a thousand tomorrows » methods & techniques

the quantum parallelograph

Nik — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:25:25 +0000

Designer and University of Dundee graduate, Patrick Stevenson-Keating became inspired “by the pioneering work of Professor David Deutsch of Oxford University, and the earlier work of Professor Hugh Everett, who argue for infinite copies of ourselves existing within multiple universes”.

As such he developed the quantum parallelograph, a device enabling users to explore the lives of their parallel selves in parallel versions of the universe. At the turn of a knob and the touch of a button, the device spits out a cash-register like receipt of your life in another parallel world. Hence, through a glimpse at their alternative selves and the world they live in, people are implicitly provoked to question their uniqueness and ponder about physics in general. Another subtle example of critical design or design for debate, a field we are particularly fond of and like to experiment with over here at Pantopicon.

The direct link with alternative worlds links this particular example even more closely with the realm of foresight and scenario analysis. Imagine a few extra knobs or levers to set parameters on future developments and you’d have a tangible future scenario-generator, yourself as persona included!

Keep up the good work, Patrick!

a travel guide to planet earth

emiel — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:03:09 +0000

On August 2nd 2011, Dutch philosopher, editor in chief and journalist-commentator of NRCNext Rob Wijnberg published a tongue in cheek column entitled “A travel guide to Planet Earth” in the dutch daily: NRC Handelsblad. The same article was entitled “Lonely Planet” on NRCNext. In concordance with his statement on Planet Earth’s Media – i.e. earthlings blogging on whatever they read in newspapers – I hereby ‘blog’ his column (in translation) on ‘a thousand tomorrows’:

Planet Earth is located in one of the most isolated corners of the galaxy. Earthlings are known as hospitable, except to strangers. Please read this guide carefully before departure.

Journey: Between two and four million light years. Consider a jet lag.

Climate: The best time to visit Earth would be between 2011 and 2100. After that the tropical season will start.

Currency: The main currency on Earth is debt, a fictional currency based on which earthlings manage to maintain their non-existing wealth. Debts are the only currency in the universe that are being reproduced in case there are too many of.

Geography: Earthlings have divided their planet randomly into 196 countries. Free travel is permitted, unless you’re poor, hungry, or on the run.

Politics: There are two political movements on Earth: Left and Right. Left hugs terrorists, right breeds terrorists. Terrorists themselves are lonely lunatics who have lost their sense of reality.

Religion: There are two religions on Earth: Islam and anti-Islam. Muslims believe that all people are equal, except gay men, women and non-Muslims. Anti-Muslims believe that all people are equal, which makes them superior.

Points of interest: Earthlings were known for their cultural traditions, until the multiculturalists helped to kill the culture. The last bit was retrenched in order to save banks. The only remaining attraction is the Nationaal Historisch Museum in the Netherlands, which has on show a model of the Nationaal Historisch Museum.

Media: Most earthlings get their information from the so-called ‘Internet’. The Internet is a gathering place for bloggers who write about what they have read in the newspapers that day. In the newspapers of the next day, pieces of what’s been said on the internet are being published. In addition, on Earth every year a thousand books on how the Internet causes people to read less and less are being published.

Hotspots: Greece is the place to be because of low prices. Expect a high credit card bill after returning home. The United States were supposed to be closed by now, but will remain opened until the end of the season - (check usdebtclock.org for opening. Who wishes to visit Belgium will need to hurry.

Although Wijnberg mainly reflects on a future inspired by the present and currently ongoing events, he chose a format not unlike that often employed by futurists to shake people out of their perspective and look at the world through the eyes of a timetraveller or someone coming back from a long journey after 20, 30, … years time. The column shows how ‘distancing’ in either space or time is a powerful perspective-changing tool stimulating critical reflection.

metropolitan agriculture

Nik — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 15:08:23 +0000

Growing vegetables in your rooftop garden, soil+crop-leasing contracts with local farmers, vertical gardens, school gardens, … urban farming takes many forms. Amsterdam, Chennai, Detroit/Flint, Johannesburg, London, São Paolo … six cities exchanging ideas and experiences in the area of metropolitan agriculture. From 28-30 September 2010 the first Global Summit on Metropolitan Agriculture was held in Rotterdam (NL).

The event, and the MetropolitanAgriculture.com learning network as such, are an initiative of TransForum (& Reos Partners), a project-cluster partially funded by BSIK money which concluded its 5 year long series of activities at the end of 2010. TransForum focussed on the sustainable development of dutch agriculture in relationship to its urbanizing context.

The MetroAg Innoversity set out with joint scenarioplanning workshops “explore the opportunities for Metropolitan Agriculture based on contextual characteristics, assets and challenges in each city”, inspired by input from stakeholder interviews within participating cities. Later on, groups were formed to incubate ideas and draft prototypes. The summit gathered experiences and insights gained and looked ahead as how to scale and create enduring projects and processes.

At the occasion of the Summit, Jan Kees Vis, programme director of Unilever’s division of Sustainable Agriculture, used three words to sketch the pillars of his image of the future: “The right to food, ethics, metropolitan agriculture”. In the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, the company commits “to source 100% of [their] agricultural raw materials sustainably by 2020.”

Via Ventiquattro

24 hours of innovation

Nik — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:33:48 +0000

The Board of Innovation – an initiative by friends and fellow belgian bloggers Nick De Mey (see mouseover.be) & Philippe De Ridder (see openinnovators.net) – kicks off its 24 hours of innovation today: a non-stop marathon of innovation initiatives.

Organizations big and small, national and international will take part in this unique online event. On the playlist are among others our one-time neighbours of AddictLab & Materio, our friends from FlandersDC, trendwatcher Richard Lamb, the City of Antwerp, Sun Microsystems, VisualDimension, Umicore, IdeaMonopoly, Betavine, Symnetics from Brazil, UAMS, Pfizer, URDT from Uganda, and many others. Keep your thumbs up, as Pantopicon participates as well (see here)!

Update: see our contributions “5 what if teasers” and “10 ways in which exploring & envisioning the future empowers innovation”. Thanks Nick & Philippe, another job well done!

les boîtes de l’avenir

Nik — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:10:19 +0000

Archeology fascinates people, especially children. As they dig up stuff in the garden, their imagination runs wild as they fantasize about all kinds of stories from times past. As we walk the streets, as we use everyday object and live contemporaneity, most of us will have wondered at some point: will this still exist in a few centuries? or: what will future generations dig up from our times? which stories will they reconstruct around them?

Some craft special devices to survive the times. Timecapsules are popular among scientists, amateurs, children … More than merely preserving the past, they are used to send a message to the future.

So-called future archeology works the other way around: we imagine a world of tomorrow’s making and imagine to dig up some of its artifacts. What might they look like? In which kind of world did they originate? Wired’s Found series is a good example of this approach, one we often indulge in as well at Pantopicon. We either create such artifacts together with people as a participatory design exercise during our workshops to render the future tangible or we craft some of our own as triggers to shake people out of today’s constraint based reasoning patterns and plunge them into possible tomorrows.

As I was preparing some designs for a set of looking boxes to allow people to gaze into future scenarios, I somehow stumbled upon the fascinating work of the Swiss designer collective Postfossil. They describe the deeper ground of their work as follows :

“In an age of increased reliance on carbon emitting technology and a rapidly depleting natural resource pool, POSTFOSSIL address the question– How will we live in a post-fossil fuel age?”

As such they made a whole series of boxes – dubbed boîtes de l’avenir - to raise awareness about our age of fossil fuels as we move into a postfossil era. Click through and meet the beautifully crafted and inspiring Actioreactio, A Kiss Good Bye, Ten Matches, Postfossilien, To teeter on the brick of collapse, Pandora’s Box, The Speaking Sun, Historical Landscape.

The boxes somehow reminded me of Joseph Cornell‘s artworks. Well done, Postfossil!

wicked problems

Nik — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:56:03 +0000

The Rotman School of Management dedicates its winter issue (pdf) to wicked problems, a concept not unknown to futuregazers. Jeff Conklin of the CogNexus Institute once characterized wicked problems as follows:

The problem is not understood until after formulation of a solution.
Stakeholders have radically different world views and different frames for understanding the problem.
Constraints and resources to solve the problem change over time.
The problem is never solved.

Aside from an interview with him, the magazine is chock-full of insightful articles on topics such as Confronting the World’s Most Important Strategic Challenges: The End of Oil, Strategy as a Wicked Problem, Peter Senge et al. on The Next Industrial Imperative: The 80-20 Challenge, Creativity, Improvisation and Organizations, The Designful Company, IDEO’s Fred Dust and Ilya Prokopoff on Designing Systems at Scale, Managerial Algorithmics: Thinking Strategically About Thinking Strategically, Artistry for the Strategist. Muhammad Yunus shares his ‘point of view’. There are Q&A’s with Prof. William Duggan on strategic intuition, reverse brainstorming etc., with Prof. John Broome on the ethics of climate change, with Prof. Sarah Kaplan on the origin of our cognitive frames, with Nigel Cross on the differences between abstract and concrete thinking, with Prof. Lucy Kimbell on the importance of a ‘design attitude’, with Prof. Dolly Chugh on the human foibles of bounded willpower, bounded awareness and bounded self-interest, with Prof. Ingo Walter on new alternatives for microfinance institutions, with Cary Fowler on protecting the world’s food supply via the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Prof. Heather Fraser shares insights on tackling wicked problems in healthcare.

In other words: an issue to devour.

three horizons

Nik — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:53:35 +0000

Futurewheels, scenario planning axes and several other methods & techniques in the land of futures studies all have in common that they bring structure to the process of thinking about the long term in an insightful manner. They lower the threshold for futures thinking beyond the academic context. Exploring and analyzing possible futures is one thing, the step towards visioning, strategy-development and action for change another.

In this respect, Andrew Curry of the UK’s Henley Center HeadlightVision (now aka The Futures Company) and Anthony Hodgson from Decision Integrity recently published an insightful article in the Journal of Futures Studies (August 2008) entitled “Seeing in Multiple Horizons: Connecting Futures to Strategy”. Their paper describes …

“[...] a futures method called the ‘Three Horizons’ which enables different futures and strategic methods to be integrated as and when appropriate. [...] It can relate drivers and trends-based futures analysis to emerging issues. It enables policy or strategy implications of futures to be identified. And it links futures work to processes of change. The paper connects this latter aspect to models of change developed within the ‘social shaping’ school of technology.”

The initial work on the Three Horizons method – in its present form and scope, a systems thinking-based approach looking at the strategic fit between a system and its context over time – was done by Anthony Hodgson and Bill Sharpe when they used it to think about long-term technology change for the UK government’s foresight project on Intelligent Infrastructure Systems. The method is now being further developed under the umbrella of The International Futures Forum.

Taking a closer look at the fitness-landscape- or phase-like curves, the fade-out S-curve of the first horizon points reminds one of the urgency to change with respect to a future scenario. Also worth noting is that the third horizon’s S-curve is also recognized as a core component of the transition management methodology as put forward by Rotmans et al. also pointing towards enabling change in context of high systemic complexity and uncertainty (e.g. societal change in view of sustainability).

The paper argues that the Three Horizons method features several strengths compared to more classic scenario-approaches:

the method brings several perspectives together which help to bridge future exploration, visioning and action: horizon 1 helps to uncover the values and assumptions underlying current business of usual, horizon 2 helps to assess whether one is focussing on incremental change to keep up or systemic change/radical innovation of its core values, horizon 3 opens up and explores the enabling pathways towards such radical change
emerging issues and weak signals receive more attention
action is incorporated in the assessment, thereby increasing the constructivist notion of the future as something one can – at least partly – design or shape.

seeing, believing, acting

Nik — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:21:25 +0000

At the outbreak of any major crisis, there is always the question of ‘why didn’t we see this coming?’. The financial crisis? Oh, many saw it coming alright … yet few managed to make others believe a meltdown was not only possible, but most likely, and none managed to mobilize believers-decision-makers to act upon their belief to an extent that would have prevented the crisis from happening (or the latter proved insufficiently equipped/organized to do so).

Adam Gordon of FutureStudio reflects upon the relationships between belief & action in foresight contexts in his most recent post over at The Future Savvy Journal. He refers to a letter from Peter Schwartz explaining the added value of scenario thinking in assessing and acting upon future challenges. They help to keep various options open, alternatives about what the future might be like, hence serve as a tool-to-think-through & to learn, and pave the way for action. According to Peter Schwartz:

“The problem is that decision-makers believe that they are forced to pick one right answer: the most likely scenario. Their approach to decision-making does not afford them the opportunity to consider apparently low probability but highly consequential scenarios. The answer, therefore, to the “believe” half of the question is a decision-making process that considers several scenarios: compelling stories about alternative futures that incorporate the analysis of “outliers” and describe three or four plausible paths forward.
Good scenarios force decision-makers to challenge their own assumptions and reconsider what is possible. As a result, they can take seriously those scenarios that seemed less likely at first, but whose plausibility increases over time.”

It is also a people matter in the sense that to make radical, systemic changes happen, various roles or skills are needed (e.g. to understand the complexity of the challenge at hand, to network and form the necessary alliances to tackle it, to draft innovative solutions, to scale and sell these, to monitor progress and motivate etc.). Seldomly these are found in one person or one type of person, even one group of people only. Also because of this aspect, the action part of the equation of systemic change is a complex one and no one, easy recipe can be prescribed to orchestrate massive change as such. Nevertheless, insight in these matters is growing, both academically and practically, which will hopefully serve as well in the many futures and societal challenges ahead of us.

Crossposted on Kashklash.net

pantopicon is hiring

Nik — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:55:46 +0000

Do you dream about flying hydrogen cars – even though they are so yesterday?! – sustainable cities, social cohesion services, gracefully degrading packaging etc. at least once a day? Are you fascinated by the many opportunities and challenges that tomorrow’s world(s) might bring? Do you have strong design(er) DNA which makes you think with both head and hands: analytically, conceptually, visually and tangibly?

Then you might be the futures designer we at Pantopicon are looking for to join us in our mission to help public and private organizations explore and envision successful futures, to inspire, guide and transform them, propel them forward towards greater strategies, products, services etc. …

Help us shape the future, join our team. Check out our careers page.

PS. Looking for a traineeship? Click through as well.

s1ngletown

Nik — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:27:58 +0000

At the inspiring Venice Architecture Biennale - this year’s edition curated by Aaron Betsky, former director of the NaI – the famous Dutch design studio Droog Design & KesselsKramer showcase S1NGLETOWN.

S1NGLETOWN focuses on the world of contemporary singles. Its relevance is broad, as all of us are likely to belong to this group at some stage in our lives — and likely more than once. In fact, some sources predict that a third of people in developed countries will be living alone by 2026.

S1NGLETOWN is an exhibition that’s also a town, an abstract interpretation of a new kind of urban space. Visitors will be able to walk its streets and interact with its products and citizens, and view their homes.

The concept is a beautiful illustration of a persona-like approach, typecasting different types of singles and imaginatively describe their world, ways of living using their point of experience as a point of departure. Although designed in a beautiful, powerful yet fairly abstract way, one is fully immersed in this ‘view on the world’ being able to walk around in S1NGLETOWN through an exhibition.