Uncertainties make for a variety of possible futures. Add to that expectations and a bunch of competitive people and you have a nice set of ingredients for a market or betting game. We already wrote about the Long Now Foundation‘s Long Bets and Fabrica‘s Stock exchange of Visions. For those of you hungry for more, check out Predictify, the Foresight Exchange or Foresight Markets.

Prediction markets are no new phenomenon, but with such high public interest in wisdom-of-the-crowds, the pop-up frequency of new initiatives is on the rise as well. Check out Mercury’s Blog dedicated to prediction markets.

Royal Dutch Shell, home to several scenario planning pioneers, takes another look into the future of energy and the related climate change challenge. In an open letter distributed in cooperation with Project Syndicate, CEO Jeroen van der Veer sees two major pathways to a possible future of a more sustainable energy mix (i.e. including wind, solar, hydro, bio and nuclear): the scramble way and the blueprints way. In any case, the shift is necessary as it is foreseen that easily accessible oil and gas reserves will most likely not be able to keep up with demand after 2015. In a nutshell :

scramble scenario: nations hurry to secure their energy reserves, local coal & biofuels rise, policy makers basically sit back and wait until things go wrong as energy consumption and and greenhouse-gas emissions are not mitigated, result: spikes & volatility in energy prices. Sounds familiar?

blueprints scenario: new coalitions emerge to tackle energy-, economy- and environment-related challenges together, local authorities/policymakers, industry players and R&D/innovators work together, national governments adjust their instruments (taxes, incentives, standards, etc.) to help curb things in the right direction (especially in terms of buildings, vehicles & transport fuels), at a world level harmonization increases, cars run increasingly on electricity & hydrogen, CO2 is increasingly captured and stored underground

Shell sees the blueprints scenario as the best move in terms of the energy, economy, environment equation, but does mention some requirements for it to succeed.

The approach taken in the blueprints scenario follows a path similar to that in transition management initiatives (Pantopicon is involved in several such projects at the moment, e.g. Plan C), in which common challenges are explored and ideals shared, new cross-boundary coalitions are formed bottom up, innovative pathways to the ideal are explored, experiments are set up, to explore not one but a series of possible solutions and spark innovation, etc. Succesful solutions will be scaled up gradually through society-wide capacity building.

“The world faces a long voyage before it reaches a low-carbon energy system. Companies can suggest possible routes to get there, but governments are in the driver’s seat. And governments will determine whether we should prepare for bitter competition or a true team effort.”

Via Alex over at Worldchanging.org

Harvard psychologists Donna Rose Addis, Alana Wong and Daniel Schacter, recently carried out a study which revealed that the ability of older people to construct imaginary scenarios is linked to their ability to recall detailed memories.

According to the study, episodic memory, which represents our personal memories of past experiences, “allows individuals to project themselves both backward and forward in subjective time.”

Therefore, in order to create imagined future events, the individual must be able to remember the details of previously experienced ones extract various details and put them together to create an imaginary event, a process known as the constructive-episodic-simulation.

When compared with young adults, the researchers found that the older adults displayed a significant reduction in the use of internal episodic details to describe both past memories and imagined future events. 

Yet another reason to involve children and youngsters in participatory foresight exercises more often one could say. At the same time, elderly often bring in a level of wisdom, knowledge of and experience with dynamics of the past, mental frameworks which help them to assess new situations. A good mix still remains … a good mix.

Via Eurekalert

Few experiences awaken a dialogue with possible futures ahead of us, or renders them tangible via a change of perspective as well as describing ‘a day in the life of’ a person x years ahead in time.

At Pantopicon, we often challenge our clients (as well as students) to shed today’s skin and crawl into that of somebody else in a tomorrow’s world: a client, a citizen, a farmer, a dentist, etc. As they engage in describing as meticulously – and poetically – as possible, the events, actions and sensations throughout a day in the life of that someone in some distant future, their minds are stretched beyond the barriers of current-day assumptions, inspired by future possibilities, threats and challenges. While, as an exercise  already being a revealing and rewarding experience in itself, the results as such can be made tangible in various ways (e.g. illustrated maps, timelines, storyboards, videos, …), sharing, communicating with and feeding further reflection and dialogue.

Irene Pereyra & Tom Klinkowstein recently presented their “day in the life of a networked designer’s smart things or a day in a designer’s networked smart things, 2030″ at the Pratt Institute. The project was made for the Singapore Design Festival and deals with an imagined designer’s day, anno 2030. Irene & Tom created a diary like wall-sized map taking the viewer on a day’s journey through the life of a designer as if sitting on her shoulder and reading the world through her mind’s eye. A smart-tech-infused future comes to life through the experience of the designer via a fascinating, diverse yet integrated storyline.

The full map can be viewed as a pdf here.

Jamais over at OpenTheFuture developed a set of four possible future scenarios describing ways of responding to the challenges brought about by global climate change. The scenarios for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies were constructed on the basis of two core questions:

1. Who makes the rules? (centralized vs. distributed)
2. How do we use technology? (precautionary vs. proactionary)
   

… and feature elements from three main approaches to tackling the climate crisis: prevention, mitigation, remediation (read also here).

Functional Green (centralized & precautionary): “a world in which top-down efforts emphasize regulation and mandates, while the deployment of new technologies emphasizes improving our capacities to limit disastrous results. ”

Power Green (centralized & proactionary): “a world where government and corporate entities tend to exert most authority, and where new technologies, systems and response models tend to be tried first and evaluated afterwards. “

We Green (decentralized & precautionary): “a world in which collaboration and bottom-up efforts prove decisive, and technological deployments emphasize strengthening local communities, enhancing communication, and improving transparency.”

Hyper Green (decentralized & preactionary): “a world in which things get weird. Distributed decisions and ad-hoc collaboration dominate, largely in the development and deployment of potentially transformative technologies and models.”

Read here for more detailed scenario information.

The UK government’s Foresight programme & the Government Office for Science recently published their full report on the theme of obesity, titled Foresight – Tackling Obesities: Future Choices.

“By 2050, Foresight modelling indicates that 60% of adult men, 50% of adult women and about 25% of all children under 16 could be obese. Obesity increases the risk of a range of chronic diseases, particularly type 2 diabetes, stroke and coronary heart disease and also cancer and arthritis. The financial impact to society attributable to obesity, at current prices, is estimated to become an additional £45.5 billion per year by 2050 with a seven fold increase in NHS costs alone. “

The study arguments for an integrative approach in tackling the issue and notes how the challenge bears resemblence to the societal shift needed to counter climate change. Also regarding obesity, multiple levels of societal scale need to be addressed, i.e. personal, family, community and national. “It requires partnership between government, science, business and civil society.”

Watch the video summing up the 4 future scenario’s here or check here for more background reading.

Forbes.com recently published a special report on the future and futurists as ‘future-professionals’. In a series of articles critical – albeit generally unilateral – reflections are made on the future in general as well as the futurist profession and practice in particular. Furthermore, five authors share their images of a world experienced from the context of an American workplace in 2027, in a world shaped by a financial crisis. Visionaries are questioned to retrospect: what were they sure about that would happen, but didn’t? what surprised them? Forbes editors and writers jump a decade ahead and take a look at what the world could look like in terms of energy, education, health care, the internet, investing, real estate, retirement, sports, technology, travel, video games, Wall Street.

Note: Sometimes the future is now, yet just as often the now is confused with the future.

Image courtesy of Forbes.com

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The World Future Society recently released their Futurist Outlook 2008 report, sketching some major trendlines concerning times ahead, as seen through the eyes of their futurist memberbase. In an article titled “The Good Old-fashioned World Future Society”, Bruce Sterling distilled some of the most significant trends covered in the report (see also here for more info on the freely available top ten):

1. a million billionaires by 2025
2. technologies will revolutionize the textile and fashion industries
3. war with China and/or Russia might become a bigger threat to US foreign policy than terrorism
4. counterfeiting pressure on traditional currency might speed up the move to a cashless society
5. our planet is on the verge of a major extinction event (cf. strong decrease of biodiversity)
6. water will be to the 21st century what oil was for the 20th
7. healthier and longer-living people might lead to larger world population growth than expected (by 2050)
8. Africans threatened by floods likely to increase 70-fold by 2080
9. the Arctic becomes a new focal point in the rush to exploit natural resources, as prices rise and availability decreases
10. more decisions will be made by non-human entities (cf. networks, robots, AI etc.)

Via Wired

Science-fiction novelist William Gibson – who coined the word cyberspace – sets his most recent novel in the near past as he feels the future becomes exponentially harder to predict. “We have no idea at all now where we are going”, he says in an interview over at Silicon.com recently. He also speaks of the increasing difficulty corporate futurists are having trying to tells company boards which world they will be living in in 10 years time.

But that is a certain kind of futurist and a certain kind of company, living by the question:  ‘What will the world be like … ?’. A whole other kind is asking: ‘What if the world turns out like … or … or … or … ?’. They care less about getting the one and only future right and more about being inspired by and preparing for a manifold of possible futures that might occur. As such, the decrease of predictability or the increase of uncertainty of developments and their possible consequences, sounds like a  plea for looking ahead by means of alternative futures, as in scenario-based thinking, participatory (en)visioning etc. Diversity of viewpoints, a manifold of imagined, possible futures shape a thousand tomorrows … a new reality of complexity we need to learn to deal with in new ways.

Via LunchoverIP

The convergence of technologies such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, IT & robotics, is a much debated trend in research labs around the world. It is also gaining attention in terms of assessing possible futures because of its potential sociocultural, environmental and political-institutional consequences and societal changes.

The Guardian’s blogs editor Kevin Anderson recently visited a conference at the James Martin Institute at Oxford University, organised by the UK’s Economic & Social Research Council trying to chart a direction for the future of research in the UK, through the exploration of future scenarios. The following scenarios came up:

a world of gridlock, in which converging technologies have led to a segmentation of worldviews, immobilizing it, a world shaped by high-competition, little co-operation and conflicting values. think: genetic screenings and pre-birth offspring selection, conflicting viewpoints on reproductive innovations such as genetic enhancement, etc.

a competitive but regulated world, in which legislation runs behind rapid innovation, in which new developments take place at a fast pace but follow-up is severely lacking, it is aimed at trying to manage and regulate the uncertain future. think: superbabies-’production’ gone wrong, China-subsidized African nanotube-production, climate change effects and turn-around ventures into wind, coal and biofuel energy plants and nano-tech enhanced batteries, etc.

an open, dynamic, co-operative world, in which information is openly shared and public-private cooperation is highly dynamic. think: open-source developed life-extending and -enhancing drugs, charity-driven genetic experiments (e.g.. six-legged horse winning races for needy children), complexity driving development of human-assistive technologies such as neural nets for climate change to help deal with information overload and information noise, etc.

a no-glue world, extremely fluid and dynamic, hyper-competitive. think: highly interdependent complex, pro-active systems (cf. adaptive-profile-based intelligent agents acting in your name), overwhelming complexity and information-noise, virtual world currencies becoming increasingly real-world, manipulative news agencies owned by equity firms, indifference leads to death of terrorism, converging languages (e.g. Arab-Mandarin), virtual identities as important as real ones, etc.

The futures were brought to life by the participants through storylines and newspaper headlines. For more, check out Kevin’s blog post as well as some of the interesting comments.

Via Kevin Anderson’s blog

The Dutch Waag Society together with CyberspaceSalvations are organizing a series of seminars titled ‘Science fiction, science faction’, dealing with the crossroads between science and science fiction.

First up yesterday were Bruce Sterling and Peter Pels, moderated by Sally Wyatt.

On the program for the coming months are (April 11th) cyberpunks RU Sirius and Rudy Rucker, moderated by Giselinde Kuipers, and (May 2nd), the lovely Brenda Laurel, Bruce ‘Avatar’ Damer and Galen Brandt moderated by Christian van ‘t Hof.
Videostreams of the events will be available on KillerTV soon.

Our friend Nicolas over at the ever-insightful PastaAndVinegar, also blogged a line or two about the relationship between science fiction and foresight today, after also spotting this article in Information Week, which quotes John de Lancie (Q in Star Trek) saying:

“today’s technology, whether it’s cell phones or Second Life, is feeding off the fictional technology dreamed up by science fiction writers years ago“

We couldn’t agree more when Nicolas points to the strength of the story in bringing the future to life, increasing its impact and leaving a stronger mark on many people’s minds than traditional ‘futurist’/foresight writings. He correctly arguments:

(a) narratives are good way to give a flavor of the future, of things to come,
(b) Scifi folks write about problems, why things work, do not work, lead to crisis, create social issues (or social issues that create innovation),
(c) they put things in context, [...]
(d) they have their own rules.

To some extent, reading scifi is somehow like opposing “critical foresight” to “futurism”.

Stories form a powerful, subtle, experiential envelope which invite listeners and readers to join in on a co-creation journey to visualize another world. As our experiences show, they are a fantastic tool to render the future ‘experiencable‘ and to get higher qualitative response from people in terms of what the ‘storyboarded’ future awakens in them, emotionally as well as rationally.

PS. For those of you interested in the power of storytelling in an organizational/learning context, you might want to check out Steve Denning‘s books.

Via our dutch friends from ExtendLimits

People often associate memory with the past, yet memory also plays a central role in looking at the future. Not only do past experiences or knowledge thereof influence the way people look at tomorrow, also the memory of shared experiences during the process of exploring and/or (en)visioning futures plays a role in how people look at and act upon their views of the future.

At Pantopicon we go about futures exploration and (en)visioning in participatory ways. Time and again we realize how much added value(s) is to be gained in paying qualitative attention to documenting the participatory, often multi-stakeholder, process in various ways (cf. steps, atmospheres, ‘dramatic moments’, products, perspectives, different media, etc.), value for ourselves but most of all also for the client and participants. It allows to increase the group’s mnemonic grip upon the trajectory, makes certain group-dynamic related processes and events explicit, enhances learning (collaboratively and also in terms of methodology),  allows to capture valuable ‘working material’ for later reflection and/or use, helps to manage generated knowledge and share experiences with and beyond the group thereby increasing participatory motivation, strengthening common ground, common purpose,  etc. to name but a few. The trap of classical project management is often to limit documentation of the process to in-between deliverables, often also purely textual or ‘bullets-and-arrows’-prose as a friend calls it. Once beyond that barrier, the notion of ‘seeing is believing’ gets a whole new meaning.

The Ford Motor Company recently embarked on a journey in which the process’ ‘documentation’ was used in such a tool-like, purposeful fashion. FordBoldMoves.com documents a year of ‘open‘ futuremaking, “a year of meeting challenges and creating opportunities” at Ford Motor Company. ‘Open’ – in the contemporary fashion – because the company pulled back the curtain, gives people an in-kitchen view as well as a voice in their journey to answer the question “how can Ford be successful in the future?”

“Ford Bold Moves is a video documentary series that takes you inside Ford Motor Company as it attempts one of the largest corporate turnarounds in history. With candid interviews from Ford executives, employees, industry experts and even Ford detractors, Bold Moves approaches each segment from every angle and keeps asking the question: Will Ford succeed?

Bold Moves also involves you in the actual corporate decision-making process—allowing you to engage, debate and discuss what you think is relevant.”

Although the project received quite a bit of criticism (e.g. being overdesigned/window dressing, too Ford-centric, more campaign than open experiment, etc.), some rightfully, some not, do take a look at a fascinating experiment to document, show, envision, build capacity, involve stakeholders, etc.

Design prototyping is an excellent way to bring imaginable future(s) to life, to make them visible, tangible, ‘experiencable‘ and allow people to deal with their meaning(s) in versatile ways. Prototyping – whether conceptual or physical – makes for possible contextual scenarios in the foresight-sense to give rise to possible scenarios-of-use in the user centred design-sense. As such, in foresight activities these designs not only help to evoke more in-depth qualitative reflections from stakeholders, they can also give direct leads as to how to take up certain strategic challenges posed by the scenario, thereby co-creating new value(s).

In ways reminiscent of experimental projects by Philips Design as well as the EU research project Designing for Future Needs (see also here), and with a time horizon of about 10 years, industry partners and students at Victoria University of Wellington School of Design in New Zealand envisioned future solutions in an initiative titled Design Led Futures.

Professor Simon Fraser started it in order to challenge students “to step back from the constraints of daily practice, to look beyond the immediate product, to look at it in context, and to investigate the broader issues that surround it – human issues, issues of society, culture and behaviour – including emotional issues that are fundamental to industrial design as a discipline.”

So far three projects have been concluded, in which the focus lay explicitly upon the overall experience rather than the mere object of design :

• domestic bliss: students were required to create a new understanding of the role that appliances (such as fridges, washing machines and cookers) might play in the architecture and culture of the home
• inside-out: project on the theme of outdoor living and the role that appliances might play in making this possible and pleasurable
• energising water: project to explore and create a new understanding of the base material of water by creatively applying existing or new, specifically developed technologies

Check out the fascinating concepts that students developed.

In order to trigger people to think about the future from a variety of perspectives, futurists often use the mnemonic acronym steep, which stands for: socio-cultural, technological, economic, ecological, political. A slightly less well known alternative is ‘pinchastem‘, which stands for political / governmental, information / communication / media, nature-related / macro-environmental, conflict, health / biological / micro-environmental, artistic / cultural / recreational, social, technological / electronic / mechanical, economic, moral / ethical / religious.

Last year, the foresight department of the British global design and engineering firm Arup, published a deck of inspirational cards, meant to inspire people to assess how certain developments might change their future. The cards deal with major drivers of change that are likely to alter the face of business in the coming 50 years (time-horizon 2050). They are divided into five subsets, each dealing with a different ‘steep’ category.

Vividly I remember Prof. Stefano Boeri‘s fascinating project (Liquid Europe &) Solid Sea in which he invited people to switch viewpoint and consider the Mediterranean as ‘land’ instead of sea and the land surrounding it as water. In doing so the concepts of migration, roads, ports, departure and arrival, frontiers, that which is fixed and that which is fluid, volatile, moving etc. and consequently planning and design for such an environment change completely.

Now the studio of which he is a cofounder, Multiplicity, is preparing a promising book titled ‘Milano. Cronache dell’abitare’ to be published by Giorgio Mondadori Publishers next month in which the future of Milan (timehorizon 2020) is portrayed and discussed along the lines of 3 possible scenarios:

1. Milan as a city, completely void of fixed residents, with life concentrated around commuters and grand events such as the Salone del Mobile and other fashion and design-related happenings.
2. Milan as an archipelago-like city in which each and every ethno-cultural-economic community has carved out its turf.
3. Milan as a city in which public services are no longer, yet where free agents and entrepreneurs flourish and have taken over ‘management’ of the city.

Via Elle Decor Italy