working notes of Future Fabulators

• prediction_markets
• can we use predictions to help separate/isolate important, predictable events within a “A Nonpredictive View of the World”? (cf. fragility → robustness → antifragility)
• what is the question? can it be answered diceisively at a particualr point in the future? what is at stake? what are the consequences or impacts?

• divination / invocation

20140206 Having done several scenario workshops, it seems that the most powerful aspect of the process is the realisation that people usually live in multiple scenarios today - which makes them laugh in recognition, but also helps distill the issues very quickly. How 'futuristic' or accurate the scenario narratives end up being doesn't seem to matter so much. The realisation about their present situation already gives a sense of awareness what's going on and where they'd like to be. It makes the future more open or malleable in a way. So for us the question is how do we emphasise and support this renewed sense of agency? Prehearsals, scenario testing, 'how do we get from here to there' excercises are a good start, but more research is needed.

Here are a few possible research questions and directions (some quite broad, others very specific), collected from various debriefs

How to improve the prehearsal pocket guide? (notes from February 2014)

General questions:

• 'but why' (experiential futurism)?
• how do we give the participants a sense of agency when discussing 'possible future'?
• how do we clarify that what we’re doing is not about predicting the future, but about empowering people to be more aware of their present situation and clarify what they could do today to shape their actions to encourage a preferred possible future?
• what forms can 'experiencing possible futures' take?
• what is the shortest and longest time in which we can do scenario workshops and/or prehearsals to come up with interesting results and keeping the process enjoyable for the participants?
• how can we help increase commitment of the participants to work towards their preferred future? how much follow-up is needed?
• what can we borrow from other fields, like improv, role playing games, LARP, disaster drills, meditation… to improve prehearsals?
• how can we allow participants to use digital tools to enrich the process, but discourage being distracted by email, social media…? what collaborative digital tools could we use to share the same digital working surface (something like the Reactable for example)
• what other methods, aside from scenario building, are used to discuss possible futures?

Preparation beforehand

• what can participants prepare for a scenario workshop beforehand?
• what is the ideal room size (per person) for a scenario workshop?

Key question

• how to better structure designing the core question?
• how can we encourage the 'inquiring state of mind'?
• why is it so difficult to make questions instead of stating problems?

Mapping the present situation

• what are different ways to map-out the present situation surrounding the key question?
• when is this step necessary?
• does it help talking about things that are fixed, or constraints that exist?

Key factors

• how to best visualise and cluster the relationships between key factors
• are we talking only about success criteria here?

Macro trends

• how much analysis is appropriate for the types of scenarios and prehearsals we’re making?
• what is the relevance of facts and data related to macro trends in experiential futurism?
• how can we have a more constructive discussion about the macro trends that will result in something more meaningful than a list of assumptions?
• how do we look at drivers as dynamic forces? should we be looking at responses to trends rather than trends in general?
• what are existing ways of discussing trends with groups of people?
• should we make our own STEEP cards to avoid the 'business' bias?
• are there other ways to group trends except the customary STEEP (in which cultural changes seem to be clumped in with social or political)?
• is there another way to look at large scale changes aside from trends (without having to do a PhD in each of the changes)?

Ranking critical uncertainties

• what are different ways in which this is done by others?

Scenarios

• when to use one, two, three or more axes?
• how to better structure building scenario skeletons with guiding questions (which questions could be generalised?

From scenarios to story-worlds

• what techniques can we use to flesh out the scenarios into interesting stories
• what elements do we need in a scenario database?
• how to create rich characters and meaningful plots?

Scenario testing (signals, how to get from here to there)

• how is this done by others?
• what are important things to focus on?

Visualising

• which methods could we use to visualise possible futures?

Prototyping

• which methods could we use to prototype possible futures?

Prehearsals

• how to design them?
• how to host them?
• how to evaluate them?

Follow-up

• How can we follow-up what happens to the groups after we finish the workshops (especially to understand what happens to commitments to actions and preferred possible futures)?
• How much do we need to be involved in the follow-up?

20140205 While editing scenarios on the libarynth it became apparent how tricky it is to keep a consistency in information and layout of the scenarios. The scenario database we're planning to make should make this easier. Components that seem to be needed in all scenarios:

• what is the question?
• what are the scenario axes?
• sometimes we have a short answer to the question (usually created after making the scenarios)
• how far in the future does the scenario take place?
• scenario description
• genaral image(s)
• more specific/clarifying images
• links to the pages of related scenarios (and a 'parent' page that describes the workshop goals etc. - not sure if we should include this in the database?)

should we try to contextualise the scenarios directly in the database?

• a section with links to projects/theories/examples of (the beginnings of) this scenario already taking place today
• section on how the scenario is turned into a prehearsal (could be in the form of a 'day in the life of…“?
• reflections on the prehearsal
• etc.

or should we keep the database only as a 'short story collection'?

• open formats > closed formats
• utf-8 > ascii/latin-1/etc+
• documents
  • utf-8 text or ODF (libreoffice, openoffice) for editable docs
  • pdf for reference & archiving
  • VUE for diagrams
• semi syncronous; email, twitter, irc (freenode → #ff ?)
• asyncronous; dokuwiki, django, gitlab
• algorithmic sketching; racket, common lisp, python, git
• online
  • libarynth for text, tangents and collation → http://libarynth.org
  • flickr for image matter → https://secure.flickr.com/photos/foam/
  • vimeo for video matter → http://vimeo.com/fo4m
  • zotero for library and references → https://www.zotero.org/groups/foam_library
• potentially
  • tumblr, cargo, diasp, other?
  • prediction book
  • wikipedia

• various scifi threads re. possible future cultures, shifting relation between humans & their environment, exploration of 'biosphere dividend'. near and far futures
  • bloom, ventus, mars trilogy, incrementalists, etc+
  • “A History of the Future in 100 Objects ” » notes and quotes
  • 'the culture' (iain_m_banks)
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
    • notes_on_the_culture
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_ideas_in_science_fiction
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_ideas_in_science_fiction
• The Hermetic Library reading room » http://hermetic.com/reading-room/
• Erwin Wagenhofer's movie about the crisis of creativity in education: http://www.alphabet-film.com/
• Christine Wilks talking about text as a way for developing character depth; http://www.riders-project.net/research/videos/christine-wilks-taking-text-out-of-the-box.html (This probably belongs elsewhere, but…)
  • performing text on screen
  • Varytale http://varytale.com
  • “Text becomes the equivalent of subtitles” - is this a good thing?
  • Very based around computer games.
  • “Character is a black box” - in PNs, we can only be based on interpretation based on behaviour and its artefacts, not on explicit exposure, unless we have things like “Dear Diary…”
  • Note: Prehearsals are first person narratives, PNs are third person. Thus a Prehearsal can have “more” introspection in some sense.