User-friendly futures...

...and future-friendly users.

The central tenet of the Manoa school of futures studies is that the future acts on the present through the pull of "images of the future" held by individuals, groups, nations, and cultures. Nonetheless, the nature and operation of this connection remains undertheorized and poorly understood within the field. Still, most would agree that the dominant images of the future in the world today reflect the value structure and telos of western culture and capital.

Futurists have had a difficult time unmasking common assumptions about change and alternatives held by leaders, scholars, and the public at large. However, there seems to be a critical mass of futurists paying close attention to the representational aspects of futures studies, often frustrated by the glaring lack of social and political response relative to the importance of the issues being elucidated within the field, and the seeming clarity with which these issues have been explained. It appears to be the case that it is not the message that is the problem, but rather the medium. White papers, journal articles, even news reports are demonstrably weak in mobilizing foresight into action.

Jose Ramos, researcher at the Centre for Social Change Research, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, has been leading the call for alternative ways of communicating futures. He has also noted the cognitive biases, cultural predispositions, and corporate colonization of media that make for a difficult (and sometimes hostile) arena for futurists trying to communicate widely and effectively to the general public. Ramos:

Making the case for change is hard as future-related knowledge is not as empirically apparent to the general public or even to practitioners of conventional science. While a tsunami one mile away makes us run for the hills, Jim Dator's tsunamis of change, ten to fifty years away, most often draws scant public attention, and we become the proverbial boiled frogs in the slowly heating pot. So futures challenges and issues require concrete clarification and definition in ways that provoke public conversation and responses. People's awareness, assumptions and field of vision live in the domain of communication and, deeper still, consciousness.

A survey of the history of futures studies, and my own recent experience working with the government of Hawaii, has made it clear to me that effective communication of the core concepts of alternative futures is a rare and fugitive accomplishment. But there is cause for hope. Especially in its recent projects with government and industries, the HRCFS has been developing and utilizing techniques to take the future out of the realm of the abstract, and to put participants in situations in which they can "feel" the alternativity of futures at an emotional and visceral level. Once the affective register has served its purpose, we then engage participants in a more intellectual conversation about possibilities and choices. Our experience has been that the conversations have more energy and meaning for those who have made an emotional attachment to the scenario. While not always the case, people seem to "get it" when they actively "experience" a future with all their senses. Among our techniques, we have produced "immersive scenarios" with actors, props, and storylines which cast participants in certain roles appropriate to the nature of the scenario. We are designing and producing an audiowalk of alternative futures for Honolulu's Chinatown. We have also designed artifacts-from-the-future to act as tangible conversation pieces for our workshop groups, and as items to strategically leave in unlikely places to creatively inflect the present with anomaly. The cognitive dissonance these strange and anachronistic "found" items can provoke the discoverer to personally engage with the story being told by the artifact, and can be a subversive way to inject futures into the everyday--what Ramos calls "future-jamming."

All of these projects are experiments in ways to make people aware of possible futures, and to take stock of their role and responsibility in creating futures. These might be called minor attempts at controlled future-shock therapy. A growing number of futurists and futures organizations are involved in similar experiments, but like us, laboring under a slow process of trial-and-error in discovering the most effective techniques. So, a systematic appraisal of how certain techniques change perceptions about change, and make the invisible visible is a needed and necessary initiative.

In a recent post at IFTF's Future Now, Jason Tester, has outlined what could be a highly useful framework for exploring and developing a range of approaches emerging in futures media. Tester analogizes the wave of new (or newly re-imagined) futures techniques-- such as immersive workshops, online role-playing games, open-source scenarios, artifacts-from-the-future, and cinema-- to a similar period in the development of the field of human-computer interaction. Thus, he dubs these burgeoning approaches in futures studies "Human-Future Interaction," defined as:

the art and science of effectively and ethically communicating research, forecasts, and scenarios about trends and potential futures. For technology design, human-computer interaction has become the framework that links the capabilities of technology, the behaviors of users, and the goals of designers and developers. These three constituents have very similar counterparts in futures work, and human-future interaction should serve much the same role--connecting the capabilities of design tools and media formats with the strategic needs of users, shaped by the goals and insights of researchers and forecasters.

Tester calls for a more systematic and iterative method of understanding how people process information about the future in order to find the most effective ways to engage groups, organizations, and individuals in productive conversations about (and action toward) possible and preferred futures. He notes:

This isn’t just about giving a catchy label to work already being done. Thinking of the creation of futures media and related experiences as a structured process will simply lead to better results—media that engages a broader audience in discussion about trends shaping our shared future, and experiences that engage this audience in far more personal ways than a wordy report ever could.

And the tools of creative and effective futures communication would not just be available and appropriate for futurists. An ethical agenda the HRCFS shares with Tester, Ramos, and most others in the field, is the desire to provide vehicles to democratize and de-colonize the future. These new techniques and media offer just these vehicles. Tester:

But I think there’s an even more fundamental--and exciting--reason [for proliferation of futures media]: a growing view of the future as a medium that anyone can affect and co-create, and less as looming inevitability to be passively consumed. Driven by democratic media and open platforms, more people see themselves as potential agents of influence and change.

It will be exciting to see if a pattern (or contact) language does develop around these concepts. Tester:

Much as HCI has evolved into a cross-disciplinary umbrella that brings interface designers and computer scientists to the same table as artists and social scientists, so too will human-future interaction benefit by breaking outside the walls of think tanks and traditional forecasting groups. Let's learn from and create with game designers, experience designers, community organizers, information visualizers, scientists and researchers, educators, ethicists, social activists, and users and participants.

Absolutely! However, to reflect our commitment to plurality and alternatives, I suspect we'll be referring to Human-FutureS Interaction on this blog!

So in the meantime, we will post the progress of our work here, and look forward to learning from others.