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| future_fabulators:antipodean_musings [2014-03-05 07:25] – created maja | future_fabulators:antipodean_musings [2014-03-05 08:15] – nik |
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| ==== Musings from the Antipodean research retreat ==== | ==== Musings from the Antipodean research retreat ==== |
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| by Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney | by Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney. Glenelg, Australia. 020140210 - 02140305 |
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| | A few years ago, we started to design 'seasonal programming’ for FoAM in Brussels. During winter we would focus on research, in the spring design and productions, dedicate summer to outward oriented activities (e.g. workshops and public events) and in the autumn retreat into documentation and reflection. While we feel the theory is sound, it has been difficult to implement in practice, as embedded as we are in a world that is always 'on', regardless of the weather, temperature or diurnal-cycles. In following these seasonal rhythms, the northern hemisphere winter suggests our time is primarily focused on research. |
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| Glenelg, SA, Australia, 020140210 - 02140305 | <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/11645684936/" title="20131227 by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5490/11645684936_0f9fa6d78d_c.jpg" width="800" height="492" alt="20131227"></a></html> |
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| | Three weeks ago, we began our research retreat in Adelaide, Australia (despite the summer here) with the aim of better understanding the techniques, tools and theories of 'future studies' and if they could be applied in our work. This delineated focus was deemed necessary since it is rare for us to be able to spend weeks in more or less uninterrupted reading, following interesting leads down often fractal rabbit holes. We attempted to answer questions that had arisen from the last few years of practice with scenarios and in particular prehearsals. |
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| A couple of years ago, we designed a 'seasonal programming’ for FoAM in Brussels. In winter we would do (literature) research, in the spring focus on design and productions, dedicate the summer to outward oriented activities, such as workshops and public events, and in the autumn retreat to documentation and reflection. This sounds great in theory, but it was a bit more difficult to implement in practice, as embedded as we are in a world that is always 'on', regardless of the weather, temperature and light conditions. With ups and downs we’re carving out as much space as possible to keep our seasonal rhythms. The current season being winter in Belgium, our time is primarily focused on research. | Since we began working with what we call 'speculative culture' (~2009), we have crossed paths with people like Bruce Sterling, Anab Jain, Chris Luebkeman, Scott Smith, Justin Pickard, Maya van Leemput, Stuart Candy (amongst others) who are more directly involved with futures, future studies or may even call themselves futurists. We have seen many points of contact (and departure) with their work, but without dedicated time to research the field in earnest we often felt like dabbling amateurs or isolated adventures, most likely been spinning the reinventing wheels and solving well understood problems. So, these few weeks have been very precious to us: we have begun to place our practice in a wider context, understand where we can stand on others' shoulders, and where we consciously or unconsciously stumbled on possible solutions or new avenues of exploration. It has helped us to more or less answer the questions of why we working more explicitly with futures, as well as beginning to glimpse answers to a few other dilemmas, including: |
| | * how do we increase a sense of agency when faced with unknowable volatile futures? |
| <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/11645684936/" title="20131227 by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5490/11645684936_0f9fa6d78d_c.jpg" width="800" height="492" alt="20131227"></a></html> | |
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| Three weeks ago, we began our Future Fabulators research retreat in Adelaide, Australia (even though it is summer here) with a mission: getting our feet more firmly on the ground of futures studies. It is so rare for us (considering our executive positions) to be able to spend several weeks in more or less uninterrupted reading, following interesting leads down fractal rabbit holes, attempting to answer questions that arose from several years of practice with scenarios and prehearsals. Since we began working with what we call 'speculative culture' (~2009), we met people as Bruce Sterling, Anab Jain, Chris Luebkeman, Scott Smith, Justin Pickard, Maya van Leemput, Stuart Candy and others who are more directly involved in the futures studies, or even call themselves futurists. We saw many points of contact (and departure) with their work, but without having time to research the field in earnest we always felt like we were dabbling amateurs, probably reinventing multiple wheels and solving known problems that have been resolved many times over. This is why these few weeks have been so precious to us: they allowed us to place our practice in a wider context, understand where we can stand on others' shoulders, and where we consciously or unconsciously stumbled on possible solutions. It helped us to more or less answer the question "but why? (are we working with futures), as well as beginning to glimpse answers to a few other dilemmas, including: | |
| * how do we increase the sense of agency when faced with seemingly unsurmountable futures? | |
| * who are our historical and contemporary peers? | * who are our historical and contemporary peers? |
| * how can we increase commitment in co-creating a preferred future? | * how can we increase the commitment to co-create preferred futures? |
| * how can futures work empower people to live abundant, meaningful lives in the present? | * how can futures work empower people to live abundant, meaningful lives in the present? |
| * what are the different forms experiential futures can take? | * what are the different forms experiential futures can take? |
| 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. |
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| <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> |
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| 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. |
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| <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|}} |
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| === Scenario thinking === | === Scenario thinking === |
| === What next? === | === What next? === |
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| As our research retreat comes to an end, we can only conclude that we’re just beginning. We had to leave many threads open, messy and unknotted, which is on one hand frustrating, but on the other we know that our investigations found a fertile ground. We hope to get back to the research in between our practical experiments, but we’d also like to encourage all of the Future Fabulators, and anyone else interested in these subjects to keep feeding these pages with interesting, relevant and/or surprising information and insights. | As our current research retreat comes to an end, we can only conclude that we’re just beginning. We have left many threads open, messy and unknotted, which is on one hand frustrating, but on the other we know that our investigations found a fertile ground. We hope to get back to the research in between our practical experiments, but we’d also like to encourage all of the Future Fabulators, and anyone else interested in these subjects to keep feeding these pages with interesting, relevant and/or surprising information and insights. |
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| <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/8647294919/" title="20130412 by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8102/8647294919_2141d7e13d_c.jpg" width="800" height="463" alt="20130412"></a></html> | <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/8647294919/" title="20130412 by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8102/8647294919_2141d7e13d_c.jpg" width="800" height="463" alt="20130412"></a></html> |
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nik