also more eclectic practices as meditation, divination and invocation (that most futurists are careful to stay very clear of nowadays). Not having a professional futurists’ background, we have not shied away from these fields - we see them as different aspects of knowing-, relating to- and having agency in the world. So, with this weird collection of conceptual and practical baggage, in the beginning of February 2014 we embarked on a journey through the unwieldy terrain of the futures studies. We had less than a month to do something that could take several PhDs (I guess we have never outgrown Alice’s plans for doing six impossible things before breakfast). Luckily, we had two very useful filters: a set of practice-based questions that we collected from various debriefs from future preparedness workshops and a more or less defined direction for the Future Fabulators pre-enactments we’re planning to design in the coming months. Whatever we researched had to be furthering our practice, in one way or another. |
| |
| <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/12375707514/" title="20140207 by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5530/12375707514_f47d6a221b_c.jpg" width="800" height="580" alt="20140207"></a></html> | <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/9367569207/" title="20130725 by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7407/9367569207_287ceb9eff_c.jpg" width="800" height="532" alt="20130725"></a></html> |
| |
| |
| From this rather idealistic and ambitious starting point, we delved into the literature of future studies, hoping to generate a mental map of the field. This lead us down labyrinths of military strategy departments and corporate think tanks, with pathways through dusty academic paper factories and glitzy design [[:/forecasting]] blogs leading us towards [[the future of futures]] and [[non predictive strategy]]. We learned buckets of jargon and found out that futures studies has many faces and inconsistencies, as well as an interesting histories and promising futures. From what we could grasp from skimming through papers and websites, the field seems somewhat fragmented and insular, comprised of various cliques and schools of thought and action. There are the Europeans (in France, Netherlands, Germany, UK…) and the Americans (such as the RAND think tank or the Global Business Network), with quite formalised methods designed for policy and strategic planning originating in the (cold) war era of the 40s and 50s and more recently looking at digitally enhanced [[crowdsourced futures]]; there is the Pacific strand with the Manoa School in Hawaii and several Australian futurists enclaves, proposing methods that are perhaps more culturally and philosophically closer to what we’re interested in (such as causal layered analysis, or [[integral futures]]) and finally there are interesting futurists from Mexico, India, the middle east and parts of the Global South, with interesting views on de-colonising futures. | From this rather idealistic and ambitious starting point, we delved into the literature of future studies, hoping to generate a mental map of the field. This lead us down labyrinths of military strategy departments and corporate think tanks, with pathways through dusty academic paper factories and glitzy design [[:/forecasting]] blogs leading us towards [[the future of futures]] and [[non predictive strategy]]. We learned buckets of jargon and found out that futures studies has many faces and inconsistencies, as well as an interesting histories and promising futures. From what we could grasp from skimming through papers and websites, the field seems somewhat fragmented and insular, comprised of various cliques and schools of thought and action. There are the Europeans (in France, Netherlands, Germany, UK…) and the Americans (such as the RAND think tank or the Global Business Network), with quite formalised methods designed for policy and strategic planning originating in the (cold) war era of the 40s and 50s and more recently looking at digitally enhanced [[crowdsourced futures]]; there is the Pacific strand with the Manoa School in Hawaii and several Australian futurists enclaves, proposing methods that are perhaps more culturally and philosophically closer to what we’re interested in (such as causal layered analysis, or [[integral futures]]) and finally there are interesting futurists from Mexico, India, the middle east and parts of the Global South, with interesting views on de-colonising futures. |
| |
| <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/9367569207/" title="20130725 by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7407/9367569207_287ceb9eff_c.jpg" width="800" height="532" alt="20130725"></a></html> | {{:future_fabulators:screen_shot_2014-02-27_at_16.25.13.png?direct|}} |
| |
| === Scenario thinking === | === Scenario thinking === |
nik