By Leonardo Santiago and the Students from the speciality in Design of Tomorrow
In April 2020, in the framework of the SARS CoV 2 crisis, students of the fifth generation of the futures studies postgraduate course at CENTRO, a higher education institution located in Mexico City, held a sounds of the future workshop.
The representation of future scenarios by means of sounds is not new. Well-known is the case of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds (1938). This case was a creative exercise, even a provocation, the result of the adaptation of a novel, we are not speaking properly of a prospective exercise; however, this staging and the subsequent scandalized reaction of the audience made evident the powerful relationship between collective consciousness, the visions of the future and the ability of sound to conjure them.
To design the future scenarios, the students used methods and techniques such as Geoffrey Coyle’s Fear Anomaly Relaxation (1997), Michel Godet scenario planning (2000), and Jose Ramos’ Futures Action Model (2019), among which they learned and practices across the Futures Studies program. To adapt these future visions to sound language, we launched a constant exercise on listening to the sounds that surround us (the signals), starting from the concept of soundscape raised by Murray Schafer 2006), for whom sounds are evidence of change, therefore they become powerful resources for future research. We must listen to create, to design the future.
The realization of future scenarios presented through sound pieces is intended to be a didactic exercise that makes it easier for the analyst to imagine the scenario and for the viewers to immerse themselves in the diegesis that the analyst has designed. It is supposed to be an intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional experience that allows the playful approach to the study of futures.
Thus, we present this collection of yearnings, concerns, visions (auditions, perhaps should be more accurate) of different futures encapsulated in landscapes that reflect on change, technology, isolation, the gender gap, among other attributes.
Along the way, exercises such as understanding the nature of sound, listening journals and podcasts, listening to the actual sounds that surround us, exploring digital tools, studying sound theories, designing sound scenarios, games, and reflecting on all this information and its relation with change.
What does the futures sound like? We suggest the use of headphones to appreciate the different sound planes of each piece.
1. Chapultepec Beach, Carlos Buenfil
Imagine a future where travel has changed due to the climate crisis, social economic and political crisis, and tech is more available and accepted: a future of extended reality where you don’t go to the destination, but the destination goes to you.
It’s summer 2030 in Mexico City. In the last green-lung of this overpopulated city, the government is recycling and redesigning one simple but powerful and popular idea: city beaches. This time enhanced with AR technologies. How could an Augmented Reality Beach Experience sound like? This is an attempt to take you there through a soundscape from the future.
2. Where are we going? Fernanda Rocha
We pay our debts, we receive and send messages, we drink coffee, we watch the neighbor go by, we take a brief shower (just 15 seconds), all this in a routine morning in which an ordinary citizen tries to keep his old habits to recognize himself human in an era of Artificial Intelligence.
The design of futures provides us with methodologies and a combination of qualitative and quantitative tools, which are adapted to achieve a preferable future. It all starts with the recognition and analysis of signals, frequently signals of change. However, with this exercise, I tried to answer what are the things that are possibly not going to change or that we will try to hold on to?
3. Grandma Rosario Gracia’s Birthday Cake, Fernanda Enríquez
Recreating a tradition lost more than 4 decades ago, mom tries to make a birthday cake for her son. An artificial Intelligence companion helps her find an old recipe of a grandmother of the past. Even when the task seems easy to conquer, she finds an obstacle that makes the experiment fail. Maybe there is still time to order one of the usual boring cakes.
While designing futures, it is very important to be capable of, somehow, transfer people to the future setting you are working with; in order to provoke them anything powerful enough to question their present and wonder what we all did (or stop doing) to let that happen. This is why, for this future sound it was key to intervene and turn around something that today is common for many of us, in this case: making a birthday cake. This easy task changes and even faces obstacles that today may seem easy-to-solve, but that in the future may interrupt the complete process.
Future may seem (or sound) absurd sometimes, full of things that in the present may be non-senses. In this relay its power to challenge ourselves, our posture and actions towards it.
4. Gender Wellness, Diana Espinosa and Jesica Bastidas
After the events of 2027, Mexican society is looking for radical changes. In 2030, comprehensive sexuality education becomes a cross-cutting component of all basic and upper secondary education programs. By 2050, new realities coexist in Mexico City, giving rise to new products and services for gender health.
“Gender Wellness” is a call from an emerging vision, a glance into a preferred future of equity, fluidity, and connectedness across all genders. However, in 2050, not all Mexican population has moved along within this narrative, whether it is because of a lack of access to gender education or dragging a Used Future filled with previous dominant visions, generation X, Y & Z have struggled the most to overcome this culture gap.
For this scenario, we follow Aarón on his way home. He is 51 and is concerned about his difficulty to deal with this new culture. Then, an atavism is introduced: the figure of the “merolico”, a trickster, who makes promises of endless wonders of his products, now impersonated by a vending machine offering gender health products and personalized services.
5. The Perfect Profile, Mariana Núñez
Only three educational institutions made it. The requirements to teach are very high. Along with genetic modification to resist bacteria, viruses, and poor eating habits, came the hiring profile set up for each school. The teachers’ profile is kept in secret and if they have a low nucleotide level, they must undergo modifications in order to fit in, without the consequences being known yet. For example, The Universal Knowledge Institute only hires teachers with Creativina-Novarasa-A7in and Z-Globalina- AC-56-tualina complex in the DNA. They use to train them, now there is no time for that.
A recurring question when thinking about the worst futures is how do we get there? And sometimes, to respond, we tend to look for situations in this present (signals) and we find ourselves exclaiming aha! But of course, it was already coming! What context would allow an institution to install this type of modification requirements to the people it hires? Why exactly would this happen in education? And so, pulling the thread to tie it to many ends (trends).
These questions are extremely interesting because then we think about whether the function of education is to transmit the institutionality to which it belongs and the knowledge that only perpetuates certain norms; or while it should recognize that individuals develop their own ability to decide and act on their learning and that, then, the school offers a context that facilitates. In the first case, such operation then requires that each member of the Institution have a very specific profile that helps perpetuate the structure. Does that sound familiar to you at any institution? Whatever this is? You could see it coming, right?
6. Caught in Monotony, Sophia Arrazola
Mely is an engineer who leads a community garden. With the help of his artificial assistant, she manages the orchard. The residents of the Chalco area, Mexico City, work, study, have fun, and receive medical attention at home. The virtual assistant warns Mely about the rigorous sanitation approaching, but she does not listen. She is caught in monotony.
Caught in Monotony is a collection of sounds that synthesize the stifling and repetitive daily life of a foreign woman living in Mexico City in 2040. The protagonist lives in a morphologic setting created with the Field Anomaly Relaxation (FAR) method. The FAR approach centers on the identification and analysis of change-drivers in any given system: social and gender inequality that confronts women who live on the outskirts of Mexico City, but who work within the city; the impact on those women’s lives in the wake of the COVID-19 health crisis; and allowing for identification and development of an aspirational yet consistent future.
7. Welcome to the New World, Mauricio Hernández
After the Revolution, Artificial Intelligence redesigns humans. A new human race has arrived, and with this, a new era. Half humans, half machines: welcome to the new world.
The depicted scenario in this sound piece shows the imagined result of probable misuse of Artificial Intelligence technology by humans and responds to one question: What if instead of being used by institutional forces of the State to prevent crime, AI is used by other factual powers like criminal groups? The probable chain reaction is a violent war between AI and humans and then after a brief period of resistance, the extinction of the human race as we know it, in order to allow the AI to create a new, more intelligent, more “sustainable” and improved kind of being to inhabit the earth: half AI, half-human.
There are clear signals today that point to the feasibility of this scenario. Fast-growing technology, criminal groups showing their superior logistics, strategy and military tactics, plus ample financial resources at their disposal that they already use to have open access to state-of-the-art weapons and technology.
8. Shhh! Listen to Them, Maru Cué
Although we didn’t pay attention to them, they were always there. The serene, the sharpener, the “camotero” and the cylinder. Sounds of my grandparents’ childhood, of mine, of my children. The sound of ice cream with which many grew without knowing that until the 19th century only the richest people ate them.
Local sounds that made us happy gave us strength, inspired us, saddened, and built us. Sounds that were always there, that went and came new, without us paying attention to them. Sounds that one day was divided into two: those inside those outside. Those outside were sounds of birds and nature recovering territory without us.
Little did we imagine that over time, those sounds would be the only ones and that in the long run, they would also disappear. Little did we imagine that there would only be silence to tell the end of our history of perhaps…the beginning of a new future.
You can hear all the soundscapes here
About the author
Leonardo Santiago, Professor, Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, Mexico City
Contact: leosantiago.avila@gmail.com
References
Coyle, G., 1997. The nature and value of futures studies or do futures have a future?. Futures, 29(1), pp.77-93.
Godet, M. 2000. The Art of Scenarios and Strategic Planning: Tools and Pitfalls. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 65, pp. 3–22.
Welles, O., 1938. War Of The Worlds.
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0K4ApWl4g [Accessed 3 June 2020].
Ramos, J. 2019. Mutating the Future: the Anticipatory Experimentation Method. Available at: https://medium.com/@joseramos_30450/mutating-the-future-the-anticipatory-experimentation-method-17ca1244da8 [Accessed 3 June 2020].
Schafer, M., 2006. The Soundscape. Rochester, Vt: Destiny Books.
