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GAMES
18 APF Compass | Methods Anthology 2015
Over the past decade there
has been a surge of activity at the
intersection of futures and design.1 The
term Experiential Futures refers to the
gamut of approaches involving the design
of situations and stuff from the future to
catalyse insight and change.2 With the
maturation of this practice come new
frameworks and tools that promise to
make operating in this vast and still
relatively unexplored design space easier
than it has been to date.
The Thing From The Future offers one
such framework. It is a card game that
scaffolds imagination, strategic
conversation and storytelling about
possible futures. One part scenario
generator, one part design tool, and one
part party game, it lets players collaborate
and compete to describe, sketch, and even
physically prototype artifacts that might
exist in alternative futures, based on a
wide array of creative prompts.
Co-designed by the author, a professor
in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at
OCAD University, and Jeff Watson, a
professor in the University of Southern
California's School of Cinematic Arts, the
game was published in March 2014 by
Situation Lab, which the two jointly run
from Toronto and Los Angeles.
Here is how it works. There
are 108 cards in the deck, in four
categories or suits, to kindle and guide
players' imaginations. The suits are Arc
(the applicable time horizon and type of
future, building on Jim Dator’s framework
of four generic futures3), Terrain (the
context for the object), Object (the
hypothetical “future thing” for which
players will generate a description, ranging
from Device, to Headline, to Monument),
and Mood (how it feels to interact with
that thing, lending an “interior” inflection
to the other three more external
elements). Either alone or in a group,
players can make a creative prompt by
combining any set of four cards from each
suit.
A prompt offers the requisite "enabling
constraints,” in Katherine Hayles’ phrase,
for a player to describe a specific cultural
fragment from a possible future. Just as
history leaves behind innumerable traces
––in attics, museums, and other treasure
troves––and these can speak volumes
about what has happened in the past, the
card deck is intended to help players to
imagine evidence from the countless
scenarios that could happen.
The artifact generation process is a sort
of “reverse archaeology”4: whereas from a
found artifact, an archaeologist infers the
world that produced it, here, one
creatively infers a specific artifact from a
brief description of “the world”.
The “artifact from the
future” conceit dates back at least as
far as Wired magazine’s long-running
back-page feature “Found” (ca. 2002-2013),
but also finds precedents in work at
Institute for the Future by Jason Tester
The Thing From The Future
by Stuart Candy
Stuart Candy, Ph.D. (@futuryst) is a
pioneer of experiential futures for
strategy, education, activism, and
entertainment. The Thing From the
Future is available from
www.situationlab.org
Prompt and Playsheet from World Future Society Conference, San Francisco, July 2015. Photos by Stuart
Candy, unless otherwise stated.
GAMES
APF Compass | Methods Anthology 2015!19
and others; in Jake Dunagan and Stuart
Candy’s FoundFutures initiative; and not
least, in the accelerated spread over the
past five years of popular futures-inflected
design practices, including design fiction5
and speculative design6.
In its first eighteen months The Thing
From The Future has had a productive
career. It has been used as the ideation
engine for several “speculative design
jams” (mostly in collaboration with New
York design collective The Extrapolation
Factory), where we facilitated participants
in generating artifact ideas through
gameplay, then helped them bring these to
life. Outcomes have included popup
design fiction shows, such as street
merchandise from the future made at New
York University and put up for sale on the
corner of Canal St and Broadway in
Manhattan; and an exhibition about
future live music performances, created by
Stanford d.School students and mounted
at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San
Jose.
The game was also an Official Selection
at international games festival IndieCade
2014. It has been played by thousands of
people worldwide in settings ranging from
the United Nations Development
Programme’s Annual Strategy Meeting in
New York City, to NESTA’s FutureFest in
London; the Asia Pacific Foresight
Network conference in Taiwan; the
Toronto Maker Festival; Amplify
Innovation Festival in Sydney; the
IRAHSS symposium in Singapore; and the
5D Institute’s transmedia storytelling
event “The Science of Fiction” in Los
Angeles.
Generating ideas for physical
things is just the beginning. Originally the
Object suit focused on small-scale,
tangible items such as Wallet, Postcard,
and Toy. This reflected the game’s origins
as a tool created for the first
“Futurematic”, where participants filled a
vending machine with future artifacts
produced in a single day using the game as
the ideation engine. In the revised edition,
released October 2014, “Object” expanded
to encompass other forms of cultural
output, such as Ritual, Festival, and
Building.
The game has been
likened to Oblique Strategies, Brian
Eno and Peter Schmidt’s creativity-
boosting card deck from the 1970s, as well
as to the Kickstarter phenomenon, Cards
Against Humanity. It has been covered by
media ranging from Forbes to Discovery
Channel to La Repubblica. Part of the
reason for this widespread interest may lie
in the game’s flexibility: it turns out to
serve equally well as a group icebreaker,
ideation engine, and imagination gym.
In mid-2015 The Thing From The
Future was recognised by the Association
of Professional Futurists as a Most
Significant Futures Work in the
methodology category. But how does it
actually work––what does this game bring
to the table, so to speak?
Certainly the generative card deck is
not a new phenomenon. One can find
numerous antecedents ancient and
modern, from tarot and playing cards, to a
parade of more recent creations with
generative properties, including IDEO’s
Method Cards, Art Center College of
Design’s Mobility VIP, and Near Future
Laboratory’s Design Fiction Kit.7
Still, the design of The Thing From The
Future may be especially relevant to the
foresight community as an encapsulated
Futurematic” vending machine installed at OCAD
University, Toronto, after the game’s first
deployment, March 2014
Playing a film-themed version of the game at Hot
Docs documentary film festival, Canada, April
2014. Photo by Joseph Michael Howarth, courtesy
of Hot Docs.
GAMES
20 APF Compass | Methods Anthology 2015
methodology because it tackles something
that to date has tended to be a specialist
task (generating ideas for future artifacts),
and makes that task easier.
Having served for a time as an advisor to
editor Chris Baker on Wired’s “artifacts
from the future” I can attest to the
challenge of generating new ideas from
scratch every month.
Similarly, not long after he successfully
crowdfunded (but was yet to start writing)
his book A History of the Future in 100
Objects,8 I met with Adrian Hon in early
2011 and suggested that devising
satisfactory descriptions for that many
future artifacts might take longer than the
single year he expected at the time. (In
fact, Hon managed the feat in about two
and a half years, which is still an excellent
effort!) With a playful structure to scaffold
imagination (or “choreograph attention” as
creativity consultant Edward de Bono
might say), such thinking can become
faster, more systematic, and more
accessible.
To get technical for a
moment, The Thing From The
Future exemplifies what my co-designer
Jeff Watson calls a combinatorial
prompting system.
The deck’s possibilities are practically
inexhaustible, with dozens of options in
each of the four suits multiplying out, in
the revised edition, to yield over 3.7
million permutations, any of which could
inspire countless artifact ideas.
The key to its generative potential is in
the relationship between the deck’s four
suits. It is a typology splitting the
attributes of a future artifact into three
complementary levels of abstraction that
the player is offered as disparate elements
to synthesise. These are the macro (type of
scenario; Arc), meso (geographic or
thematic area of interest; Terrain), and
micro (the unit of cultural output, and
focal point of the description you create;
Object), and an interior state (Mood). In
each round of gameplay, then, it could be
said that player is descending a sort of
“abstraction ladder”, a notion I have
adapted from linguist S.I. Hayakawa and
developed into a design aid called the
Experiential Futures Ladder.9
Here the climb is a rapid descent from
high-level, abstract descriptors of possible
futures––Grow, Collapse, Discipline,
Transform––to multiple ground-level ideas
for future artifacts expressing this grand
narrative premise, and that often invite
further exploration of a longer story en
route. (In terms of the Experiential
Futures Ladder, players move quickly from
broad “Settings” down to specific “Stuff”,
in such a way as to invite further
exploration in the narrative-rich middle
rungs of “Scenario” or “Situation”.) The
Mood card brings in an unusual generative
parameter, an emotional spin on the rest
of the prompt that helps take gameplay
out of mere thought-experiment territory
and into a more resonant register.
Happily, a player need not
know or worry about such details in
order to play, much as one need not
understand precisely how an internal
combustion engine works in order to drive
a car safely to any number of destinations.
The playful interface of a card game may
conceal considerable complexity. Indeed,
the offer of The Thing From The Future as
a method could be said to consist in the
way its design and storytelling engine
works, mostly unseen, “under the hood”.
The power to scaffold coherent prompts
in large numbers depends on what might
be called typological complementarity,
where all members of each card category
are conceptually compatible with all the
others.
Another way to state this in relation to
futures methods that the deck provides a
Artifact created as part of Futurematic: Canal
Street, New York, June 2014
GAMES
APF Compass | Methods Anthology 2015!21
means of exploring a combinatorial
possibility space that is similar to
morphological analysis, but a lot less
scary10. While this may be at first a near-
invisible (and admittedly pretty geeky)
aspect of the game’s design, the result is
that, without great effort, players can
engage in quite a sophisticated form of
integrative, imaginative thinking,
embedding abstract future-narrative
notions in particular concepts for future
things––all while actually enjoying
themselves.
Continual feedback helps
to refine the game's contents, and
extension sets or “Hackpacks” have also
been created by Situation Lab to adapt the
game for various audiences. Typically it
does not take long for players and
facilitators to get how the suits work, from
which point it is straightforward for them
to augment or adjust the contents, leaning
exploration into specific subterritories in
the future’s vast and ever-expanding cone
of possibilities. Ultimately, those who
grasp this structure may find themselves
equipped with an infinitely extensible,
customisable, layered way of using their
imagination, with or without cards in
hand.
The Thing From The Future (or
#FutureThing on social media) has already
generated a variety of narrative and
making activity that cuts across the
futures, design, gaming and transmedia
storytelling communities, and it looks set
to continue enabling surprising
conversations and creations. Experiential
Futures, it would appear, is going
mainstream. All of this is an encouraging
sign that designing playfulness into our
professional practice as futurists, without
sacrificing rigour, can help foresight have
greater impact by making it more
accessible––as well as more fun. ◀
First published, Quarter 2, 2015,
and revised for this anthology.
References
1. See T. Haldenby and S. Candy, 2014, ‘The Age Of
Imagination: A History of Experiential Futures
2006-2031.’ ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems, Toronto; S. Candy and J.
Dunagan, ‘Co-Creating an Experiential Scenario,
Futures, forthcoming; and Journal of Futures
Studies, 2012, vol. 17, no. 1, “Special Edition on the
Communication of Foresight”.
2. S. Candy, 2010, The Futures of Everyday Life
(Doctoral dissertation). Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i
3. J. Dator, 2009, ‘Alternative Futures at the Mānoa
School’. Journal of Futures Studies, November
2009, 14(2): 1-18.
4. S. Candy, 2013, ‘Time Machine / Reverse
Archaeology: Create an experience or artifact from
the future.’ Seventy-two Assignments: The
Foundation Course in Art and Design Today. Ed.
Chloe Briggs. Paris: PCA Press, p. 28.
5. J. Bleecker, 2009, ‘Design Fiction: A short essay
on design, science, fact and fiction.’ Los Angeles:
Near Future Laboratory; B. Sterling, 2013, ‘Patently
untrue: fleshy defibrillators and synchronised
baseball are changing the future.’ Wired UK,
October 11.
6. James Auger, 2012, Why Robot? Speculative
design, the domestication of technology and the
considered future (Doctoral thesis). London: Royal
College of Art; Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby,
2013, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and
Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
7. IDEO, n.d., Method Cards; Art Center College of
Design, n.d., Mobility Vision Integration Process;
Near Future Laboratory, n.d., Design Fiction Product
Design Work Kit. See also TFTF co-designer Jeff
Watson’s 2012 doctoral dissertation, Reality Ends
Here, based on a combinatorial prompting game to
help aspiring filmmakers create more diverse
student films.
8. Adrian Hon, 2013, A History of the Future in 100
Objects. Newbold on Stour, Warks: Skyhook/
Skyscraper Publications.
9. See K. Kornet and S. Candy, ‘Ethnographic
Experiential Futures’, Futures, forthcoming.
10. Tom Ritchey, 2009, ‘Morphological analysis’, in
J.C. Glenn and T.J. Gordon (Eds), Futures Research
Methodology (CD-ROM version 3.0). Washington,
DC: The Millennium Project.
Playsheet from Toronto Maker Festival launch party, July 2015
