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Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF)

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Abstract

EXF is a framework for hybrid design/futures research and practice that is all about making images of the future more legible and concrete and seeing what one can learn from doing so. Rather than being dreamt up from scratch, it originated in a pattern identified as underpinning multiple projects previously undertaken by futurists, designers, and researchers with diverse investigation and engagement objectives in mind. It offers a practical structure and set of prompts for devising projects and interventions with a view to promoting the availability of a more diverse and deeper array of scenarios for consideration, in all sorts of contexts, and ultimately in service of developing a social capacity for foresight. This piece is adapted for the new edition of the Knowledge Base of Futures Studies, published Summer 2020, at the invitation of editors Richard Slaughter and Andy Hines. It first appeared in 2019 as a peer-reviewed article, "Turning Foresight Inside Out", in the Journal of Futures Studies special double issue on Design and Futures edited by Stuart Candy and Cher Potter: <researchgate.net/publication/338129083>.
Editors
Richard Slaughter & Andy Hines
Washington, DC, USA
Brisbane, Australia
The Knowledge Base
of Futures Studies 2020
Copyright © 2020 Association of Professional Futurists and Foresight
International
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Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-0-9857619-3-6 (print)
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The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies 2020
i
Contents
CONTENTS
Foreword ..................................................................................................................... iii
Introduction ................................................................................................................ iv
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................... viii
Volume 1: Foundations ............................................................................................... 1
Introduction to Volume 1: Foundations .................................................................... 2
Part 1: Origins and State of Play ............................................................................... 6
Chapter 1: Yesterday’s Futures over Three Millennia .............................................. 7
Chapter 2: Mapping Fifty Years of Futures Studies Scholarship (19682017) .......24
Chapter 3: The State of Play in the Futures Field: 10 years on ................................48
Part 2: Approaches to Futures Thinking .................................................................65
Chapter 4: Seeing in Multiple Horizons: Connecting Futures to Vision and Strategy
.................................................................................................................................66
Chapter 5: Design for the Abstract Qualities of Futures Studies .............................86
Chapter 6: Presencing: The Theory U Framework as Foresight Method .................98
Chapter 7: The Manoa School’s Four Futures ....................................................... 109
Volume 2: Methods and Practices ........................................................................... 120
Introduction to Volume 2: Methods and Practices ................................................. 121
Part 1: Futures Methods and Tools ........................................................................ 124
Chapter 8: Emerging Practices in Foresight .......................................................... 125
Chapter 9: Aspirational Futures ............................................................................. 143
Chapter 10: Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) .......................................... 157
Chapter 11: Wild Cards and Weak Signals ............................................................ 171
Chapter 12: An Updated Practitioners Guide to Science Fiction Prototyping ....... 185
Chapter 13: Framework Foresight: Exploring Futures the Houston Way .............. 196
Part 2: Critical Practice and Integral Futures ....................................................... 215
Chapter 14: Decolonizing Futures: Finding Voice, and Making Room for Non-
Western Ways of Knowing, Being, and Doing ...................................................... 216
Chapter 15: Surfacing the intangible: integrating the doing and thinking of strategy
............................................................................................................................... 231
Chapter 16: Integral Futures: Theory, Vision, Practice ......................................... 237
Volume 3: Synergies, Case Studies and Implementation ...................................... 258
Introduction to Volume 3: Synergies, Case Studies, and Implementation ............. 259
Part 1: Synergies and Implementation ................................................................... 263
Chapter 17: Australian Futures: The Swinburne Foresight Program ..................... 264
Chapter 18: Finnish and Nordic Futures Studies Current insights and new voices
............................................................................................................................... 280
Chapter 19: The IFR story and Futures in Africa .................................................. 295
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Contents
Chapter 20: A Foresight Journey in Education Futures, Foundation Style ............ 310
Chapter 21: The Polak Game ................................................................................ 326
Chapter 22: Foresight Maturity Model (FMM): Achieving Best Practices in the
Foresight Field ...................................................................................................... 341
Chapter 23: Foresight Capacity: Towards a Foresight Competency Model .......... 352
Part 2: Futures in Governance ................................................................................ 367
Chapter 24: Transforming Global Governance in the 21st Century: Issues and
Proposals ............................................................................................................... 368
Chapter 25: Anticipatory Governance: The Role of Futures Studies in Regaining the
Political Initiative .................................................................................................. 385
Chapter 26: Foresight as a Rigorous and Systematic Imagining Process .............. 403
Volume 4: Directions and Outlooks ........................................................................ 418
Introduction to Volume 4: Directions and Outlooks ............................................. 419
Part 1: 21st Century Outlooks and Risks ............................................................... 422
Chapter 27: Public Perceptions of Future Threats to Humanity: Why They Matter
.............................................................................................................................. 423
Chapter 28: The Three Tomorrows of Postnormal Times ..................................... 437
Chapter 29: Energy Descent Futures ..................................................................... 453
Part 2: Where Now for Futures Studies and Applied Foresight? ........................ 471
Chapter 30: Professionalizing Foresight: Why Do it, Where it Stands, and What
Needs to Be Done.................................................................................................. 472
Chapter 31: Futures Studies as a Quest for Meaning ............................................. 489
About the Editors ..................................................................................................... 508
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Chapter 10: Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF)
CHAPTER 10: ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPERIENTIAL
FUTURES (EXF)
by Stuart Candy, Kelly Kornet
Introduction
This article outlines a framework for hybrid design/futures research and
practice called Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF). It is all about
making images of the future more legible and concrete and seeing what
one can learn from doing so. Rather than being dreamt up from scratch,
EXF originated in a pattern identified as underpinning multiple projects
previously undertaken by futurists, designers, and researchers with diverse
investigation and engagement objectives in mind.
The framework may be considered for application any time a
practitioner looks to pair ethnographic and experiential futures, or put
another way, wants to do the following two things:
Examine “existing” or generate “new” images of the future
through working with particular individuals or cultures.
Render these images more accessible, legible, and discussable via
tangible, performative or other mediation strategies.
EXF’s purpose, then, is to serve as a practical structure and set of
prompts for use in devising projects and interventions to come, with a
view to promoting the availability of a more diverse and deeper array of
scenarios for consideration, in all sorts of contexts, and ultimately in
service of developing a social capacity for foresight.
The body of this article is in three parts:
A background section briefly locating the work in futures
literature and practice.
A description of the framework and outline of the cases that
inspired it.
And finally a section on application, looking at key questions and
issues raised when using EXF to design a project.
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Background: Ethnographic and Experiential Futures
Critical futures scholarship argues that “the future” does not exist as such
but is inherently a domain of ideation and imagination. As Slaughter has
noted, for example, it “cannot be experienced directly, but only though
images, thoughts, feelings and the multiple ways these are subsequently
expressed in the outer world.”
1
The concept of “images of the future” thus
has occupied a central place in Futures Studies.
2
In the 1970s, Stanford anthropologist Robert Textor, a younger
associate of the great Margaret Mead, began integrating Futures Studies
with tools and approaches from his own field. He saw the value of
anticipatory anthropology” in terms of confronting a pair of ubiquitous
ills: “ethnocentrism refers to one’s being excessively centered in one’s
own culture, and tempocentrism to one’s being excessively centered in
one’s own timeframe.”
3
Textor and his students developed Ethnographic
Futures Research (EFR) as a process for systematically mapping images
of the future held by various individuals and communities: “Just as the
cultural anthropologist conventionally uses ethnography to study an extant
culture, so the cultural futures researcher uses EFR to elicit from members
of an extant social group their images and preferences (cognitions and
values) with respect to possible or probable future cultures for their social
group.”
4
A semi-structured interview format is used to draw out
participants’ alternative projections in terms of what they want, fear, and
expect.
Textor avoided positing a singular future, echoing the ontological and
epistemological pluralism of Futures Studies. In a similar spirit, we put the
EXF cycle forward in the interest of methodological pluralism. EFR’s
version of ethnography for studying futures is useful but is not set on a
pedestal as the best or only way to do so. (Only two of the five projects
outlined here use that specific approach.) Thus, EFR is one way to try
rendering people’s otherwise invisible images of the future “visible” in
words. But what happens when we go even further: rendering particular
futures materially or performatively using other media and strategies of
representation?
Experiential Futures (XF) is a family of approaches for making
futures visible, tangible, interactive, and otherwise explorable in a range
of modes.
5
XF, led by practice and accompanied by a growing theoretical
base, is grounded in the big-picture agenda of contributing to a social
capacity for foresight.
6
The turn to experience as a canvas for futures
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practice prods at a traditional overreliance in the field on words, and
corresponding underutilization of other media,
7
disclosing a transmedia
landscape of alternative ways to use the future. More embodied and
media-rich depictions of futures, proponents argue, can make the field
more effective in shaping change, and the practitioners and projects of XF
are highly intertwined with those of design-led futures-oriented activities
which have come into prominence over the same period (since the mid-
2000s), including speculative design and design fiction.
8
Yet the task of
enhancing futures thinking is medium-agnosticthe best approach is
whatever it takesand so XF exhibits great variety in terms of the media
and engagement strategies used. This can be seen in the projects outlined
below.
The result of bringing ethnographic and experiential futures together
as described here could be characterized (following José Ramos) as a
protocol for Futures Action Research.
9
We are of course not trying to
establish foreknowledge of what the future will be, but aim instead to
extend critical and participatory foresight work into a deeply embodied
mode, by scaffolding processes to more effectively explore the futures
thinking of diverse communities, using design (broadly) to loop from an
interior register to an exteriorthinkable, feelable, discussableone. Any
project following the EXF Cycle also potentially tackles a need
highlighted in Integral Futures scholarship: to span interior and exterior,
individual and collective ways of knowing.
10
Framework: Shape and origins of the EXF Cycle
The steps involved in EXF may be summarized as follows:
(a) Map1: Inquire into and record people's existing images of the future
whether using the classic EFR trio of probable, preferred, and non-
preferred futures, or some other guiding approach.
(b) Multiply: Generate alternative images or scenarios to challenge or
extend existing thinking. (This step is optional, especially in first
iteration.)
(c) Mediate: Translate these ideas about the future/s into experiences:
tangible, immersive, visual, or interactive representations.
(d) Mount: Stage experiential scenario/s for participants to encounter, for
the original subject/s, others, or both.
(e) Map2: Investigate and record responses; that is, revisit the inner
landscape of futures thinking, taking stock of how it has been
(perhaps) changed, perturbed, or deepened by the intervention. In a
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sense the process circles back to the first stage.
These steps take the form of a loop or cycle (Figure 1) and could be
repeated any number of times. A first iteration might document anchoring
narratives such as those that EFR seeks to capture, while subsequent
rounds could challenge or revise these.
Fig. 1. The EXF Cycle
Below we outline in broad strokes a diverse set of five projects
having different goals, media, and contextsthat nonetheless share a
structural resemblance in combining ethnographic and experiential
elements. These projects were all created prior to the framework
diagrammed above, and in fact helped to inspire its development.
11
Project 1. FoundFutures: Chinatown (2007)
12
In the mid-2000s, Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan ran a series of informal
experiments deploying “future artifacts” to the public on an unsolicited
basis. They called the approach “guerrilla futures” by analogy with
guerrilla theatre, marketing, art, and semiotics. Initial gestures such as
“droplifting” future products into local shops paved the way to
FoundFutures: Chinatown, a more systematic effort to bring futures to life
at the scale of a community—Honolulu’s Chinatown, on O’ahu, Hawaii.
Bringing backgrounds in anthropology and theatre, they orchestrated
artifact deployments and enactments from a series of imaginaries for the
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neighborhood, grounded in the particulars of place and history. The set of
scenarios was generated after interviewing area residents and business-
owners, and then translated into urban installations and happenings.
Gentrification concerns were dramatized through signage heralding
the (then-unprecedented) arrival of American franchises such as Starbucks
and TGI Fridays, and luxury apartments (see Image 1). Another
intervention, inspired by the outbreaks of bubonic plague in Chinatown in
the early 20th century, hypothesized an epidemic of “Hang Ten” flu. A
third posed the question: what becomes of Chinatowns in a future where
China is the preeminent superpower? Reactions were registered via direct
observation, as well as in the press, and at a free community workshop.
Project 2. Causing an Effect (2015)
13
Kelly Kornet, a designer and researcher who had grown up near one of
Canada’s most polluted industrial centers, an area known as Chemical
Valley, undertook a project to gain an understanding of the thinking and
motivations of environmental activists from that area and places like it. In
one-on-one interviews, and using Textor’s EFR format, participants were
invited to speak about the kinds of futures that they expected, hoped for,
and feared.
Kornet then set about materializing these divergent futures in a
selection of future artifacts, as if the imagined scenarios had actually come
to pass. This meant creating props, as it were, from the movies in the
minds of her informants: the industrial accident that they worried could
occur at the plant; or the laws that they hoped local authorities would
properly enforce to restore air and water quality. These were shared at a
small exhibition in Toronto, Causing an Effect, to which not only the
research participants but also the general public were invited to respond.
Project 3. 1-888-FUTURES (2015)
14
A series of day-long participatory design workshops was staged in the
mid-2010s by researchers from Situation Lab and The Extrapolation
Factory (Situation Lab is run by Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson; The
Extrapolation Factory is run by Elliott Montgomery and Chris Woebken).
Hosted at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic
Arts in Los Angeles, 1-888-FUTURES solicited public input in the weeks
prior by inviting people to call a toll-free number and record their future
dream in a voicemail, together with a mailing address.
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On the day, workshop participants were assigned a random voicemail
to retrieve as the basis for a “tangibilization” (Woebken’s excellent word)
of the dream. The makers then recorded a video explaining how the dream
recording had inspired their “future present,” and boxed it up to send to
the provided address. Afterwards, on social media, some recipients posted
responses to the artifact they had opened.
Project 4. Making the Futures Present (2016)
15
Designer and futurist Maggie Greyson developed a framework for
“Personal Experiential Futures” to help people more concretely picture
their possible future selves and circumstances, drawing partly on EFR and
partly on Personal Futures practice.
16
The process entailed interviewing
volunteer participants one on one about a range of scenarios they could
imagine facing on a 20-year time horizon in their own lives: positive,
negative, and expected, and then “unexpected” too. (Not part of EFR’s
descriptive protocol, the latter was added to probe, challenge, or expand
prospective thinking.) In the same session, researcher and participant co-
created rapid prototypes from selected futures, and afterwards the host
went on to develop more polished, real-looking artifacts as a basis for
deeper conversation at their next meeting.
Project 5. Futureproof (2017)
17
Conor Holler is a management consultant with a background in
improvisational comedy, who undertook a design project to research how
it might be used for more serious foresight purposes. “Improv,” a
longstanding theatrical tradition, has recently become fashionable among
businesses seeking to enhance their creativity.
18
Holler devised an improv
format that put topic experts and actors together in front of a live
audience, to create scenes from possible futures: “Futureproof explores
improv’s potential to contribute positively to futures practice, with XF
work serving as its main conceptual and methodological reference point.”
For instance, a guest expert in genetics was invited onstage to describe
how genetic technologies might figure in everyday life a generation from
now. The host and actors asked some questions, then the players
improvised a series of scenes from futures inspired and informed by the
opening, for both audience and expert to react to.
We first presented EXF to the futures community at the
Design/Develop/Transform Conference in Brussels in mid-2017.
19
Soon
after this we encountered a humanitarian activist initiative about girls in
Syrian refugee camps being supported in imagining their own preferred
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life and career paths. Vision Not Victim had originated in entirely different
circumstances, tied to neither the futures field nor design, yet it followed
the same trajectory as these other projects,
20
which for us underscored
how the structure might genuinely be useful for traversing a wide project-
design space.
Having outlined the framework and considered a range of ways that it
can look from extant examples, we now turn to considering how it can be
applied. What kind of orientation and guidance does EXF provide, and
what kind of project design questions and options is it intended to surface?
Application: Using EXF to design a project
We have seen that each step in the cycleMap, Multiply, Mediate,
Mount, and Map againadmits of wide variation. This may make for
strange juxtapositions, but it also points towards the utility of a framework
intended to be flexible, with each step being part of a design conversation
and opening up numerous generative questions for practitioners. So while
the questions might be quite similar from one context to another, the
answers ought to be as different as their futurist/ designer/ researcher/
participant co-creators can imagine.
(a) Map1
Whose futures are being explored, and why? Are individual, personal-
scale mental models especially of interest, or those of a group or
community? If the latter, who speaks for the community? What are the
elicitation strategiesin writing or interview, in person or remotely, with
how much scaffolding and of what kinds? When might existing evidence
of future images suffice?
All five of the cases outlined were self-initiated as opposed to client-
facing efforts, with three being culminating projects of students receiving
a terminal design (MDes) degree. The research collaborators represented
multiple demographics: some of the sort perhaps conventionally orbiting
relatively wealthy, Western university-based participatory design projects
and invited subject-matter experts; but alongside the usual suspects were
residents of a traditionally ethnic-minority urban neighborhood, and
environmental activists from fence-line and First Nations communities. It
is exciting to consider how projects to come could partner with and be
activated by many more kinds of stakeholder.
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In discussing this Mapping phase, we acknowledge potential
objections in some quarters to the term “ethnography” being used so
flexiblyperhaps less where EFR is deployed than where the imaginative
contributions are more rapidly produced or playful. We exercise a certain
license in describing an improvisational theater format in terms of
“ethnography,” and although it is beyond our scope to weigh in on the
contested question of what should count as such,
21
we repeat that our aim
is to support attempts to animate and embody futures thinking in many
contexts. Ethnographic depth is for us a design parameter; a spectrum to
be throttled up and down as circumstances require, rather than a fixed
boundary to be drawn and policed in the same way at all times. On the
spectrum of depth some projects might be located in the middle ground
(FoundFutures), and one starts to see how certain kinds of inquiry
(conversation with neighborhood residents who might not have much time
to spare) could be less effective, or practically prohibited, with a stricter
approach. This spectrum view, together with the imperative that format be
crafted to fit the case, comports with our aim of enabling not simply more,
but appropriate, activity in this design space. It might seem strange to say,
but rigor or depth are not an unalloyed scholarly good to be maximized at
any cost; they are part of a dynamic project-design landscape in which
more of one thing (e.g. time spent with informants) is bound to mean less
of something else (e.g. access for certain kinds of participants).
So for initial mapping, EFR could be used, but less formal portals will
sometimes be appropriate, be they voicemails from the public or the
ruminations of a subject live onstage. One method seemingly well suited
to mapping futures in projects to come is Causal Layered Analysis, useful
for analyzing and also generating in-depth images of the future.
(b) Multiply
Should the initially found images of the future be specifically challenged,
diversified, and expanded? And if so, on a first pass, or later and in which
directions? To supplement a first set of futures images is an optional
variation in the process. One might omit it where the goal is to consider
primary “extant” futures (like the activists’ motivating narratives in
Causing an Effect), or where the diversity of the original inputs meets
requirements (like the dozens of voicemails recorded by the public ahead
of 1-888-FUTURES). The key underlying question, often the case in
futures practice, is which future stories need to be told, regardless of how
they are arrived at or framed—“surfaced” from prior thought, co-created
from scratch, or something else.
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(c) Mediate
How, where, and when can the future(s) be brought to life? Whose
responsibility is it in the project setup? Might participants be able to
manifest their own future concepts directly? This step is about taking
relatively vague ideas or future narratives towards more concrete ones. As
our examples suggest, there are myriad ways to make this move, from
hybrid design/research exhibition, to rapid prototyping, guerrilla art
installation, and improv theatre. Techniques and formats for producing
experiential scenarios—“situations” and “stuff” from times to come—are
covered elsewhere; in particular the Experiential Futures Ladder may offer
relevant scaffolding for this stage.
22
There may seem to be an assumption here that people always need
help to bring their futures thinking to lifecasting the
futurist/designer/researcher as coming to the rescue with superior
representational skills. We are not making such an assumption. While
possibly be true in some cases, aside from the obvious parameter of
medium or format for expression, the other central Mediate question is
how collaboration is set up. Design responsibility might sometimes be
located with the researchers (as in the artifacts made for FoundFutures
and Causing an Effect), or more with participants (a kind of
autoethnographic experiential scenario creation is integral to Making the
Futures Present), or with third parties (Futureproof; 1-888-FUTURES).
EXF starts with Mapping because that is where futures work usually
starts, and too often, ends as well. But in some cases direct nonverbal
mediation could be a starting pointsuch as hand-drawn (pictorial)
images of the future (used by Candy in introductory foresight courses for
designers), or the recent Turkish study of children’s paintings of potential
future technologies,
23
or still-life tableaux created on the spot by
workshop participants in the emancipatory theatre practice of Augusto
Boal (e.g. “the image of transition”).
24
These quick and dirty
representations may be more symbolic than diegetic in how they invoke
the future; potentially rich fodder for discussion when closing the loop in
Map2.
(d) Mount
How, when, where, and for whom is the experiential scenario made
available? What it means to Mount an EXF project depends on what and
how one chooses to Mediate. These are not neatly separate variables. An
improv theatre scene or Boal tableau Mediates and Mounts an experiential
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scenario all at once; there is literally no distinction. But they are separated
in the framework because in some formats they are intrinsically different
design choices, so the creation of artifacts from a particular future could
occur at one point and be staged for an audience much later.
Of course the circumstances in which a person “meets” the future can
vary considerablya scripted environment like a workshop (Making the
Futures Present) is quite different from an unscripted one like a city street
(FoundFutures), or a private one (future presents received in the mail after
1-888-FUTURES). There may sometimes be a single Mounting event for
multiple constituencies (Causing an Effect) and capturing the responses of
different groups to a given experiential scenario may be highly
illuminating.
(e) Map2
At last, and connected to all of the above, how best to Map responses to
the experiential scenario? Whose responses are in scope? Is there the
possibility, or need, to bring different views into dialogue, and if so how?
Are they to be recorded formally or informally; live or online; privately or
with others present; from a captive audience or a parade of passers-by? A
rigorous research approach may call for interviews with the original
informants (Causing an Effect; Making the Futures Present) or a
questionnaire filled out by an audience (Futureproof). Less demanding of
participants might be direct observation of those having the futures
encounter (FoundFutures), monitoring of public responses online (1-888-
FUTURES), or opt-in feedback mechanisms (like the blackboard prompts
that invited visitors’ reactions at Causing an Effect).
The closing of a cycle may be quite another matter from its opening,
with the circumstances of a particular encounter (and thus capture of
responses) sometimes being dramatically different from those at the start.
Still, the range of options here, including depth and rigor required, can be
usefully compared to those in Map1 above.
Conclusion
This article has provided a pattern for creating hybrid design/futures
projects, through pairing moves to surface people’s images of the future
with moves to dramatize and deepen the scenarios in play. In the initial
handful of cases, motivating agendas vary from academic experimentation
to documentary, activist, and public deliberation purposes, as well as more
personal, quasi-therapeutic, and outright playful ones. Going forward we
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picture not only cultural and social foresight-oriented projects being
extended, but also uses in more formal and institutional contexts such as
businesses, classrooms, governments, and nonprofits. Some such
applications have already begun and can be explored in work to come.
For the most part, the projects seen here circle just once, but if
pursued past a preliminary pass, the learning loop (or feedforward) shape
of EXF could let all parties refine and track evolving images of the future
over time. This raises the prospect of supporting social foresight through
continuing community elaboration and deliberation of alternativesfor
example, tied to a public election cycle, to participatory organisational
governance, or for ongoing disaster preparedness efforts. So appears part
of the potential for a pattern structurally echoing action research,
experiential learning, and iteration in design.
Meanwhile, in navigating the framework details and variations in this
setting, we must take care not to lose sight of the human heart of the
matter: people often find it difficult to think about the future,
25
and even in
supposedly advanced democracies, often our aspirations and motivating
narratives are not present or legible to one other in any form, let alone in
idioms designed to “create empathy and build understanding for the
perspectives of others”,
26
bring the “disruptive energy of laughter,”
27
or
combine “interactive interviews, deep listening, systems thinking and
prototyping together.”
28
Overall, EXF represents a part of what Candy and Dunagan have
described as “the experiential turn” in futures, which includes:
finding ways to translate or articulate the established, routinised
foresight outputs with which we are traditionally comfortable
talky workshops, scenario documentsinto an extended range of
forms with which still too few futurists are professionally familiar
at this time (filmmaking, theatre, and the design disciplines, for
starters). . . . [A] central challenge, perhaps indeed the central
challenge, for the next generation of foresight practitioners will
have less to do with generating and broadcasting ideas about the
future, than it will have to do with designing circumstances or
situations in which the collective intelligence and imagination of a
community can come forth. To design and stage an experience of
the future is one class of activity. To attend to the design of
processes whereby such experiences are designedmaking
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structures of participationis another.
29
The framework carries in its DNA some core ideas from the futures
field, both longstanding, like the centrality and importance of plural
images of the future, and more recent, like XF’s contention that finding
new and compelling ways of making invisible images of the future
thinkable, feelable, and discussable—“turning foresight inside out,” so to
speakis critical for humanity to have any chance of developing a
distributed social capacity to think ahead. It is our hope that others will
discover variations and uses that currently cannot be foreseen. We look
forward to what a community of EXF experimenters will generate.
This article was significantly edited and reformatted from Candy, S.
and Kornet, K. (2019). “Turning foresight inside out: An introduction to
Ethnographic Experiential Futures,” Journal of Futures Studies, 23(3), 3–
22.
Stuart Candy
Dr. Stuart Candy (@futuryst) is Director of Situation Lab and Associate
Professor of Design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. A
pioneer of experiential futures in the service of social foresight, he works
across strategy, consulting, policy, and art/activism contexts, with
contributions appearing in boardrooms and city streets, at museums and
festivals, at events from South by Southwest to Skoll World Forum, on the
Discovery Channel, and in the pages of publications like The Economist,
Wired, and VICE. An alumnus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa
futures program, he has helped propel the dialogue between futures and
design, media and the arts through appointments and visiting engagements
at institutions including the Royal College of Art, National University of
Singapore, California College of the Arts, OCAD University, and
Stanford d.School. He is co-creator of the acclaimed imagination game
The Thing from the Future and co-editor of the book Design and Futures.
He can be reached at stuart@futuryst.com.
Kelly Kornet
Kelly Kornet (@kellykornet) is a trained futurist, ethnographer, and
graphic designer based in Waterloo, Ontario. In her day-to-day work as an
innovation consultant at Kalypso, she helps Fortune 500 companies
explore alternative ways to create, make, and sell products for the future
with emerging technologies. Whether working with automotive leaders to
evaluate generative design tools or bringing the future to life through
The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies 2020
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Chapter 10: Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF)
immersive experiences with cosmetics brands, Kelly ensures her work is
grounded in the emerging needs of consumers and end users.
In her personal research, Kelly is passionate about collecting the
images of the future held by individuals and facilitating ways for others to
engage and interpret these images. She strives to spark meaningful
conversations with diverse stakeholders about the futures we desire (or
would like to avoid). Kelly holds a master’s degree in Strategic Foresight
& Innovation from OCAD University, and a BA from the University of
Toronto. She can be reached at kelly.kornet@kalypso.com.
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The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies 2020
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About the Editors
The Knowledge Base
of Futures Studies 2020
Edited by Richard Slaughter and Andy Hines
Since 1993 thousands of practitioners have encountered the pathway of foresight
through The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies. Now an entirely new 2020
edition has been created by the Association of Professional Futurists. It is
organized in four volumes, across 31 chapters, by 37 authors. Early and mid-
career professionals, educators, policymakers, managers, and college students, as
well as instructors, trainers and consultants will find something of value in this
edition.
Volume 1: FOUNDATIONS
Origins and Current State
Approaches to Futures Thinking
Volume 2: METHODS AND PRACTICES
Futures Methods and Tools
Critical Practice and Integral Futures
Volume 3: SYNERGIES, CASE STUDIES AND IMPLEMENTATION
Synergies and Implementation
Futures in Organizations and Governance
Volume 4: DIRECTIONS AND OUTLOOKS
21st Century Outlooks and Risks
The Futures of Futures Studies
... In this paper, we describe the participatory process we engaged in to explore this question. We employ the EXF methodology [7] to inform the design of speculative intimate objects where the audience is an active contributor in building alternative worlds, and value systems [12,18,22] rather than a passive recipient of the speculative narrative. We talk about the final four prototypes co-designed in the process and the world built around them. ...
... The prototype offers colour signals augmented with vibration patterns and thermal feedback to share emotions, simple messages, and remote presence [21]. Custom objects or modified objects are another class of explorations that include a pair of furry robotic pets that can be summoned by knocking on the lid of a closed box [7]. While some other works employed a wearable to mediate intimacy, leveraging the medium's proximity. ...
... While specifically looking at designing artefacts for intimacy, we found prior work has looked at this space through a theoretical lens and conducting workshops presented exciting findings. We follow the theoretical methodology of design futures and Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) [7]. In this process, we created multiple physical artefacts, which we presented along with responses from a workshop we conducted. ...
... The approach we used for speculating the future was based upon the Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) framework [19]. The EXF framework has five segments that we employed: Map 1: Understanding people's existing ideas about the future; Multiply: This step is about generating alternative ideas in order to extend people's existing knowledge of the future; Mediate: Creating tangible, immersive experiences out of such ideas; Mount: Staging experiential scenarios for the people to witness and participate in; Map 2: Recording the responses and reflections to the scenarios. ...
... Design Activities Phase 1: Exploratory workshop with participants Understanding participants' opinions of clothing taboos and to imagine different possible futures Phase 2: Worldbuilding design studio with researchers Using the ideas developed during the first phase, we (the researchers) created a provocative speculative future world Phase 3: Exhibition workshop with participants An exhibition where participants engaged with and reacted to the researchers' provocative future world Table 1: Speculative research design process informed by the EXF framework [19] culturally sensitive topic was achieved. ...
Method
Full-text available
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>.
Article
Full-text available
Based on multi-method team ethnography, this study examines the knowledge production of creative ethnographic methods. We explore what the encounters between ethnographers and streets as sensory entities can tell us about urban living: How do ethnographers become part of street life, and what kind of knowledge is produced through this material-sensory entanglement? Our experimental methods include ethnographic hanging out, sensory intervention, and the application of ethnographic methods in futures studies. These methods broaden our understanding of the ways in which the socio-material environment can be experienced and envisioned. They shift attention to the blind spots, offering a unique perspective on urban life that diverges from traditional depictions of street life. Our project draws inspiration from a 1970s ethnological project in which two streets in central Helsinki were documented by ethnology students through interviews, photographs, and observations of street and domestic life. In autumn 2023, present-day ethnology students revisited the same streets using sensory and creative ethnographic methods as their tools. This knowledge is reflected in the research ideals of the 1970s and the knowledge produced at that time.The article is based on the coursework conducted in the Ethnography of Everyday Life course in autumn 2023.
Thesis
Full-text available
Justin Chua Jia Bin, 2020 Title: Critical Design as an approach to Future Design: A critique on shortfalls of existing methodologies of Critical Design, and the optimisation of frameworks as a guided workflow for future thinking in helping to minimise ambiguity within the practice. Abstract: Researchers within the field of Critical Design (CD) have argued for its adaptation as a
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter explores parallels between action research and futures studies to suggest approaches to “Futures Action Research (FAR).” I describe links between foresight inquiry and action research, and how futures studies as a field has evolved toward participatory action modalities. I then provide examples of future studies approaches that exemplify what Reason and Bradbury call 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-person approaches to action research. Contemporary issues in the confluence of action research and futures studies are explored to provide two approaches I have developed, the Futures Action Model and Co-creation Cycle for Anticipatory Design. It concludes with a call to further develop a Futures-oriented Action Research that can more directly provide value to both fields.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
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.
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.
Article
Full-text available
This research sought to determine whether or not futures methods are scalable and applicable to individual lives. Could the same futures methods that are used effectively around the world by governments, institutions and businesses be applied successfully to individuals? This paper describes the development of a futuring process for individuals. This system substantially reduces complexity and guides individuals through the steps of personal research, scenario development, and personal strategic planning. Post-doctoral experience suggests some effective learning approaches.
Article
Full-text available
This study aims to investigate the elementary school students’ perceptions of future technology through their pictorial representations. The study carried out with fifth-grade elementary school students was applied to a class of 18 students. The 5th graders of Çağış Primary School in Balıkesir constituted the research context. The participant children were given pastel painting sets and asked to paint pictures related to future technology. Before this, they were given information about life in the future or using technology. Images collected from children participating in the study were analyzed using content analysis method. According to the analyses, it was determined that the children focused on more than one future technology topic in their paintings. A great majority of the students used “transportation” and important portion of students used “nature” as future technology themes in their paintings. The rest of the students used “Instruments-Devices” as future technology themes in their pictures.
Article
Full-text available
This paper reports the results of a web-based survey concerning how people think about the future. Five hundred and seventy-two people from 24 countries completed the survey. The results indicate that when the respondents hear the word ‘future’, they think about a point in time 15 years into the future, on average, with a median response of 10 years. Respondents think less about the future than the present. On the other hand, they tend to worry more about the future than the present. Respondents’ ability to imagine the future goes ‘dark’ around 15–20 years into the future. Most of the respondents are optimistic about the near term, but become more pessimistic about the longer term. Respondents believe that humankind is not acting very responsibly with respect to a whole host of environmental and social issues but is acting responsibly with respect to technology. Almost half of the respondents would not wish to have been born in the future. Most of the other respondents would have preferred to have been born 50–500 years into the future. Approximately 45% of the sample believes that humankind will become extinct. The data suggest that Christians are more optimistic and less worried about the future and do not believe that we will become extinct. Males worry less but also think more about the future. There is a strong correlation between thinking about the future, clearly imagining the future, and being optimistic about the future. It is concluded that individuals have diverse and rich conceptions about the future but that they think less about the future than futurists might hope. Individuals’ considerations of the future are highly influenced by their identities and worldviews. Future research should focus on better unraveling these relationships and on understanding their implications for futures-oriented policy making.
Chapter
Futures Studies is generally misunderstood from two perspectives. On the one hand, there are those who believe it is, or pretends to be, a predictive science which, if properly applied, strives to foretell with reasonable accuracy what THE future WILL BE.
Article
Integral futures (IF) has developed over several years to a point where it has emerged as a productive way of understanding futures studies (FS) itself and re-evaluating its role in the wider world. It is not merely a new ‘take’ on FS but has brought the field to a new stage of development with many practical consequences. For example, consulting, research, publishing, the design and implementation of training programs can now draw on a broader and deeper set of intellectual, practical and methodological resources than ever before. Similarly, with its new clarity regarding the individual and collective interior domains, IF profoundly affects the way people operate and changes the way in which the advanced skills and capabilities involved in strategic and social foresight are developed and used. Some of the reasons for these developments are explored here in a review of specific effects as shown by a sample of futures methods. The paper concludes with some brief suggestions about broader implications for the field as a whole.