Looking Past Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Using Futures Studies Methods to Extend the Research Horizon (original) (raw)
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Making Futures Present: A postcard from the future clears up your vision of the horizon
Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design, RSD11, 3-16 Oct 2022, Brighton, United Kingdom., 2022
Is what’s over the horizon a bit blurry for you? The future presents a greater feeling of certainty when you hold a piece of it in your hands. Making Futures Present is a one-hour personal experiential foresight and design thinking workshop that helps to review and rethink the future by co-creating multiple scenarios. It is very tempting for us to turn our gaze away from the future when it looks blurry, seems unknowable, and feels menacing. However, strategic foresight is a practice of low-risk thought experiments to reflect on the capacity to manage complex and turbulent scenarios. This is an experiential learning workshop to help us envision preferred futures via design fiction objects. As a result, participants will increase their comfort level with uncertainty and take steps in the present toward the future that they want. Making Futures Present was awarded the Next Generation Foresight Practitioner award from the School of International Futures in 2018. It was also awarded the Most Significant Futures Work by the Association of Professional Futurists in 2019. It has been adapted for high school students, seniors, artists, writers, journalists, and people who are in career transitions. In 2020 it was adapted for youth anti-vaping research with the University of Toronto School of Public Health and recreated as an online research tool called Nod from 2050 in 2021. Most recently, it was adapted again for anti-vaping training onsite at a high school in Toronto.
Designing for Uncertain Futures: An Anticipatory Approach
Interactions
shape the way by which future societies, economies, and environments develop from the present. New technologies may have unexpected direct and indirect impacts that could pave undesirable pathways for the environment and for our future societies. A key challenge is how we can take a systems approach across these transformations, rather than scrutinizing individual aspects in isolation. One problem is that the future is uncertain and there are myriad possible futures. Methods such as speculative design [1] can help us explore possible futures and can As climate change, economic instability, new uses of AI, and other transformations are affecting the world, life is becoming more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (often referred to as a VUCA world). This poses a challenge for humans, organizations, and governments to navigate. Exploring the potential impact of these transformations is important for us HCI researchers and designers, as we strive to build better futures through new technologies. Through prototyping, workshops, user studies, and other future-oriented activities, we can craft possible futures and thereby A
The Future as a Design Problem
Design Issues , 2016
Introduction All designers have to grapple with the unknowability of the future. Objects that are designed here and now will come into use at some future under conditions their creator can neither know nor control. 1 This problem is a special case of a common predicament for human social organization: Every action in the present is also a movement into a future that it helps shape but cannot determine. In many instances, such uncertainty is bounded by the limited scale of the action and the constraints of formal rules and informal norms that structure social action. However, even the most mundane of acts can unravel if expected outcomes are not met. Garfinkel's ethnomethodological " breaching experiments " demonstrate how quickly social organization disintegrates if assumptions about the stability of the consequences of actions are challenged. 2 In cases that designers address, there may be important opportunity costs if expectations are disappointed and the legitimacy of a design is questioned. Individuals, organizations, and nations may all have made significant commitments of material or symbolic resources that could have been applied to other objectives that might have been more productive. Human societies have traditionally developed institutions to try to manage this risk and stabilize (if not control) their future. These range from oracles through insurance to the contemporary fashion for economic modeling. Through such means, the future may be collectively grasped in order to act upon it. Only once the future is stabilized can the designer begin their work to exploit it. However, studies of design have only occasionally addressed this relationship with futures: for example, in urban planning design 3 or in formal anticipatory models of abstract design reasoning. 4 This article explores the recruitment of the future into design practice and the ways this constrains and shapes what could or should be designed and its relations to retrospective evaluations of what should have been designed. Ubiquitous computing (or " ubicomp ") is used as a case study. This is an influential and strongly future-oriented design program—a characteristic that is apparent in the technical and popular literature. 5 As such ubicomp provides an exemplary site to investigate the effects of different strategies for stabilizing the future, while also speaking to a much broader category of socio-technical design practices. We distinguish two intertwined approaches: pragmatic projection, which tries to tie the future to the past, and grand vision, which ties the present to the future. We assess their implications and conclude by arguing that the social legitimacy of design futures should be increasingly integral to their construction.
Sustainable Technological Futures
Nordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference
In this critique, we problematize the framing of technological futures through rhetorical devices such as the Futures Cone which we contend promotes a one-world-world perspective, in that it assumes a collective (western) acceptance of a particular historicity and notions of time when used to consider and design technological futures. Instead, we adopt an alternate perspective which primarily draws from the work of Brazilian philosopher Alvaro Vieira Pinto who considered the past and the future as shaped by the present-a present that is open and creative due to constant change. In addition, we draw upon game design philosopher Ian Bogost's proposition Alien Phenomenology which allows us to better consider the notion of 'human' as part of complex assemblages of human and non-human actants in interdependent relationships but operating within independent perspectives. This framing enables us to begin to act on present orthodoxies of design and promote more sustainable practices that go beyond purely human considerations and to begin to accommodate futures for non-human entities, both technological and ecological (flora, fauna and climate). In this critique, we will develop this argument and present a series of examples that illustrate how it may be put into actionable design practice. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing • Human computer interaction (HCI) • HCI theory, concepts and models
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2011
Futures studies are the scientific study of possible, desirable, and probable future developments and scope for design, as well as the conditions for these in the past and in the present. Modern futures studies assume that the future is not entirely determinable and that different future developments ('futures') are possible and there is scope for design. They are based on the realization that there are indeed a great number of possible futures but that these are not arbitrary. The term 'Future-oriented Technology Analysis' refers to potent changes and challenges for futures studies at the interface of technological change with increasingly science-based innovation, attention to societal issues and concerns. Futures Studies and Future-oriented Technology analysis are concerned with complex dynamic systems and processes and engage multiple stakeholders in participatory and interdisciplinary processes to assure distributed understanding and sustainable development. The article discusses principles and context of Futures studies and Futures analyses methodology. It puts forward five core research lines to outline Futures studies contribution to addressing issues in the research area of Internet & Society.
Everyday futures: a new interdisciplinary area of research
Interactions, 2017
With the rise of ubiquitous computing, the role of HCI and interaction design in making everyday futures is becoming ever more encompassing and profound. The articles in this Special Topic offer perspectives on how these implications might be researched, understood, and challenged.
Delphi method to explore future scenario possibilities on technology and HCI
Based on the pattern shown in the nose of innovation graphic of Bill Buxton, this paper investigates future developments and construct a future scenario regarding technology, interaction and expectations of affordances in the next 5 to 10 years. The research is based in the Delphi method to help construct scenarios of possibilities as it helps identify expectations of incremental and drastic innovations. The method brings together specialists on user experience, usability, information architecture, technology and network, with experience and points of view from five different cities around the world.
Imagining the Future from the Margins
Communicating the Arts, 2023
Exploring past visions of the future reveals two key insights: First, we are not always great at predicting the future, but we are good (and unavoidably so) at shaping it. How the future unfolds is shaped by our present imaginings. Second, what the future looks like depends on where you’re looking at it from. Mainstream media, particularly Hollywood, often hands us meticulously crafted visions of the future. Rarely does the wider public get a chance to participate in crafting these images. In this talk, I share some of the creative projects—spanning dance, installation art, AI-generated imagery, and wearable technology design—that my colleagues and I have undertaken. These projects point towards anticipatory approaches to the future that ask, what happens when our images of the future emerge from the fringes rather than conventional centers of power, influence, and imagination? This presentation was given at the Communicating the Arts Conference Singapore in 2023, a gathering of art professionals, museum directors, curators, innovators and change-makers exploring the future of arts and technology.
World Futures Review, 2020
The key question behind this article is, How is AI impacting futures research, with particular focus on foresight and design futures? To address such question, this article reports on selected epistemological and methodological traits of design futures research, on the nature of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the potential impact of AI on the design futures domain, offering a conceptual model as theoretical junction between the domains of foresight and design. Key topics and themes addressed were selectively focused on foresight, design, design futures, weak signals, and their role in relationship with visioning and the image, AI, and a multidisciplinary discussion of how these fields relate to each other. This article is based on desk research and dialogue among the two authors, both profiled professional experts in their respective fields of design futures and AI, with a track of experience both in academic and applied research. Therefore, sources include a rich texture of bibl...