The Futures of Everyday Life

Artwork by Sky Kiyabu for FoundFutures, August 02006
Poster used in "Hawaii 2050" Blue Room

In Honolulu last Thursday morning, 27 May, I defended my completed doctoral dissertation. The five committee members accepted the document as submitted, without requiring any changes. To say that this comes as a relief hardly begins to describe the feeling.

I owe a debt of gratitude to a lot of people -- family, friends, and colleagues -- for incalculable moral and intellectual support. You know who you are: thank you. But I want to acknowledge here the key contributions of two people in particular: Jim Dator, my committee chair and mentor, truly the futurist's futurist, and the reason for my going to Hawaii to begin with; and Jake Dunagan, my long time collaborator and friend, with whom much of both the practice and theory of experiential scenarios, as described in the dissertation, were developed. To be able to work with such fine people as these makes an otherwise arduous process totally worthwhile.

The rhythm of everyday life around here is going to change now that the long PhD writing process is behind me... Time at last to take a few deep breaths.

The Futures of Everyday Life: Politics and the Design of Experiential Scenarios

Abstract

The great existential challenges facing the human species can be traced, in part, to the fact that we have underdeveloped discursive practices for thinking possible worlds ‘out loud’, performatively and materially, in the register of experience. That needs to change. In this dissertation, a methodology for ‘experiential scenarios’, covering a range of interventions and media from immersive performance to stand-alone ‘artifacts from the future’, is offered as a partial corrective. The beginnings of aesthetic, political and ethical frameworks for ‘experiential futures’ are proposed, drawing on alternative futures methodology, the emerging anti-mediumist practice of ‘experience design’, and the theoretical perspective of a Rancièrian ‘politics of aesthetics’. The relationships between these three domains -- futures, design, and politics -- are explored to show how and why they are coming together, and what each has to offer the others. The upshot is that our apparent binary choice between unthinkable dystopia and unimaginable utopia is a false dilemma, because in fact, we can and should imagine ‘possibility space’ hyperdimensionally, and seek to flesh out worlds hitherto supposed unimaginable or unthinkable on a daily basis. Developed from early deployments across a range of settings in everyday life, from urban guerrilla-style activism to corporate consulting, experiential scenarios do not offer definitive answers as to how the future will look, or even how it should look, but they can contribute to a mental ecology within which these questions may be posed and discussed more effectively than ever before.

Life in Hell, circa 02050

I loved this cartoon by Matt The Simpsons Groening when I saw it years ago. And was delighted to rediscover it a week or two back, in a published collection (found at Aardvark Books, an excellent San Francisco used bookstore) of his long-running comic strip "Life in Hell".

Now, dear reader, I pass it on to you.

A comic-strip-from-the-future published in 01996, it's showing its age just a little...

(Click to enlarge.)

Reperceiving Detroit

A city in suspended animation
Photo by Jerry Paffendorf | Backstory

In late January I was honoured to speak at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, as part of their spring lecture series in Critical Studies. In the arts world the Academy is apparently regarded as "the cradle of American modernism", associated with art and design luminaries (who seem to come in pairs) including father and son Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Ray and Charles Eames, and more recently, Mike and Katherine McCoy. Cranbrook's beautiful and historic campus lends itself particularly well to being strolled or driven around on crisp snowy evenings, but its toney neighbourhood lies just 15 miles from downtown Detroit -- currently an American byword for urban blight -- making it an especially interesting vantage point from which to contemplate alternative futures. Which is what we did in the lecture.

Called "Fragments of Possible Worlds: The Art and Design of Experiential Scenarios", my presentation encouraged the audience, mostly Cranbrook students and faculty, to consider the resemblance between the role of the artist and that of the futurist. What the two have in common, as I see it, is the vocation of enabling new perceptions. Compared to the artist, whose self-understanding frequently seems to include a studied refusal of the constraints to which many other kinds of work are subject (viz. "artistic licence"), the futurist's role may be somewhat more circumscribed, especially in a consulting setting, by the client's needs. But the general role is fundamentally similar. And, while there is a conscious turn towards public and political engagement in my recent work, compared to the more narrowly targeted, strategic use of foresight as used in organisational settings, this common ground shared by art and futures is well captured by the elegant phrase of Royal Dutch/Shell scenario planning pioneer Pierre Wack: "the gentle art of reperceiving".

In the lecture, I outlined the development of experiential futures work I've been doing since 02006 or so, and provided an argument for collectively making our thinking about futures more affective, immersive, and experiential. (I relish exploring this topic with artists and designers because they tend to understand it, and are able to use it in their work, immediately.) Actually, the recent histories of two American cities were sufficient to get the point across: in 02005, New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing consequences of failing to internalise and act upon the entirely predictable (indeed, predicted) disaster. The other example was Detroit itself, which, notoriously, has endured a slower but no less grotesque disembowelment with the failure of the expected (US automobile industry-driven) future, and of the city to reinvent its dream accordingly. More on that in a moment.

While at Cranbrook I also held an introductory futures workshop for the 3D Design department, which is run by Scott Klinker, with whose work I had become familiar through Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things -- a visionary and gratifyingly short manifesto about spimes, in which he acknowledges Scott's formative influence on the design ideas therein. (Note that in 02007, they did an intriguing talk together at Google about "The Internet of Things: What Is a Spime and Why Is It Useful?", video of which can be found here.) At the start of the workshop, I had the 3D Design students generate a list of design activities, products and industries to which they expect or hope to contribute during their careers. Then I invited them to spend some time in four alternative futures for the US and the world, around 30 years from now, and to begin considering how those various products or industries could be affected in each scenario.

Despite significant structural similarities between design and futures thinking, as usual it was clear that the participants' expectations for their professional lives were firmly rooted in present assumptions, rather than in awareness of various ways in which these might be comprehensively overturned during the next three decades of change. (I don't mean to pick on anybody here; among people who have not been exposed to futures studies -- that is, almost everyone -- presentism and monofuturism are pretty much ubiquitous.) For instance, what would the role of a designer be in a post-collapse economy? How about in a world where Open Source designs can be selected online, then fabricated on the spot by a black box in the corner? The students seemed fully engaged, and asked great questions, and I'm looking forward to seeing how these ideas may begin to find their way into the work. As is often the case, my only complaint was that our time together was so short.

Overall, I found Cranbrook, the sole graduate-only art school in the United States, to be an extremely interesting place. It educates aspiring artists from around the country and the world in any of ten disciplines, from metalsmithing to architecture, each one of which has a small cohort of around 15 students, making for a total of just 150. Each department is overseen by an Artist-in-Residence, who, given the intimate scale of the programs, can exercise great latitude in running his or her own show. There are no conventional syllabi and no compulsory classes. Students are minimally scheduled, but enjoy the close attention and tutelage of their department's artist-in-residence, as well as the social and creative comradeship of their peer group. So the role of guest lecturers, Academy Director Reed Kroloff told me, can be significant insofar as they provide an opportunity for to develop a conversation around themes transcending the differences across the departments.

Here's where the fact of my visit and the topic of my talk intersect. The kind of academic and artistic freedom with which Cranbrook is blessed is a precious, Arcadian rarity. It is just far enough from the woes of Motor City that the temptation to remain safely cloistered must be great, yet being so close affords an important opportunity -- some would say responsibility -- to use its privilege and status to help lead a much-needed conversation about reinventing the region beyond its postindustrial malaise. During my own short stay, the city impressed on me a sense of suspended animation, a place holding its breath, poised between energetic reinvention and the terrifying momentum of continued decline. However things go next, Detroit's predicament as a semi-abandoned, deindustrialising city appears to strike observers as resonant, even prophetic, for the United States at large. Much has been written about the city's socio-economic downward spiral and the paradoxical potential this brings with it for renewal. Articles from just the last couple of weeks include The Guardian and Fast Company, joining earlier pieces in Time, Fortune and the Financial Times. I haven't yet found an adequate treatment of the failure of foresight in Detroit's unravelling, but that aspect surely warrants investigation -- and beyond that, active forward-looking intervention, for those able to offer it. Detroit is not, in the first instance, merely fodder for journalistic curiosity. Like any other community, it is a human work in progress, and an important role of futures for a community fallen on hard times -- like the role of art -- is to enable new perceptions and potentials, helping the next chapter to unfold along a different, more hopeful path. In particular, when futures and arts unite, to create and distribute "fragments of possible worlds", it seems to me that their joint resources hold out the promise of an unprecedentedly vigorous, vivid public discourse of possibility.

In line with the above, I couldn't leave the city without checking in on fellow futurist Jerry Paffendorf, who is putting his entrepreneurial zeal to good use in a fascinating and playful project called Loveland, in which Detroit real estate is sold online by the square inch, serving as the basis for a mixed-reality social network. Since my whirlwind visit, he has been profiled on NPR (that's National Public Radio, USA): excellent news!

Ventures like Jerry's are part of efforts, here and there, to rekindle the city's collective self-imagination; a tremendous challenge, but a worthy one, and it would be marvellous to see Cranbrook assume a leading role in broadening the conversation. (On that note, the extent to which artists and craftspersons can or should remain detached from the fate of their communities could make an excellent topic for another lecture in the Critical Studies series.) For the time being, though, I want to say it was a real pleasure to introduce futures thinking to this attentive and thoughtful audience, and I trust this will not be the Academy's last official foray into futures.

My thanks to Cranbrook's Sarah Turner and Sid Deaghlin for handling the logistics of my visit, to Jerry Paffendorf for his kind hospitality during a whirlwind city tour.

Related posts:
> Killer imps
> The Unthinkable and the Unimaginable
> Future-jamming 101

Amusing anachronisms

After attending a 35th anniversary screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail last night -- a movie which revels in outrageous anachronisms and (what some would call) thoroughly postmodern, meta-media commentary -- I'm moved to post below three videos, all comico-spiritual successors to the Python example, that have recently come to my attention. Each plays on film and TV conventions reflexively (and so often invisibly) deployed in relation to other historical times, to great comedic effect: the present treated as retro-future, the very recent past treated as distant past, and the present seen from distant future. They use their targeted tropes to distort a recognisable picture (past or present) which, being so familiar, makes the distortions themselves all the clearer. We could say more, but instead, let these astute satirical tidbits speak for themselves.







1: The Astounding World of the Future, dir. Scott Dikkers, 02001 (YouTube link).
(Thanks to Steve Duncombe.)
2: "Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of 'Friendster' Civilization", Onion News Network, 02010(?).
(Thanks to Kurt Bollacker.)
3: "Beatles 3000", dir. Scott Gairdner, 02009.
(Thanks to Jake Dunagan and Alexander Rose.)

Related posts:
> Comedy ahead of its time
> Guerrilla futurists combat war on terror
> Satire's layers

A climate of regret

An older, sadder Barack Obama looks back on the Copenhagen climate conference

Today marks the beginning of the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen, COP 15. As delegates and media converge on the Danish capital, they are being greeted at the airport by a strange sight: environmental advocacy groups Greenpeace and TckTckTck have created a series of billboards depicting various world leaders ruefully looking back from the year 02020, having not seized their opportunity in 02009 to commit to decisive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Old, sad French President Nicolas Sarkozy

Sad and old German Chancellor Angela Merkel

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Only older. And sadder.

Each is emblazoned with the same message. "I'm sorry. We could have stopped catastrophic climate change. We didn't."

In case you haven't been following the news (say, you're writing a doctoral dissertation or something), Planet Green has posted a helpful, brief overview of what's at stake in Copenhagen. Meanwhile, Greenpeace Climate Rescue Weblog explains this last-minute campaign to engage the emotions of decision-makers:

We're hoping these ads predict the wrong future -- the one where world leaders look back with a "coulda, shoulda, woulda" attitude at a Copenhagen climate summit which failed. There's still time to change the future. Our recipe for world leader regret-avoidance is simple: agree a fair, ambitious, and legally binding deal to save the climate.

(Er, save the climate?)

Anyway. While it is not clear to me whether the busy itineraries of all or any of the high-profile individuals concerned will afford them a glimpse of their future selves -- which would make this really interesting -- over 15,000 people are expected to attend (source: CNN), and no doubt many of those will be passing through Copenhagen Airport.

So it's an ingenious and valiant attempt to make the climate message personal; here's hoping it makes some difference.


[[All images from Greenpeace, via Osocio; see also COP 15 set at Greenpeace's Flickr photostream. Sad, old versions of the leaders of Russia, Poland, Brazil, Spain, and Canada are also part of the set.]]

Related posts:
> Ignore global warming (an acerbic climate-themed campaign by the World Wildlife Fund)
> Future shock hits San Francisco (an outdoor site-specific billboard that gave Market Street an earthquake makeover)
> Climate change for fun and profit (Diesel's commerce-friendly take on rising seas)
> Facing future (evidence that artificial aging is hit and miss)
> Future news-flash: your vote counts (pre-'08 election videos activating anticipatory remorse for U.S. non-voters)

(Thanks, Dad.)

The Unthinkable and the Unimaginable

Update (25MAR10): Video of the lecture (minus the interesting post-talk Q&A, unfortunately), made available on YouTube courtesy of CCA, is now posted here too.

Update (6APR10): This presentation is also now downloadable on iTunesU, together with others in the same lecture series by presenters including designer Tim Brown, artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and critical theorist Donna Haraway. (Thanks to Garry Golden for unearthing this.)

Last night I had the pleasure of guest lecturing at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. The title was "The Unthinkable and the Unimaginable: Why Futures and Design are Getting Married". Our starting point came from a speech, ever on-target, by scifi-and-design prophet Bruce Sterling at South By Southwest back in 02006:

We’re on a kind of slider bar, between the Unthinkable, and the Unimaginable, now. Between the grim meathook future, and the bright green future. And there are ways out of this situation: there are actual ways to move the slider from one side to the other. Except we haven’t invented the words for them yet.

(This talk by Sterling, by the way, is a tour de force, even by his exceptional standards: check out the mp3 via BoingBoing, and full transcript via blogger Sean Harton. Sterling also did an excellent and, it seems to me, overlooked talk about the intersection of futures and design in this same CCA lecture series, back in 02006, highly recommended: video at FORA.tv.)

An outline of last night's presentation...

It is our critical collective need to be able to think the supposedly "unthinkable", and imagine the "unimaginable", that is driving the merger of futures and design practices. Futures provides a big-picture context and sense of the stakes for design work, and design brings concreteness and communicative effectiveness to futures. Together they can do far more than simply convey propositional content about possible futures; they enable otherwise schematic, affect-free, "flat" images of the future to be fleshed out, thought and felt -- in a word, experienced -- in a more profound way.

But the notions of unthinkable and unimaginable are just the extremes of a normative spectrum: dystopian (unthinkably bad) at one end, and utopian (unimaginably good) at the other. As important for our collective well-being as it is to engage these edge-cases, part of the offer of this union of design and futures thought/practice is to move beyond the long-standing and limited utopia/dystopia binary. We need to be able to think, and feel, the "possibility space" of alternative futures in more dimensions -- ones not pre-designated (often thought-stoppingly) as desirable or undesirable. To do this, we can use Jim Dator's four generic images of the future (GIFs): continue, collapse, discipline, transform. Dator's framework, which groups scenarios into sets of narratives based on the trajectory of change that they express, can be -- and for many years at HRCFS, actually has been -- deployed generatively to map and explore the "four corners of possibility space", providing a way to range imaginatively and yet systematically towards the outer limits of possible futures, before proceeding to home in on probable and preferable ones.

The meat of the lecture lay in examining a whole series of projects which exemplify the marriage of design and futures work. My focus was on those efforts I knew best, that is, in which I was personally involved -- mostly undertaken in Hawaii over the past four years in collaboration with Jake Dunagan and a variety of artists and designers (above all Matthew Jensen and Yumi Vong). Some of the projects discussed may already be familiar to readers of this blog -- the experiential futures produced for the "Hawaii 2050" kickoff; FoundFutures artifacts including Postcards from the Future and the Chinatown project; our intervention at SXSW '08; the show curated by Sally Szwed at CCA's own Wattis Institute, and more. These stand as part of an emerging breed of exploratory design/futures work that attempts, we could say, the coinage of some of those needful words Sterling references in the quote above. Except that an important part of this new vocabulary comprises not literally words, but rather objects and experiences, and the methodological approaches that help call them into being.

It was great to have an opportunity to discuss these ideas with such an attentive, curious audience, and I am told that this instalment of the CCA's Graduate Studies Lecture Series will shortly be available online. I'll post when that happens. Many thanks to Nathan Shedroff, Nathalie Kakone, Brenda Laurel and others at CCA who helped organise the event.

Also, while we're in update mode, I should add a word or two about what's been going on here at the sceptical futuryst. In the busy time since my last post, I've joined the Executive Board of the World Futures Studies Federation, passed my comprehensive exams and begun writing my doctoral dissertation, and unofficially relocated my base of operations to the San Francisco Bay Area. I have a load of material to blog, but dissertation-writing remains top priority for the time being. Still, I do expect to be able to post here more frequently than I have in recent times, so please do get in touch [stuart at futuryst dot com] if you spot anything that belongs in the mix!

CCA | Image via Street View in Google Maps