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| future_fabulators:antipodean_musings [2014-03-06 01:30] – [What next?] maja | future_fabulators:antipodean_musings [2014-03-07 01:07] – nik |
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| by Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney. Glenelg, Australia. 020140210 - 02140305 | 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. | Three weeks ago, we began our research retreat in Adelaide, Australia (in line with the 'seasonal programming’ for FoAM in Brussels, despite the summer here) with the aim of better understanding the techniques, tools and theories around 'future studies' and looking further afield to find tehcniques applicable to our current work. This delineated focus was deemed necessary since it is rare for us to be able to spend time 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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| <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> | {{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/12979291555/}} |
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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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| Since we began working with what we now 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: | Since we began working with what we now 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: |
| * etc. | * etc. |
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| <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/12287400455/" title="20140201 by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3784/12287400455_efff2019e5_c.jpg" width="800" height="548" alt="20140201"></a></html> | |
| | {{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/12287400455/}} |
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| ==== Our path towards futures ==== | ==== Our path towards futures ==== |
| Our romance with the futures has always been entangled with storytelling, but also more eclectic practices including meditation, divination and invocation (which most futurists are careful to stay very clear of nowadays). Not being professional futurists, we haven't 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 field which calls itself "futures studies". We had less than a month to do something that could easily have taken 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 including meditation, divination and invocation (which most futurists are careful to stay very clear of nowadays). Not being professional futurists, we haven't 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 field which calls itself "futures studies". We had less than a month to do something that could easily have taken 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/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> | {{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/9367569207/}} |
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| ==== But why…? ==== | ==== But why…? ==== |
| We began by interviewing each other using the "5 whys" technique. From this conversation it became clear that we’re interested in examining the futures tools and techniques that can help us adapt to uncertainty (in its many guises). We believe that a culture where foresight is embedded in daily life would be more adept to living in a world of probabilities without anxiety, away from rigidly linear 'cause and effect'. Being able to envision alternative futures in the present could allow us to embrace uncertainty more easily. It could also open up new possibilities that would shake up the currently unacceptable status quo and attempt to steer it towards a future where holistic, inclusive and anti-fragile values prevail. We want to investigate experiential futurism as a way to (re)connect future visions with realities, where humans aren’t separate from planetary "others". Our conjecture is that by experiencing what it would be like to be ourselves in a range of future scenarios we could observe our present situation more clearly, adapt to the world as it evolves and experience the agency to navigate our present in the direction of more preferred futures. | We began by interviewing each other using the "5 whys" technique. From this conversation it became clear that we’re interested in examining the futures tools and techniques that can help us adapt to uncertainty (in its many guises). We believe that a culture where foresight is embedded in daily life would be more adept to living in a world of probabilities without anxiety, away from rigidly linear 'cause and effect'. Being able to envision alternative futures in the present could allow us to embrace uncertainty more easily. It could also open up new possibilities that would shake up the currently unacceptable status quo and attempt to steer it towards a future where holistic, inclusive and anti-fragile values prevail. We want to investigate experiential futurism as a way to (re)connect future visions with realities, where humans aren’t separate from planetary "others". Our conjecture is that by experiencing what it would be like to be ourselves in a range of future scenarios we could observe our present situation more clearly, adapt to the world as it evolves and experience the agency to navigate our present in the direction of more preferred futures. |
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| <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/10743442776/" title="20131107 by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5543/10743442776_45e5442b63_c.jpg" width="800" height="513" alt="20131107"></a></html> | {{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/10743442776/}} |
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| ====Studying Futures==== | ====Studying Futures==== |
| Aside from these general methods, there are several specific techniques that may help us improve aspects of the scenario process. To begin with, we want to be able to ask better questions and encourage an [[inquiring mind]], while being aware of our [[cognitive bias|cognitive biases]] and [[affective forecasting|emotions]]. We looked at how we could better structure a discussion about the past and present circumstances (finding interesting possibilities in the [[KPUU framework]] and [[integral scenario development]]). We looked at different ways to identify and present (interactions between) drivers of change (aka macro-trends), including [[horizon scanning]], futures wheel, trend impact analysis or [[field anomaly relaxation]]. The question how to construct [[http://lib.fo.am/future_fabulators/scenario_methods#scenarios|scenarios]] lead us deeper into the territory of axes, branches, layers, fans and cones (no specialist field is complete without a working vocabulary) - all of which can represent different relationships between (elements) of possible, probable and/or preferred futures. What we have previously called 'retrocasting' or 'scenario testing' (probing the paths from "here" to various projected futures) goes by several names, the most widespread being "[[http://lib.fo.am/future_fabulators/scenario_methods#retrocasting|backcasting]]" and/or "incasting". Exploring each of these methods and techniques has of course revealed more promising leads, many of which have been left unexplored for now. However, our initial collection of [[scenario methods]] is now more extensive and has already sparked ideas about how we could use or adapt some of them in our work. We feel less constrained by the GBN method which we had become familiar with, and the limits of four scenarios based on two 'critical uncertainties'. | Aside from these general methods, there are several specific techniques that may help us improve aspects of the scenario process. To begin with, we want to be able to ask better questions and encourage an [[inquiring mind]], while being aware of our [[cognitive bias|cognitive biases]] and [[affective forecasting|emotions]]. We looked at how we could better structure a discussion about the past and present circumstances (finding interesting possibilities in the [[KPUU framework]] and [[integral scenario development]]). We looked at different ways to identify and present (interactions between) drivers of change (aka macro-trends), including [[horizon scanning]], futures wheel, trend impact analysis or [[field anomaly relaxation]]. The question how to construct [[http://lib.fo.am/future_fabulators/scenario_methods#scenarios|scenarios]] lead us deeper into the territory of axes, branches, layers, fans and cones (no specialist field is complete without a working vocabulary) - all of which can represent different relationships between (elements) of possible, probable and/or preferred futures. What we have previously called 'retrocasting' or 'scenario testing' (probing the paths from "here" to various projected futures) goes by several names, the most widespread being "[[http://lib.fo.am/future_fabulators/scenario_methods#retrocasting|backcasting]]" and/or "incasting". Exploring each of these methods and techniques has of course revealed more promising leads, many of which have been left unexplored for now. However, our initial collection of [[scenario methods]] is now more extensive and has already sparked ideas about how we could use or adapt some of them in our work. We feel less constrained by the GBN method which we had become familiar with, and the limits of four scenarios based on two 'critical uncertainties'. |
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| <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/8704102463/" title="Untitled by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8399/8704102463_9b55e58dee_c.jpg" width="800" height="428" alt="Untitled"></a></html> | {{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/8704102463/}} |
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| ==== Experiential futures ==== | ==== Experiential futures ==== |
| As our current research phase comes to an end, we can only conclude that we’re just beginning. We have left many [[background]] threads open, messy and unknotted, which is somewhat frustrating, yet we know that some of our investigations have found fertile ground. We plan to get back to the research 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 phase comes to an end, we can only conclude that we’re just beginning. We have left many [[background]] threads open, messy and unknotted, which is somewhat frustrating, yet we know that some of our investigations have found fertile ground. We plan to get back to the research 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> | {{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/8647294919/}} |
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nik