One of my favourite engagements of the past year was a panel about The Power of Utopia with accomplished artistic activists Terry Marshall (co-instigator of Intelligent Mischief, a creative studio dedicated to “unleashing Black imagination to shape the future”), and Cory Doctorow (bestselling science fiction author and journalist whose work includes How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism and Walkaway, among many other titles). The Center for Artistic Activism (C4AA) hosted the event as part of its Revolutionizing Activism series, a brilliant resource for agents of change to practise infusing r ..read more

The University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design has published the latest edition of its periodical LA+, an interdisciplinary journal dealing with landscape architecture –– and more, as the name hints. The topic and title this time out is SPECULATION, a multifarious and richly intersectional theme on which contributions appear from Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Javier Arpa Fernandéz, Min Kyung Lee, and Ytasha Womack, together with many others, all marshalled by the issue editor Christopher Marcinkoski and editor-in-chief Tatum Hands. I had the pleasure of taking part in the p ..read more

The Futures Bazaar: A Public Imagination Toolkit is published by Situation Lab & the British Broadcasting Corporation Picture a wild and wonderful place where all alternative future possibilities co-exist at once, and can be physically encountered in real life; a kind of multi-dimensional exchange, where tangible objects are put on offer from countless possible worlds. This crazy setting is not just an idea, but somewhere I’ve visited — twice, actually. And you can, too. The Futures Bazaar: A Public Imagination Toolkit, created and written together with my fantastic design futurist col ..read more

Futurists, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A journalist contacts you. They’re reporting on topic X (sure!) and how it could change over the coming years or decades (great!) and would like to speak to a futurist (sounds good!) Then comes the big question: “What do you predict for the future of X?” To offer a more pluralistic response, describing alternative futures based on different sets of assumptions, often spells the beginning of the end of that conversation. This is too complicated for the story they want to tell. No sooner have you suggested it than the inquirer is already movin ..read more

The Experiential Futures Ladder. Diagram by author. See articles The Experiential Turn (02016) and Designing an Experiential Scenario (2017) co-written with Jake Dunagan There has been a tremendous expansion in awareness of and interest in futures/foresight work recently, especially those approaches that intersect with the arts, media and design. Projects and publications, courses and conferences on these topics are flourishing like never before. As Cher Potter and I wrote in our introduction to the collection Design and Futures in 2019: Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon famously observed: “Ev ..read more

A snapshot from the Influence 2035 experiential scenario This week, the World Economic Forum is hosting its first ever Global Technology Governance Summit (GTGS), convening something like 1000 leading technologists, academics, businesspeople, policymakers and political representatives to discuss the sprawling array of fast-moving challenges in this space. From privacy breach scandals to the Trumpian rise of batshit-crazy conspiracy thinking, the chaotic gaming of stock prices, to misinformation-fuelled mob lynchings, and the weaponisation of online platforms for camp ..read more

Last week I helped to launch the United Nations Development Programme's annual innovation event, Istanbul Innovation Days (IID), using an experiential futures process and format created for the occasion. Back in January, they had come to me with a challenge: how might experiential futures practice be brought to bear for the event's Opening Session? Due to Covid everything was to be run online this year; this kickoff was planned as a panel conversation about global development's futures, live in video chat, with the UNDP Head and invited speakers around the world. Mission accepted: I proposed ..read more

How do you develop foresight capacity inside an organisation, and experiential futures especially? Versions of this question come up a lot.  Recently I've spoken with government agencies from the UK, Denmark, and Australia, whose leaders all reached out for advice on growing their capability in these spaces. The RSA (the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has just published a report on "Realising the Value of Futures and Foresight"; I was glad to contribute when the researchers got in touch a few months ago. These are exciting signals that the conditions for social f ..read more

How do you develop foresight capacity inside an organisation, and experiential futures especially? Versions of this question come up a lot.  Recently I've spoken with government agencies from the UK, Denmark, and Australia, whose leaders all reached out for advice on growing their capability in these spaces. The RSA (the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has just published a report on "Realising the Value of Futures and Foresight"; I was glad to contribute when the researchers got in touch a few months ago. These are exciting signals that the conditions for social f ..read more

"Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next." — Arundhati Roy *** A group of Theatre in Pandemic participants test out a new streaming platform This summer, together with my colleague Nica Ross from Carnegie Mellon's School of Drama, we staged an experimental research course called Theatre in Pandemic. It took place against the backdrop of not only the COVID-19 crisis but also a national and global effort to confront police violence and structural racism ..read more