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==== Future Fictions Quotes ==== | ==== Future Fictions Quotes ==== | ||
- | Quotes from Karen Verschooren: | + | A selection of quotes for the Futures Lab of [[Future Fictions]] |
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+ | === Collected by Karen Verschooren | ||
Heidegger: ‘the fundamental phenomenon of time is the future – everything changes toward the future and constitutes it.’ (…) To be human is to seek to be directive of change. The essence of this action is prefiguration; | Heidegger: ‘the fundamental phenomenon of time is the future – everything changes toward the future and constitutes it.’ (…) To be human is to seek to be directive of change. The essence of this action is prefiguration; | ||
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“at the core we are interested in the roles of futures and fiction to pose questions, not just to find solutions to problems, but to identify new spaces for operation. They are narrative scenarios, positioned in such a way that the audience can develop an emotional and critical response to them, rather than just dealing with ideas in an abstract way. It’s all about prototyping culture, and prototyping new rules, not predicting the future.” - Liam Young in Future Practice: Conversations from the edge of Architecture, | “at the core we are interested in the roles of futures and fiction to pose questions, not just to find solutions to problems, but to identify new spaces for operation. They are narrative scenarios, positioned in such a way that the audience can develop an emotional and critical response to them, rather than just dealing with ideas in an abstract way. It’s all about prototyping culture, and prototyping new rules, not predicting the future.” - Liam Young in Future Practice: Conversations from the edge of Architecture, | ||
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+ | === Collected by FoAM === | ||
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+ | (in progress) | ||
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+ | Futures studies … is interested not in itself furthering any particular view of the future, but rather in furthering both narrowly professional as well as broadly participative inquiry into the future–understanding the roots and consequences of each of the manifold images of the future which exist in people' | ||
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+ | The best attitude for a serious futurist is not pessimism or optimism, but a deep sense of engagement. -Bruce Sterling | ||
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+ | The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed. - William Gibson | ||
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+ | If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother teaching them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking. -Buckminster Fuller | ||
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+ | Integral Theory suggests that four irreducible perspectives (subjective, | ||
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+ | At the heart of Embodied Foresight is the development of capacity to sit with uncertainty and not- knowing, to develop tolerance and acceptance of the discomfort that comes with doubt. A healthy relationship with doubt is seen as central to good practice within a conceptual understanding of the future as non-predictable and in-determinant. -Alex Burns | ||
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+ | Zen is strongly grounded in practise; there is a program of training that supports the development of the practition- er rather than development of the practitioner' | ||
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+ | Future studies give us in the Southern world a chance to break out of this shell of progressivism. Or, if you prefer, developmentalism or modernism. It gives us a chance to think about the future in our own terms, and without the constraints imposed by nineteenth century social theories and the categories popularised by social science disciplines, | ||
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+ | Translating global insight, the forte of futures studies, into local action, the forte of action research, would seem to be a promising challenge yet social change as structure and agency are integral to each other. Foresight without action is meaningless, | ||
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+ | Critical futures studies is clearly a challenge to the distortion of meaning within society, seeking to be an agent for human emancipation. -Jose Ramos | ||
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+ | In the late twentieth century, systems thinking developments in the form of chaos and complexity theories enhanced understanding of the dynamics of intertwined human and planetary systems. These theories provided a paradigm of change as an emergent property of complex, adaptive living systems, explorable but rarely predictable. -Wendy Schultz | ||
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+ | Some have assumed that key to successfully dealing with uncertainty is to take a deep dive into the long-term future. Even when the difficulty of prediction is acknowledged, | ||
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+ | How can you craft strategy in nonlinear environment? | ||
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+ | Ultimately, strategy is about a desired future and how to get there. So don’t ask what the future will be, but rather what future you desire, and how you will bring it about. –Silberzahn & Jones | ||
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+ | The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present.-Paul Saffo | ||
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+ | Cherish failure . Preferably other people' | ||
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+ | My work is that of a limited man who must deal with a limitless situation –Paul Virilio | ||
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+ | If I had an hour to solve a problem, and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper questions to ask, for if I knew the proper questions, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes. -Albert Einstein | ||
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+ | A good scenario grabs us by the collar and says, “Take a good look at this future. This could be your future. Are you going to be ready?” -Peter Bishop, Andy Hines and Terry Collins | ||
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+ | These depictions are not predictions: | ||
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+ | Essentially we put ourselves at an imaginative future vantage point and describe what is going on right now as if we were looking at what is happening today from the perspective of a future historian. – Kees van der Heijden | ||
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+ | De ' | ||
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+ | Next generation futures systems will therefore have to address the synthesis and interpretation of results in a way that is more substantial and useful than most crowdsourcing solutions today. -Noah Raford | ||
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+ | From Stuart Candy' | ||
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+ | < | ||
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+ | The general purpose of futures studies could be regarded as the provision of tools for the invention and pursuit of preferred futures; that is, the reconciliation of hopes and expectations. But it begins and ends, finally, with what any individual does in relation to those things. | ||
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+ | To design, futures brings a holistic and systematic view of the range of longer-term impacts of today’s decisions; and design brings a concrete, communicatively potent form of exploration and an ethos of pragmatic efficacy to futures. | ||
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+ | My vision of what a futurist can and should be does not primarily entail telling people what the future can or should be, but consists in encouraging and enabling as many as possible to make such discoveries for themselves. | ||
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+ | It is about developing the requisite tools to steer ourselves, and our communities, | ||
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+ | futures is ultimately about becoming aware of, and then improving in the present, the range, robustness and rigour of our own images of the future. | ||
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+ | we make our way ‘forward’ through thickets of possible worlds, carving a particular path, which by definition is only one of many possible paths. In this conception, you are at the apex of the cone, in the moment of pure presence and of zero potential; all possibilities expand off from this point of origin into the future | ||
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+ | The ultimate reason to engage in futures work, then, and especially to create scenarios – which are merely tools to help us think – is to enrich our perceptions and options in the evolving present. | ||
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+ | The world they imagine living in 30 years later may be going to hell in a handbasket, with bus strikes and terrorist attacks as far as the eye can see, but in the essay about themselves, there tends to be no sign of society’s challenges, their lives are mysteriously insulated. To recognise this mismatch, and begin reconciling personal expectations with those at the community level, is among the first signs of increased futures literacy. | ||
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+ | As things are remade, when lines are redrawn, on however large or small a scale, the political is activated. | ||
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+ | Our ability to imagine difference is undoubtedly imperfect, and limited, but we do have one, and it can be cultivated: indeed design, futures, and critical politics are all approaches to accomplishing just that. | ||
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+ | People can and should indeed cultivate a habit of ‘thinking the unthinkable’. The difference is one of rationale – constantly to expand horizons, generate new possibilities, | ||
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+ | We designed our way into this mess, we must design our way out. | ||
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+ | Alternative possibilities exist, and failure to act is also a choice, in effect, for the momentum of the status quo. | ||
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+ | To be sure, some of the largest challenges that humans presently face could be said to result from insufficient ‘futurity’ being built into the designed world (this is one way to restate the argument of Cradle to Cradle, for instance) and so, using alternative futures to produce things more wisely, in a more future-proof fashion, as it were, would be a way to address this. | ||
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+ | Life in futures work entails constant labour on the frontier of acceptability. Those whose thinking would benefit most from a plural futures perspective are sceptical or uninterested, | ||
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+ | We must go beyond ‘jamming’ existing futures communications, | ||
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+ | A future scenario is a discursive technology at the what if end of the spectrum. It is first and foremost a thought experiment. | ||
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+ | As Whitehead reminds us, it is the business of the future to be dangerous – which makes it our business to be able, at certain times, to conjure with that danger in order to navigate it more wisely. | ||
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+ | Somewhere along the line the balance needs to shift from guerrilla futurist agitation, to a more mundane, ordinary, and embedded use of futures thinking. | ||
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+ | A foresight culture therefore emerges at the dawn of the 21st century. It is a culture that routinely thinks long-term, takes future generations seriously, learns its way towards sustainability and brings the whole earth back from the brink of catastrophe. | ||
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+ | Current futures practice is one of special occasions; here we are speaking of a futures of everyday life. | ||
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+ | Cultivating new techniques of consciousness, | ||
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+ | ‘Future-shock therapy’ is concerned with creating maximum impact, ideally triggering some sort of realisation that a particular future scenario, perhaps insufficiently considered up until that point, may be possible. (…) Future-shock therapy is the guerrilla futurist’s tactic of first resort.‘Ambient foresight’ is a contrasting idea of building futures awareness subtly, into the mental environment. Rather than demanding attention with fireworks, an ‘ambient’ future awareness is gentle, or perhaps almost invisible. They are, then, a pair of fundamentally different ways of choreographing attention, polar opposites in a sense. Both are valuable, but for different purposes; they both adjust how we experience time, but use different temporal strategies. The former optimises for impact now, the latter for sustainability. One is explicit, uninvited, disruptive, provocative; | ||
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+ | It seems to me that the final aim, the noble end-game for the futures profession (albeit rarely articulated within the field), as being actually to make itself redundant. In a social foresight culture, the job description ‘futurist’ would probably be unnecessary. | ||
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+ | In a society where futures are a reflexive, ordinary part of everyday life, we would be constantly envisioning, | ||
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+ | == esoterica… == | ||
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+ | < | ||
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+ | -- [[https:// | ||
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+ | Related: [[future_fictions_references]] |