Conference PaperPDF Available

The Age Of Imagination: A History of Experiential Futures 2006-2031

Authors:

Abstract

Due (apparently) to some sort of time travel paradox, this paper from the year 2034 by design futurists Stuart Candy and Trevor Haldenby was written for the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held in Toronto in April 2014.
The Age Of Imagination: A History
of Experiential Futures 2006-2031
Abstract
Imagination is a critical public resource. However, in
Western culture, as late as the turn of the 21st century, it
was primarily thought of as a fragmented and personal
property of individual consciousness. This paper examines
the recent flourishing of transdisciplinary practices for
cultivating shared public imagination, focusing on the
generation-long period circa 2005-2030, now known as the
Age of Imagination. The historic emergence during this time
of design fiction, together with other experiential futures
practices consciously scaffolding collective imagination,
proved to be a turning point for collective human capacity
not only, as many initially recognised, for practical design
applications on a modest scale, but also for shaping history
itself. Acknowledging a cultural debt to long-standing and
diverse strands of imaginative activity including storytelling,
theatre, simulation, prototyping, and the 20th century
tradition of futures studies (aka strategic foresight), two
practitioners who helped bring this new tradition into being
pause to look back upon a quarter century of astonishing
change. In the process, they acknowledge the growing
significance of seventh generation ritual computing
technologies to the Age of Imagination.
Author Keywords
Experiential Futures; Design Fiction; Prototyping; Immersive
Theatre; Foresight; Futures Studies; Ritual Computing
Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open
access. The additional fee must be paid to ACM.
First Author
Trevor Haldenby
The Mission Business Inc.
582 Ontario Street
Toronto, ON, M4X 1M7 Canada
trevor@themission.biz
Second Author
Stuart Candy
Situation Lab
OCAD University
100 McCaul St
Toronto, ON M5T 1W1 Canada
stuart@futuryst.com
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation
Introduction
The history of humanity is also a history of imagination. From cave paintings to 2001: A Space Odyssey, to today’s
neurocinema; from ancient China’s I Ching to Kobayashi Virtual Concern’s groundbreaking Prof-eSee; from the shamans
of Siberia to Tehran’s celebrated back-room imaginists: perhaps nothing is more characteristic of our species than our
incessant manufacture of representations of alternate realities, and the endless quest for possibility’s horizon.
And a good thing, too, for it requires a prodigious act of imagination to remember just how different things were even a
mere generation ago.
Although the story reaches back much further, some sense of the remarkably accelerated uptake and development of
this field can be gained from a brief timeline of the past 25 years. The shift from technology-themed, object-oriented
prototypes of early design fiction [19] presented mainly in stand-alone artifacts and videos towards increasingly
immersive, participatory, synthetic, and richly multidimensional experiential futures may be seen below.
2006 - Science fiction writer and design critic Bruce Sterling’s Visionary in Residence is published, coining the
term ‘design fiction’. [20]
2006 - “Hawaii 2050”, a statewide public planning process, is launched with a set of four physically immersive
scenarios. [5]
2007 - Several different futures for Honolulu’s Chinatown (respectively exploring the consequences of
gentrification, a bird flu outbreak, and mainland Chinese sponsorship of Hawaiian independence) are brought to
life in the streets via tangible artifacts. Controversy ensues as city officials are temporarily convinced that some
key neighbourhood properties have been gentrifying without a permit. [5]
2007 - World Without Oil, an early “alternate reality game” set against the backdrop of a hypothetical oil crisis,
launches just months before an actual spike in oil prices. [8]
2008 - The Museum of Modern Art opens the landmark exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind”, bringing to a
mass audience many “critical design” future artifacts of Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, and their protégés at the
Royal College of Art. [2] [7]
2008 - A future-dated “special edition” of the New York Times, produced by culture-jamming activists the Yes
Men, invites commuters to celebrate the (hypothetical, obviously) end of the War in Iraq. [5] [23]
2008 - The world’s first ‘massively multiplayer forecasting game’, Superstruct, is hosted by Institute for the
Future. Thousands of players co-create hypothetical solutions to real problems set in 2019. [5]
2009 - An alternate reality game about pandemic flu (Coral Cross, funded by the US Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention), is shockingly derailed by an actual pandemic just weeks before launch; a clear
harbinger of the increasing hazards of accelerating change in the present overtaking our imaginings about the
future. [1]
2010 - The Futures of Everyday Life, the first Ph.D. dissertation on the intersection of foresight and design, is
completed. [5]
2011 - Amid the turmoil of the Arab Spring, Tunisian press, radio and TV outlets all report from #16Juin2014
for the entire day, helping get the population back to work. [16]
2012 - ByoLogyc’s 2012 experiment runs in Toronto with a massively multiplayer simulation of a global
pandemic, the “BRX Virus” convincing thousands that the end is nigh. [11]
2014 - the Body/Mind/Change exhibition at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto invites hundreds of visitors to meld
their minds with a 3D printed and personalized “Pod” neural interface that enables massively unsettling social
gaming. [22]
2019 - The Pechora River Cult, comprised largely of international HCI experts and operating from an isolated
mining town in Northern Russia, tests a prototype nanotechnological computing platform that mimics the
induction of a shamanic ritual chronicled by explorers in the late 19th century. [12]
2021 - Fortune cookies distributed in Hong Kong’s posh New Territories invite those who open them to
“Channel their energy into something positive... for everyone. Jambo.” Everyone who ingests the cookies
reports experiencing a profound dream of China’s domination of Central Africa in the year 2064. The originator
of this designed fiction remains unknown, but is suspected to be a nootropic division of the People’s Liberation
Army. [10]
2022 - Prof-eSee launches: a supercomputer network designed by Kobayashi Virtual Concern to write and test
natural language scenarios for the futures of the human race. Its outputs are rated by a focus-group of 18,000
individuals and statistically revealed to be better at concocting plausible tales of the future than any human.
The stories it delivers to mass audiences branch off a single scenaric premise that is customized according to
each reader’s social media profile. [13]
2024 - Prof-eSee is relaunched as Dreamnet on a fully Open Source basis. Transensory renderings and
adaptations of the scenarios are delivered seamlessly across channels as videos, headlines, and the profiles of
fictional characters. The average participant in the program encounters over 168 touchpoints with the future
scenarios created by Dreamnet in a given day. [14]
2025 - The Finnish electoral process trials a week-long participatory simulation of key candidates’ visions for
the country addressing a (mandatory) twenty-year time horizon. Within three years, the process becomes
standard across the Nordic region. The remainder of the Eurasian Union follows suit by 2030. [15]
2030 - Last month, at a landmark visiongaming session convened on Dreamnet by the exponentially-growing
Global Governance Meetup, approximately half a billion participants experience a simultaneous epiphany.
Initiates universally refuse to disclose any details of their revelation experience but vocally encourage others to
join the next session. [9]
A key conclusion which consideration of this historical trajectory invites is the fact, so clear in hindsight, that much of
the initial excitement and thinking surrounding “design fiction” was surprisingly narrow in its focus on technological
artifacts. The meme’s spread gave many designers a welcome and probably overdue opportunity to reframe their craft’s
potential in more creative, speculative terms. However, both the material-object (vs. systemic- contextual)
connotations of the term “design”, and the fanciful connotations of the term “fiction” worked against the wider
realization - which did not arise until experiential futures began to gain currency - that making new stories and
prototypes can take any number of forms. Whatever scaffolds and enables thought and feeling about future possibilities
is fair game. As humans, we’re all “worlding”, all the time - designers just a bit more intensively than most. [Haldenby]
And the more comprehensive or immersive the intervention, the more effectively future-shaping (i.e., catalytic of actual
change) it is liable to be.
A second remark to make is that (perhaps ironically) it is difficult to forecast the impact of the convergence of these
accelerating technosocial trends. Our research points to the crucial importance of creating a new research group within
the Association for Computing Machinery dedicated to further exploration of Human-Future Interaction, as suggested in
2007 by Senator Jason Tester [Tester, personal correspondence], in tandem with the agenda of the Human-Computer
Interaction special interest group.
The impactful innovations and transformative social breakthroughs recounted in the chronology in this abstract might
have sounded like dreams (or nightmares) 50 - or even 20 - years ago, but as we enter the fourth decade of the
twenty-first century, what was once the realm of design fiction has rapidly become reality. The Age of Imagination is
well and truly upon us. Indeed, it’s truer than ever to declare today: the future is already here.
Acknowledgements
We thank all of the volunteers from OCAD University
and ByoLogyc Inc. in Toronto, Canada, whose
contributions and bodily fluids made this publication
possible.
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... bodily) experience and public deliberation' (cf. Candy, 2014;Önal, 2010, cited in Mazé, 2019, pp. 23-24) (see Section 3.2). ...
Thesis
Full-text available
It is challenging to comprehend the extent of oceanic plastic pollution because of the sea depth and currents. This PhD by practice in design uses marine scientific findings and data on plastic waste recycling extrapolation to support an argument that the oceans are the world's largest mismanaged landfill. As the sea's landfill is not visible, the research applied various approaches to making invisible plastic waste present. Through Higher Education (HE) action-based workshops, research participants were invited to experience ocean plastics in ways designed to challenge perceptions. The HE action-based research co-created an aesthetically positive waste response and new experiential values that re-shaped the thinking of participants. Through a co-design approach with design students, research created meaningful connections with long-lasting plastic resources and re-imagined plastic pollution as oceanic species. This PhD thesis research comprises a series of three practice-based projects. First, HE-based waste symposium engagements facilitate landfill dialogue and promote plastic reuse. Second, HE participatory workshops enabled the visualisation of oceanic plastic pollution through making installations. Third, the research explored plastic pollution using craft expositions and participated in a sailing expedition. The PhD interventions promoted positive change through hands-on reuse tactics with plastic packaging, raising environmental and oceanic landfill awareness, and acknowledging that this may not lead to changes in stakeholders' behaviour. Through the design agency-praxis, the research draws on recent works in speculative design formulating experiential design futures and design fictions. These PhD thesis contributions funnelled visual strategy insights from three practice-based interventions into two experiential scenarios - future-based climate fiction narratives. The first future scenario unpacked the responses of HE design workshop stakeholders and proposed informal global services and design-led packaging solutions. The second fiction scenario is a visionary post-anthropocentric future that visually re-imagined the planetary plastic pollution changes through intersections of research and praxis. This participatory research re-imagining with plastic waste and visualising the complexity of plastic pollution contributes further to knowledge relating to design research in three clustered domains. First, various HE learning tools for oceanic environmental awareness and waste reuse were developed. Second, the research designed an innovative methodology that expands praxis vocabulary and forms a new eco-centric compendium through workshop interventions and waste aesthetic approaches. Lastly, through practice-based participatory action and speculative agency, the research uniquely constructs a socio-material narrative with plastic things making new interdisciplinary connections and design relations to nature. The PhD promoted hands-on plastic reuse and new perceptions of plastic waste in HE design education, connecting to discard study, marine science and feminist thinking. A co-creation design approach raised transformative environmental awareness and promoted novel waste aesthetic and design language towards engaged relationships with plastic pollution.
... bodily) experience and public deliberation (cf. Candy, 2014;Mazé & Önal, 2010). ...
Article
Scenarios for policy and the public are increasingly given form by designers. For design, this means ideas about the future - futurity - is at stake, particularly in genres of 'concept', 'critical' and 'persuasive' design. While critical approaches are present in futures studies and political philosophy, design assumptions and preferences are typically not explicit, including gender norms, socio-ecological practices and power structures. Calling for further studies of the politics of design visions, I outline possible approaches and elaborate through the example 'Switch! Energy Futures'. I reflect upon how competing visions and politics of sustainability become explicit through our process, aesthetics and stakeholders.
... turn' towards fuller exploration of design, media and games (Candy, 2010;Li, 2013;Haldenby and Candy, 2014;Selin, 2015;Candy and Dunagan, 2017). Such exploration may help us reconfigure the playing field -or reshuffle the deck -to make it easier to engage people in the relatively novel modes of thought that increasing Futures Literacy entails. ...
Chapter
Full-text available
The collection "Transforming the Future", edited by Riel Miller, presents the results of significant research undertaken by UNESCO and partners to define the theory and practice of anticipation around the world today, using the core concept of Futures Literacy. This chapter "Gaming Futures Literacy" explores the award-winning imagination game "The Thing From The Future" co-created by Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson. Used by learners, leaders and creatives worldwide, it was designed to help take strategic foresight and futures literacy from difficult and rare to easier and more common. An open access, print-and-play edition of the game is available at <researchgate.net/publication/364677670>.
Thesis
Full-text available
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.
Book
Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In "Speculative Everything," Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be -- to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose "what if" questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). "Speculative Everything" offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more -- about everything -- reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures. © 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.
Design and the Elastic Mind. Museum of Modern Art
  • P Antonelli
Antonelli, P. Design and the Elastic Mind. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008.
The Case for Human-Future Interaction. Future Now blog, Institute for the Future
  • J Tester
Tester, J. The Case for Human-Future Interaction. Future Now blog, Institute for the Future, Palo Alto, CA, 2007. http://future.iftf.org/2007
Dreaming Together: Public Imagination and the Future of Governance In Made Up: Design's Fictions
  • S Candy
Candy, S. Dreaming Together: Public Imagination and the Future of Governance. In Made Up: Design's Fictions. Tim Durfee, Mimi Zeiger, Eds. JRP Ringier / Art Center Graduate Press, Zurich, 2014.
Coral Cross: Pandemic Preparedness from the Hawaii Department of Health
  • M Andersen
Andersen, M. 2009, Coral Cross: Pandemic Preparedness from the Hawaii Department of Health. http://www.argn.com/2009/04/coral_cross_pandemic_ preparedness_from_the_hawaii_department_of_health/
Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction
  • N Shedroff
  • C Noessel
Shedroff, N., and Noessel, C. Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction.
Traditional Fortune Cookies as Delivery System for Political Paradigm Shift
  • Gång Guo
Guo, Gång. Traditional Fortune Cookies as Delivery System for Political Paradigm Shift. In Journal of Somnambulistic Dining. Xu Zhiyong, Ed. Chinese Academic Nexus, 2021.
Design Fiction: Props, Prototypes, Predicaments: Communicating New Ideas
  • J Bleecker
  • S Candy
  • J Dunagan
  • J Leonard
  • S Pohflepp
  • B Sterling
Bleecker, J., Candy, S., Dunagan, J., Leonard, J., Pohflepp, S., and Sterling, B. Design Fiction: Props, Prototypes, Predicaments: Communicating New Ideas. South by Southwest Interactive (2010). http://audio.sxsw.com/2010/podcasts/031310i_designF iction.mp3 [audio]
From Design Fiction to Experiential Futures
  • N Raford
Raford, N. From Design Fiction to Experiential Futures. In The Future of Futures. Ed. Andrew Curry. Association of Professional Futurists, Houston, TX, USA, 2012.