At Pantopicon, time and time again we tell our clients that not only today’s choices influence tomorrow’s future but also that the way one forms oneself an image, an experience of tomorrow’s world, as one sees it, influences the way in which one makes choices today. As soon as these images and experiences of the futures as we envision them, stop living only in our heads but make it physically into the real world, they become tools for thought, for discussion, for exploration, for inspiration, etc.

In the past, we already shared with you some of the fascinating visualizations of the future that people came up with in the past. For those of you, who are – like us – ever hungry for more, there is the inspiring paleo-future blog.

The topic of moving the future from inside our heads to out into the world, so that they can start leading a life, resonates strongly with the whole idea of prototyping. Prototyping can have an enormous added value in futures studies, not only as a series of established methods, techniques and best practices, but also more conceptually as as an attitude, a mentality of approach to deal with that which is not yet physically there but asks us to be ‘born’. ‘Prototyping futures’ is one of the ways in which we at Pantopicon try to move people to get ‘hands-on with the future’, rather than purely ‘heads-in’.
A few years ago WIRED published an interesting article on the value but also effects of prototyping.

Via Serendipity Book

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 12:55 and is filed under arts, design, experience, future, scenarios, visions, visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.