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Time Machine / Reverse Archaeology

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Stuart Candy at Tecnológico de Monterrey
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An experiential futures / design fiction brief for teachers and students of art, design, and foresight to create an experience or artifact from the future.
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Candy, S. 2013. Time Machine / Reverse Archaeology. In: Briggs, C. ed. Seventy-two
Assignments: The Foundation Course in Art and Design Today. Paris: PCA Press, pp. 28-30.!
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TIME MACHINE / REVERSE ARCHAEOLOGY
Create an experience or artifact from the future
Stuart Candy, Ph.D.
1. Description
How can artists and designers help to shape the future? Over a decade in the foresight
field, I have learned that a key to impactful exploration of possible futures is to bridge
between abstract thought and concrete experience. Artists and designers can build
bridges of imagination between these registers to take people into alternative futures –
or at the very least, to visit there and bring amazing things back.
This assignment offers two versions of a single creative process. The task in Reverse
Archaeology is to make an artifact from the future. Archaeologists use found fragments of
earlier eras to deduce a portrait of the vanished world which produced them. Here the
process goes in the opposite direction: you will use a future scenario to generate a
fragment from a world to come. The slightly more comprehensive challenge of Time
Machine is to put audiences into a situation from a future world. On both tracks, Prototype
and Performance respectively, the underlying goal is the same: to tell a compelling story
through an experiential encounter.
Both variants represent a breed of emerging hybrid practice where strategic foresight
meets design, art and performance idioms; immersive "experiential futures" and
tangible “design fictions” in which elements of future scenarios are manifested here and
now. The process developed independently of experience prototyping, roleplaying and
bodystorming methods, but bears some resemblance to each of these. Its pedagogical
innovation consists less in technological novelty than in a choreography of creative
thinking calculated to bring deeper awareness of possible futures systematically into
conversation with current artistic practices.
This design-led framework for rigorous imagining (a wonderful phrase from UNESCO
futurist Riel Miller) expands the horizons of practitioners and of their audiences. It
helps develop a capacity for strategic foresight (or la prospective) which will prove
essential in 21st century education.
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2. Materials/equipment
You will need to find a Future Scenario – a brief textual story about the future – to
explore. Instructors/facilitators guiding a group may find it helpful to identify this
ahead of time (see Step 3). The project can incorporate whatever media and tools are at
hand, but it requires nothing more than ink and paper.
3. Instructions
Step 1. Choose your mission
Reverse Archaeology involves making an artifact, a Prototype - generally a 2D design
using paper, because it’s fast and cheap. However virtually any medium could work -
clay, painting, video, 3D printing, etc. This track is a good option for those tackling the
assignment solo. Time Machine involves creating a Performance to bring people into a
future. This is a more comprehensive task as performance often incorporates tangible
artifacts for props and set dressing, so may be more suited for work in small teams.
Step 2. Form teams and plan timing (if applicable)
If opting for group-based work, form teams of 2 to 5 members. If Performance is the
plan, then the instructor/facilitator should allow time for the culminating show.
Naturally mileage will vary, but e.g. 20 players = 5 teams of 4 people, and 5 mins
performance per group = 25 mins at least. Have team members sit together.
Step 3. Adopt a scenario (up to 20 mins)
At this point instructors may distribute scenarios to the teams and continue on to Step 4.
(If scenarios are selected in advance, consider assigning teams to alternative futures for
a single domain of interest shared across the group.) Otherwise, search online, in teams
if applicable, for a scenario worth diving into more deeply. Look for:
- A topic that all team members can relate to will serve best, e.g. scenarios for your city
or country.
- A narrative between two paragraphs and two pages of text; short enough to come to
grips with quickly, but long enough to get your teeth into.
- A time horizon 10 to 50 years out; distant enough to challenge, close enough to
connect.
- Scenarios which stretch plausibility, but don’t break it, are most interesting. Dator’s
second law of the future: “Any useful statement about the future should at first appear
to be ridiculous.”
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Step 4. Visit the world (20-30 mins)
Silently read through the text. Assume this scenario has in fact come to pass, and that
you are looking at things from this future point in time. As you read keep an eye out for
intriguing “what-ifs” or hooks to consider more closely. What are the main things that
have changed in this future? No scenario is exhaustive, so you’ll need to flesh out some
details creatively. Use these questions:
- What problems have lessened or gone away? Which have newly appeared or
worsened?
- What activities have stopped or diminished? What has increased?
- What are some of the surprising new things in this world that don’t exist today?
Step 5. Generate candidate premises for an artifact/experience (5 mins)
Reverse Archaeology: What remarkable object, product or communication from this
future would most help a visitor from the present to understand the scenario? It might
be a very mundane or typical thing in that world, but should be very striking to the rest
of us. Possible artifacts include Postcards, Posters, Packaging, or Periodicals (e.g. a
newspaper or magazine front page).
Time Machine: Confirm the length of your visit to the future (performance) with the
instructor, or choose one (e.g. 5 minutes). In that window, what specific situations can
you transport us into? What skills can team members contribute? You could co-create a
Presentation, Program, or Public service announcement. Anything that brings the whole
group into your future for the duration is fair game.
Step 6. Choose your premise (5 mins)
Of the premises generated, what’s the most captivating “tip of the iceberg” you can
create to conjure the larger scenario world, within the time and with the resources
(tools, materials, people, space) available? What will capture an audience’s imagination
and lure them into imagining the rest? Make it fun and playful, but not a throwaway
line. Distil and concentrate the richness of the scenario into an experience.
Step 7. Craft your artifact/experience (1-2 hours)
Diegesis is the technical term for a story world. What you’re seeking here could be
called diegetic integrity: put us in the world of the scenario, and keep us there. Don’t
break the universe!
Reverse Archaeology: Whatever you make should be from the future, not about it. Make
something that looks and behaves as if it had just been zapped back in time through a
wormhole. Evoke the story as concretely and compellingly as possible.
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@futuryst!#timemachine #reversearchaeology!
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Time Machine: Do you have a projector and laptop with presentation software at your
disposal? Could you add background music or sound effects? (Only if it will help!)
Might you create signs or handouts to “dress” the room like a movie or theatre set? If
you’re presenting to a roomful of people, where in the scenario is this room, and what
are all the people doing there? There’s no “fourth wall” so the more ingeniously you
can incorporate your surroundings, the less suspension of disbelief you are demanding
of people, and the more they can focus on your story.
Step 8. Showtime (30-45 mins, if applicable)
Dig up the artifacts and fire up the time machine, it’s time to visit the future! Whatever
you end up making, there’s a growing community who will be delighted to hear about
it. Feel free to get in touch* and I will happily link to images, video and blog posts
towards this fast-evolving practice in design fiction and experiential futures.
... Anthropocentric climate change brings with it an existential threat-an unquantifiable hyperobject (Morton, 2016) that has sent ecological systems into a tailspin. There is enough compelling evidence 1 that much of this pervasiveness is an unleashing of the primal forces of nature only responding to the violent systems of extraction sustaining modern human civilisation 2 , triggering the sixth mass extinction 3 , melting the arctic ice cover 4 and degrading soil fertility 5 due to industrial activity on a global scale. According to the latest IPCC reports 6 , we have 12 years to act in order to limit the global average temperatures to 1.5 o C-if we want to avoid triggering irreversible feedback loops. ...
... These so called "diegetic prototypes" create desirable technological possibilities as a "performative artefact" made real by contextualizing technologies through a narrative within the frame of speculation (Kirby, 2010). Designers thus enter these future narrative as archaeologists of the future, learning from and producing the artefacts from this imagined future (Candy, 2013). The future scenarios are chosen to envision better solutions to what exists today by garnering foresight from these speculative far future scenarios that are brought back and manifested in the here and the now, in this case, a solar cell. ...
... Accessed April 22, 2018. https://phys.org/news/2016-11-earth-technosphere-trillion-tons.html.3 "Plummeting Insect Numbers 'threaten Collapse of Nature' | Environment | The Guardian." ...
Critical Futures Today: Back-casting Speculative Product Design towards Long Term Sustainability
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  • Apr 2019
The age of climate breakdown brings with it an uncertain future, even within our collective imagination we are presented with increasingly dystopian visions of the future. This tendency towards dystopian futures can also be seen in Speculative and Critical Design (SCD) process which emerged as a disciplinary response to challenge commercial design by envisioning radical futures scenarios and artefacts that so far has been limited to museum exhibits. This paper suggests a solution-driven SCD method exploring a 'designerly' reimagining of existing solar technology as a "back-casted" design solution into the present-a 3D printed optical solar cell. The solar cell is proposed as a possible , speculative alternative for existing solar cells exploring the "what if " possibilities of technological forecasting in a futures-oriented practise, ways in which product design can contribute to climate action today while still looking towards visions of better, more thriving paradigms of futures beyond 'business as usual'.
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... These activities in the first seven weeks comprised the first half of semester. The latter half revolved around experiential futures projects co-created in small groups, each producing a "Time Machine," an immersive scenario at the scale of a room, whereby a group of visitors is invited to visit a future scenario for fifteen minutes, and spends the period immediately afterward unpacking and exploring that experience (Candy, 2013;Candy, 2014). The three-hour weekly studio format was adopted for the Futures incarnation of the course with a view to supporting deeper peer-to-peer and group-based design exploration. ...
... We evaluated the 2016 and 2017 Dexign Futures courses and 2018 Futures course using four measures: inventory of learning activities, faculty course evaluations, student experience surveys , and a culminating assignment in experiential futures called "The Time Machine" (Candy, 2013). ...
... Each year student teams were given a (previously published) future scenario to inspire their "Time Machine" assignment. The purpose of the assignment is to create a live, immersive, and interactive experiential scenario of a possible future (see Candy, 2013 and 3 show selected student projects, illustrating some key differences between these assignments from year to year. The project pictured dramatized a scenario where higher education is free because of a university-wide partnership with corporate entities that recruit students to train for specific jobs. ...
Teaching Futures: Trade-offs Between Flipped Classroom and Design Studio Course Pedagogies
Conference Paper
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  • Sep 2019
Change is exponential. Products and services are developed faster, hold a shorter shelf-life disrupted by new offerings, and exist in the wider environment with global challenges emerging such as climate change and sustainability. Thus, design for the 21st century requires different skills; design educators are challenged to adapt. In this paper, we compare two versions of a futures studies course developed for design students: one uses a flipped classroom pedagogy (with interactive online pre-work and in-class workshop activities, meeting for two 80-minute sessions per week); and the other uses a hybrid studio approach (making more use of in-class lectures followed by hands on-studio activities, meeting for 170 minutes once per week) focused on experiential futures practices of tangible artifact and immersive scenario creation. We use four measures: learning activity inventory, course quality with faculty course evaluations, student experience with a post-course survey, and time and feedback on final projects. We discuss design trade-offs for learning: format of reflections is linked to transfer activities, time on learning activities shapes perceptions, less (interference) is more, more (scaffolding, feedback, links to practice, active learning) is better, and timing is everything.
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... Additionally, the exhibition highlights the themes and values embodied by these individuals. Beyond the stories and experiences of the research participants, the Reverse Archaeology Method, designed by Stuart Candy (2013), was utilized to bridge the internal agents of change with the world that is yet to surround them. Reverse Archaeology involves the creation of artifacts from the future, enabling spectators to infer the world from which they derive (Candy, 2013). ...
... Beyond the stories and experiences of the research participants, the Reverse Archaeology Method, designed by Stuart Candy (2013), was utilized to bridge the internal agents of change with the world that is yet to surround them. Reverse Archaeology involves the creation of artifacts from the future, enabling spectators to infer the world from which they derive (Candy, 2013). Supplied with artistic license, the researcher translated the ideas and images of the future from the interview outputs and created found artifacts from the future to help immerse and engage spectators with fragments of possible futures. ...
... Supplied with artistic license, the researcher translated the scenarios and ideas written above into found artifacts from the future using the Reverse Archaeology method (Candy, 2013). ...
Causing an Effect: Activists, Uncertainty and Images of the Future
Conference Paper
Full-text available
  • Jun 2015
How might individuals challenge large-scale forces and work towards preferred futures in their community? Causing an Effect is a futures exhibition and research project that draws from individual foresight, design research, and design fiction to build understanding for activists working in future-minded ways. Seeking to emphasize the work of Canadian and American activists, this project highlights and celebrates these bold citizens in their ability to unearth complex environmental problems that threaten the health and wellbeing of their community. The research aims to generate images of the future, give voice and build empathy for activists, and create a space for strategic conversation around the future of North American industrial communities.
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... Over the first week of the workshop, the students/participants were given inputs on the urgency of the climate crises and tasked to speculate on long-term sustainable future scenarios in the form of a design fiction. The second week required of them to express the "diegesis" of their fictional futures with tangible, "diegetic" artefacts (Kirby 2010;Candy 2013). To confront the challenges of the climate crises, the workshop made explicit early on the designer's task was to both discover and understand ReFuturing Studio: Designing Long-term Sustainability for the Biosphere JOMY JOSEPH The Oslo School of Architecture and Design the "logic or intelligence" of our unsustainable paradigm. ...
ReFuturing Studio: Designing Long- term Sustainability for the Biosphere
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Full-text available
  • Jan 2021
The trajectories of the Earth’s climate and ecosystem services are unravelling, pushing the life sustaining biosphere on the path towards “biological annihilation”. As the worst climate predictions come to pass, it has become urgent to introspect on the predictable consequences of our global economic system designed for extractivism. Attempting to address and understand these issues seems to create a sense of foreboding and anxiety about our climate futures. This paper will discuss this in relation to the tendencies of defuturing in design, that is, the negation and erasure of our better futures and possibilities when trying to imagine a long-term sustainable future for human and non-human others. The discussions here are based on observations and discussions with design students in a workshop called “ReFuturing Studio” which attempts to engage young designers to con¬front the urgency of climate breakdown and long-term sustainability beyond “business as usual” (BAU). This paper argues for a “refuturing”— to reclaim that which is defutured and dehumanized, beyond the homogenizing and hegemonic futurism of BAU by re-imagining, rethinking and ‘re-humanizing’ through a ‘designerly knowing’ of the yet unknown long-term sustainable futures. Refuturing thus critically proposes alternative perspectives, solution spaces where designers and design educators can begin to understand and reconcile design practice with climate action by “designing for the biosphere” by imagining possibilities for co-regenerative practices as a means for human well-being and ecological flourishing.
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... Experiential futures: bringing it all together The final project for the class, "Experiential futures 3 " ( Candy, 2013) had multiple deliverables: First, provide an audience with a first-hand experience of life in a possible future. Second, create experiential futures with four levels: (a) setting: the kind of future world; (b) scenario: a specific future history or state; (c) situation: one-to-one scale visible representation of time and place; and (d) stuff: artifacts or instantiations. ...
Opening a Design Education Pipeline from University to K-12 and Back
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  • Nov 2017
To prepare students to imagine desirable futures amidst current planetary level challenges, design educators must think and act in new ways. In this paper, we describe a pilot study that illustrates how educators might teach K-12 students and university design students to situate their making within transitional times in a volatile and exponentially changing world. We describe how to best situate students to align design thinking and learning with future foresight. Here we present a pilot test and evaluate how a university-level Dexign Futures course content, approach, and scaffolded instructional materials-can be adapted for use in K-12 Design Learning Challenges. We describe the K-12 design-based learning challenges/experiences developed and implemented by the Design Learning Network (DLN). The Dexign Futures course we describe in this paper is a required course for third year undergraduate students in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. The "x" signifies a different type of design that aligns short-term action with long-term goals. The course integrates design thinking and learning with long-horizon future scenario foresight. Broadly speaking, we ask how might portions of a design course be taught and experienced by teachers and students of two different demographics: within the university (Design Undergraduates) and in K-12 (via DLN). This pilot study is descriptive in nature; in future work, we seek to assess learning outcomes across university and K-12 courses. We believe the approach described is relevant for lifelong learners (e.g., postgraduate level , career development, transitional adult education).
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... The third example (shown in Figure 3) is of a one-day event co-hosted by MaRS and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada (co-organized by the first author of this paper). During this event, a group of system stakeholders, service providers and individuals with lived experience of mental health needs worked together to build medicine cabinets from the future, inspired by the reverse archeology method coined by Stuart Candy (2013). Actors worked with their hands using simple materials like construction paper, popsicle sticks and plasticine to design future medicine cabinets, including ones with monitoring devices linked to peer support and bio-feedback toothbrushes. ...
Designing for Aesthetic Disruption: Altering Mental Models in Social Systems through Designerly Practices
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Amid all the excitement about transforming social systems through design, there remains a lack of understanding about what design can uniquely offer to support this change. This conceptual paper contributes to the discussion by integrating research on design and systems thinking to develop the concept of aesthetic disruption, highlighting its connection to the alteration of mental models in social systems. With support from empirical illustrations of aesthetic disruption in the context of healthcare, we identify four core components of designing for aesthetic disruption: engagement of the senses, experience of dissensus, exposed assumptions, and reflexive actors. In doing so, we bring aesthetic knowledge to the fore of what design can contribute to social systems transformation and lay the foundation for further research and practice related to aesthetic disruption.
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The Thing From The Future (APF Compass Methods Anthology)
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A methodological article describing the first edition of the award-winning experiential futures, imagination and creativity card game “The Thing From The Future”, designed by Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson and published by Situation Lab. This piece appeared as part of the Association of Professional Futurists (APF) Methods Anthology, a special issue of the periodical Compass, edited by Andrew Curry. It later served as the basis for a chapter in the 2018 collection “Transforming the Future”, published by Routledge and UNESCO, and edited by Riel Miller: <researchgate.net/publication/312016855>. A free, open access version of The Thing From The Future (1st ed.) can be downloaded here: <researchgate.net/publication/364677670>.
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Gaming Futures Literacy: The Thing from the Future (Persian translation)
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This is the translation in Farsi of the chapter "Gaming Futures Literacy: The Thing From the Future" from the collection "Transforming the Future" edited by Riel Miller and originally published by Routledge and UNESCO. Translation team: Reza Dehnavi; Atousa Poursheikhali; Somaye Nuri Hekmat; Ali Masoud; Pardis Pourshikhali. The full book in Farsi: <researchgate.net/publication/386175518>. This piece in English: <researchgate.net/publication/312016855>.
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The ‘Responsibility’ Factor in Imagining the Future of Education in China
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Design and creativity have been a considerable force for improving life conditions. A lot of effort has been invested in explaining the design process and creativity mainly through the design thinking methodology, but design accountability and responsible actions in the design process are, yet, to be fully explored. The concept of design ethics is now increasingly scrutinized on both the level of business organization and of the individual designer. A 4-day design workshop that involved creativity techniques provided the base to explore responsibility in the fuzzy front end of the design process. The future of education in 2030 was defined as the workshop's theme and fifty-six students from China were asked to create detailed alternative scenarios. A number of imagination exercises, implementation of technological innovations and macro-environment evolutions employed in the workshop are discussed. The aim was to incite moral and responsible actions among students less familiar with creative educational contexts of student-led discovery and collaborative learning. This paper reflects on the use of creativity methods to stimulate anticipation in (non)design students.
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Make the Future Visible Today!: A Reflection on Using Design Thinking and Futures Studies Techniques to Foster Creativity
Conference Paper
Full-text available
  • Apr 2018
We consider creativity as the ability to see situations in an original and unusual way. Design thinking techniques are suitable to introduce the differences between divergent and convergent thinking to newcomers at creativity. However, these beginners might feel that the model of design thinking restricts them in this liberating activity. Also, the idea that by passing through the four steps of the design thinking model a perfect solution will be found, is neither realistic nor removes their uncertainties. Moreover, whether an emphasis on the future context of a designed object, and the implementation of different storytelling methods at the front end of innovation could be recognized as added value, must still be inquired. A two-day workshop that applied techniques from design thinking and futures studies combined with narrative techniques is developed to foster creativity among User Experience students in China. In particular, the participants are design thinking "newbies" who are also not used to an educational context of studentled discovery and collaborative learning. This is a reflective paper, based on empirical experience that articulates a new attitude towards the use of methods to stimulate creativity in non-design students.
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