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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.
... Esta retórica reduccionista y tecnocéntrica tiene el potencial de engendrar un monofuturo Cero Neto (Candy, 2010) construido sobre una dilución de innovación (Vinsel & Russell, 2020). Los crecientes desafíos medioambientales que conlleva el aumento en la adopción de tecnologías emergentes están empezando a ser objeto de un mayor escrutinio. ...
... This reductive, technocentric rhetoric has the potential to engender a Net Zero monofuture (Candy, 2010) built upon an innovation delusion (Vinsel & Russell, 2020). The growing environmental challenges that come with increased adoption of emerging technologies are rightly beginning to be put under greater scrutiny. ...
From industry through policymaking to academia, much prevailing sustainability discourse focusses on transitioning to a so-called ‘Net Zero future’. Central to this vision is mitigation of human-driven climate change through the decarbonisation of industrial society, principally via increased innovation and adoption of emergent technologies. This paper argues Design Research must pivot from these reductive, solutionist narratives, and develop a disruptive yet inclusive approach towards designing for Net Zero. In response to the complexity of climate change, this paper proposes a novel conceptual frame that helps designer-practitioners to challenge the unsustainable technocentric status quo. Built upon a confluence of Speculative, Participatory and More-than-Human-Centred methods, the paper outlines how this approach can stimulate close collaboration between designers and stakeholder networks. The paper asserts that, through this scaffold, designer-practitioners can reimagine responsible technological Net Zero futures which are inherently More-than-Human, that is, sustainable and equitable for our planet’s human and non-human stakeholders alike.
... Teaching Design Futures to university students varies by tradition: Design Futures and Critical Design (Dunne, 1999;Raby, 2001), Design Fiction (Sterling, 2005, Speculative Design (Dunne & Raby, 2013), Discursive Design (Tharp & Tharp, 2019), and Experiential Futures (Candy, 2010). The growing number of futures-related design courses denotes global enthusiasm. ...
Causal Layered Analysis can help design students to engage with complex societal challenges. Undergraduate design majors differed from non-design majors in learning CLA in a Design Futures course. According to text analysis of student reflections, non-design majors wrote more reflections coded as "design insights" and "thinking structures." Graduate students with real-world work experience shifted discussions towards practical applications. Undergraduate design majors focused more on "individual reflections," "CLA details," and "other" topics. I suggest ways to scaffold student learning to use CLA with design methods and processes and, more broadly, use CLA to think more systematically about complex societal challenges.
... Questa nozione è stata successivamente oggetto di analisi da parte di studiosi e autori di guide per scrittori (Ad es. Eco, 1979, Card, 1990, Gillett, 1995, Grasso e Scaglione 2009, Wolf, 2012, Boni, 2017. ...
The following paper examines the role of science fiction in shaping future scenarios that can be concretely realized. Building upon the concept of design fiction, it will seek to define what a forecast is and how it actively influences the construction of the future.
The apparent prophetic nature of science fiction can be explained by the fact that every time we use language or other symbols to refer to objects in the world around us, we are actively participating in the process of constructing those objects. Consequently, the prediction itself can be considered a social construction. Through the act of narrating and imaginative activity, we intervene in the world and actively contribute to its construction (Von Stackelberg e McDowell, 2015). This constructivist perspective is closely related to symbolic interactionism and the sociology of action, both of which suggest that each of us actively contributes to the creation of social structures through daily actions (Fuller e Loogma, 2009).
When we apply these principles to future studies, we can see social reality as a shared construction, where each member of a group participates in developing a worldview through the encoding of available information. The concept of design fiction explores various configurations of possible futures and seeks to elicit a response in society. It's crucial to note that fictional narratives don't strictly aim to predict the future but simulate potential futures. These scenarios function as exploration tools and decision-making instruments, shaping our ideas about the future and leading us to anticipate the construction and use of once seemingly impossible artifacts and devices. The example of flying cars in science fiction illustrates a fundamental distinction between a narrative about the future and the actual practice of world-building. This practice involves creating geographically, socially, and culturally coherent fictional worlds. Integral to this process is Alex McDowell's Mandala of World-building, a tool and a method for narrative buildings process. This method, that is the focus of this paper, integrates knowledge from various disciplines, altering the filmmaking process and blurring boundaries between physical and virtual environments. McDowell's world-building model demonstrates the potential of using narrative to communicate visions of science and technology, sparking reflections and discussions about the future. McDowell's approach offers a new way to blend design and speculative narration, elevating fictional worlds to a new level projecting them into the future. This operation, evident in much science fiction, becomes a specialized and interdisciplinary laboratory for constructing future worlds. The proposal of an integrated world-building practice suggests an opportunity to expand the concept of fictional possible worlds towards new horizons of broad interest for narratological discipline and semiotics. We are facing, indeed, worlds constructed to engage in direct dialogue with the reality of the physical world, and which sit on a borderline between fictional enunciation and mental experimentation on the future.
KEYWORDS: Science-Fiction, Future, Narratology, Design fiction, Worldbuilding
... This includes widening both the understanding of participation as well as the respective futures involved to a global scale in the spirit of decolonizing the future (Feukeu & Miller, 2022). To become truly e ectual, this ongoing, collective utopian exchange would have to be properly facilitated and institutionalized in an e ort towards public imagination (Candy, 2010) or social phantasy (Jungk, 1973) as a driving force for societal change. ...
Ubiquitous calls for transformation seem to come along with a concept of transformation remaining rather fuzzy and ambiguous. This is considered problematic on the one hand, as it potentially undermines the extent of radical change that is necessary. On the other hand, ambiguity can prove beneficial within a multi-perspective and democratic transformation discourse. This paper argues for a revised understanding of transformation that moves within the field of tension between post- capitalist radicality, decentralized openness and utopian social imagination.
Against this background, the prevailing concepts of transformation are challenged through critical transformation research challenges by more closely examining relations of power and property as constitutive social categories and thus as objects of transformation. Subsequently, ways of highlighting and giving form to alternative futures are called for, presenting a connecting point to utopian theories and their critical discursive approaches. At the intersection of western dominance in transformation discourse, contrasting approaches from the Global South pick up the threads and introduce decolonizing alternatives. Finally, the different strands are tied together within the framework of a revised understanding of transformation that conceptualizes the future as a common.
... Anticipatory practices refer to prototyping, sketching or scenarios that enact possible futures in the present and make them actionable. Through the more nuanced understanding gained with concretisation, we can make better-informed decisions on how to direct action towards possible futures [Alvial-Palavicino 2016;Anderson 2010;Candy 2010]. Designer-researchers in RtD have largely similar goals, although their methods are different. ...
In HCI and design research, it has recently been suggested that, instead of risks and threats, uncertainties can be generative resources. This aligns particularly well with practice-based design research and research through design (RtD), where uncertainties are pervasive and unavoidable due to the approach's interest in open-ended problems, contexts under transformation, and unknown futures. Building on the idea that uncertainties drive design activity, we describe the design process as framing acts where a designer-researcher moves along perceived uncertainties. We identify three dynamics for a generative mode of working with uncertainties that can make designers aware of uncertainties, circle in towards those that appear essential while seeking to avoid others, and stay with those that offer new perspectives. We exemplify these dynamics by drawing from our experiences from three RtD projects and highlight this viewpoint's value in providing new reflective tools for designer-researchers.
This research paper explores the future of talent management in higher education through the lens of speculative design. By examining current trends and challenges, it develops and analyzes three distinct scenarios: The Automated Academy, The Gig Academy, and The Purpose-Driven Academy. These scenarios envision potential futures shaped by advancements in technology, societal changes, and shifts in educational paradigms. The paper identifies opportunities and pitfalls associated with each scenario, offering insights into how higher education institutions can proactively adapt to emerging trends and navigate uncertainty. The goal is to encourage innovative thinking and proactive approaches towards talent management among higher education stakeholders.
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