Essay
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Fiona Hovenden
Founder and Strategic Foresight Lead, Prospect Studio, San Francisco, CA, USA
Abstract
One of the ironies of education, especially under-funded K-12 public education, is that although it is a field that significantly creates the future, the concerns of the present are so intense and so varied, that people working within these systems find themselves almost entirely in reactive mode. My work, and that of my colleagues, is focused on bringing strategic foresight into public education, giving system leaders, their staff, and their internal and external communities tools, approaches, and ways of thinking with which to engage intentionally with the future, and to build a sense of collective agency about the future.
This paper is based on key learnings from over a decade of taking US school districts and their diverse communities – students, family members, staff, community partners, business partners, faith leaders and city government officials – through future visioning processes. The paper describes three approaches that have been integral to developing Futures Literacy in groups with widely divergent relationships to the future, ranging from fear or avoidance to unexamined beliefs that privilege will maintain and protect, and on to anticipatory hope for a more just, more sustainable world.
Keywords
Futures Literacy, Equity-centered, Liberatory, Design Fictions, Agency
Introduction
How can the ability to shape the future become a more widely distributed, equitable, and persistent capacity that informs all design? In working with communities to help them dream and to create more equitable futures for their educational systems, the following concepts and tools have been integral to the visioning process, and to helping communities build Futures Literacy. This is not an exhaustive list – my organization’s process is an iterative design process with significant phases of broader community input, and feedback, for example – but between them the three approaches outlined below help to demystify engagement with the future, and support more equitable, collaborative work. Each of these is more about ways of thinking than about technique.
3 Horizons
Developing Futures Literacy is a difficult process for many people in the face of very real immediate issues. In the invitation to redesign a system, people come to the process compelled by the issues in the current state. We talk about the creative space engendered by stepping into the future, and people understand the potential in that, but for some it still feels too abstract.
Regardless of someone’s comfort with Futures Literacy, the pressure of current issues is important. In order to help people both honor, but also let go of, the current state issues long enough to give them space to dream and aspire, I have adapted Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons framework (Sharpe, 2020). In the framework, the first horizon is the current state, the second is the transitional state, and the third is the aspirational state. Visualizing these side-by-side enables people to see the connections between, and patterns across, the three horizons. The path between ‘now’ and ‘the future’ is no longer a linear path of unfathomable jumps forward, but a field of possibilities containing multiple connections.
The minor adaptation to this that we use is that the first horizon holds what everyone in the design space wants the system to stop doing, or to let go of in some way. So the first horizon in this adaptation falls out of the field of possibilities, and instead becomes a way to identify what is valuable, and what needs to be left behind. For an in-person facilitated meeting this is done as an individual post it exercise. We start with Horizon 1 and letting go, then move to the aspirations in Horizon 3, and finally to the transitional Horizon 2. The benefits to doing the process in this way are:
Letting go
People need the opportunity to share what is concerning them most in the current state. The individual writing and posting exercise allows everyone in the room to share, not just those who are comfortable speaking in public. Participants are also encouraged and supported to write in their home language. After everyone has shared their Horizon 1 ideas there is time to look through and read what others have said. After everyone has shared their Horizon 1 ideas there is time to look through and read what others have said. Invariably there are significant patterns in the results. These allow people to understand that they are not alone with their concerns. The results also allow the organization’s staff to see their community’s concerns, and which concerns are most important for which groups within the community. This helps people to identify whether swift action needs to be taken to address something, or whether communication and outreach needs to be amplified, for example.
But its primary value is in making space to voice pain felt, harm done, trauma endured, and all the outmoded beliefs and practices that cause or contribute to these. Once participants have shared all the things they would like to see gone, there seems to be greater ease in moving into the aspirational state.
Public Cognition
The benefit of doing this as a public activity for a large group, where results are persistently visible (whether that’s as an up on the wall, post-it based, exercise, or a dedicated screen) is that it facilitates public cognition. The information is transparent, but largely anonymous (a group of around 90 people will generate about 400-500 ideas per horizon in a 15–20-minute period, so unless you know someone’s distinctive writing, or spend time tracking someone else instead of doing the exercise you will not know who wrote what). These attributes of quantity, persistent visibility, and anonymity foster a sense of shared ownership of the information, and allow the group to see patterns together, and engage in public meaning making.
This can also alleviate the concerns that some participants have that an organization is trying to sweep issues under the rug. Once the information is public and has been discussed it is no longer just one person’s concern.
Agency and Intentionality
Understanding that the future, which can otherwise seem distant and abstract, is created in the present moment, is one of the most powerful aspects of this framework. As Sharpe says, seeing the horizons in relation to one another helps people to see paths forward and understand the creative potential of the present.
Transformation happens as the emergent result of everything going on in the
world — there is always an emerging third horizon at every scale of life from the
individual to the planet and beyond. Some things will be the result of conscious
intent, others will surprise us for good or ill. The way we live now was once the
third horizon, partly imagined and intended, largely unknown. Sharpe (2020 p.14)
For our process, the final sentence in the quote above is the launching point for real participative design. Understanding that imagination and intention, the heart of any design process, can help us to create the future that we want opens people up to both their own sense of agency, and also to the sense of collaborative agency with others.
The way that we are focusing towards the future has allowed us to
connect the things that we are currently working on towards who our
students will become, and who we want our community to become.
(School District Leader)
The process that we are going through takes us through the opportunity
not just to live in the current work we are doing, but to really think boldly
and differently about what the future could be for our students
(School District Leader)
A lot of what is happening now really is going to lay the groundwork for the
2035 class. Things that students are struggling with now, the things that
are missing, if we close those loopholes, the 2035 students will be good.
(Family and Community member)
Regardless of the final outcome (although that is definitely important) this building of individual and collaborative agency is one of the most important aspects of the whole visioning process. For communities that feel splintered, or overlooked, working together especially with people that they would not necessarily meet in their day-to-day life, is very powerful.
Students particularly express feeling empowered by the fact that they are working side-by-side with a variety of adults, and being taken seriously. The resulting shared ownership of the field of possibilities, the presence of multiple great ideas, and shared hopes and dreams creates a generative commons and a powerful collective imaginary.
It’s important to have students in the room because ultimately, when it
comes down to it, the students are [the]customer. Education is the
product that is being provided, but we need customer feedback, and
having student feedback is what we need because [students]have a
unique perspective. They are experiencing this system that we have right
now, and they have opinions on how it wants to be changed so we can
have a more competitive education system for the future and for our ever
changing environment. (Student)
It feels really good getting to know that the people going to the school that
I go to, and all the schools in the district will have maybe a better
experience than people in the past have had because of what we are
doing right now. (Student)
Equity-centered, or Liberatory, Design
In recent years human-centered design, or design thinking, has been critiqued for maintaining the status quo, and in doing so being an inherently conservative part of dominant culture (for example, Iskander, 2018). Maintaining the status quo inevitably stifles the move toward social justice, toward equitable design and outcomes, and blocks the possibility of radically changing dominant power structures.
Although human-centered design (or user-centered design) was originally intended to bring the voices of others into the software design process, reminding software developers that they were designing for other people, the balance of power in projects did not really shift. The power of a certain kind of expertise still overwrote the voices of users. Part of the critique of Iskander, and others, is that Design Thinking still foregrounds the role, and the power of the designer.
Equity-centered Design, or the National Equity Project’s (US) Liberatory Design, bring multiple, diverse, voices into the design process in ways that shift dominant power dynamics and support meaningful participation in the design process. The diversity of groups collaborating together is part of this, and it is also about reframing the idea of expertise. Expertise is often understood as being about a level of professional experience. However, that view is changing rapidly. Although it has been valued in ethnography for a long time, the idea that ‘lived experience’ brings another, equally valuable, type of expertise is gaining credence.
It’s really nice to be at a table with administrators, students, parents, and
community stakeholders because we can all give our input into how we can
change the system, and how we can prepare [students]to get those jobs in
the future (Staff member)
Very often decisions seem to be made behind closed doors, with 2-3
people in a room, and I think we need to switch that. I think we need to
have more transparent conversations, putting ideas on the table, thinking
about things, and looking at how we can create a system for engagement
and also a system for collaborative development (School District Leader)
My favorite thing about today was listening to the students’ input and
feedback. I think it was very powerful to listen to their voice and what they
had to say about how we need to think about the future. (Staff member)
An Equity-centered Design process demands this broader idea of expertise. Such a process is one in which multiple forms of expertise come together to create and design a new future. One person in a group may have technical skill, another may have deep expertise in a particular community, and its history; another may be well connected locally and be able to bring other kinds of expertise into the work. In that interplay, transdisciplinary work happens, deeper understanding of an issue or opportunity is possible, and designs are stress-tested through multiple perspectives.
Because of the power of the status quo, creating a truly diverse design team requires persistent intentionality. There are many barriers to participation–planning to minimize these includes everything from providing transportation, childcare, multilingual support, multimodal exercises and activities, and an overall sense of welcome.
Design Fictions
Design Fictions are transdisciplinary artifacts that bring the future alive. They allow us to explore different possible futures, and also to engage others by using different registers. We can include the usual factual, instrumental aspects of any design– product, process, service, for example–and add psychological impact, and emotional depth. We can also explore dynamic aspects such as changing contexts (political, economic, demographic, etc.)
Like Dubovicki and Dilica (2022) we use future biographies to bring the future alive. We base them on interviews, media reports, social media “eavesdropping”, and combine this ethnographic data with trend data to extrapolate into the future.
My favorite activity that we did was when we got our own personas and we
thought about those personas into the future. (Student)
In addition, we create custom scenarios. Our approach to these is influenced by that pioneered at Royal Dutch Shell, and Global Business Network, particularly in the following way:
In general, the company has also avoided expressing a preference for one
scenario over another. The trap of having a “good” versus a “bad” future is that
there is nothing to learn in heaven, and no one wants to visit hell.
The Shell method instead emphasized plausibility. (Wilkinson, Kupers
2013)
Our scenarios, like the biographies, are based on a combination of ethnographic data and trend research. We combine biographies and scenarios in exercises to encourage the focus on plausibility rather than prediction, building the group’s capacity to think through different possibilities. We aim for the texture of everyday life with the spectrum of challenge, opportunity, and optimism, but want participants to engage with the scenarios from their perspectives and make their own meaning of them.
Another option is exemplified by the work of Joe Tankersley (Tankersley, 2018). His stories are optimistic scenarios of the future, intended, amongst other things, to help build the muscle of reframing from dystopian futures to optimistic ones. This in turn helps to build the sense of agency discussed earlier.
Discussion
In the work above I have described some key learnings in creating large-scale, equitable, participatory design processes. Some of the tools I have described above are not new. To be a futures thinker means to understand time and history, to understand that in addition to creating new tools and approaches some older tools can still be useful, while others are obsolete, and still more are new expressions of older forms.
As the field of design education reinvents itself – adapting, adopting, or developing new design tools and approaches; working with non-human agents; employing the full power of immersive virtual environments – the ways in which designers think needs to evolve. Therefore, the ways in which designers are encouraged to think in their degree courses and graduate work also needs to evolve. Designers create the future, and so Futures Literacy is an essential competency. The most difficult part of the co-evolution of design education and futures literacy may be the development of cognitive flexibility – the ability to not just think about the future, but to think about it with others very different from ourselves; to be transdisciplinary; to understand dynamic contexts and design for them; to interrogate biases during design and development; to draw upon research and technical skill, and the imagination and play. New developments in AI-based and VR-based technologies will colonize our imaginations, unless we intentionally engage with the technology, both in how it is designed, and also how we push our imaginations to play with it.
In conclusion, a question–the original teaching tool. In the spirit of meta-level reflection, if we were to apply the learnings above to the question of the future of futures thinking in design education, what would we come up with?
- What would a diverse, transnational, group of students, faculty, business and community partners, policy developers, etc. want to let go of, in terms of how futures literacy is currently developed? What are the boldest aspirations for what students can do when they graduate 5, 10, 20, or 50 years into the future? What are the boldest aspirations for what their educational experience would be, and how faculty and institutions would need to change to support that?
- What might be possible in the transitional stage of Horizon 2? For example, using rapidly developing AI-based, and VR-based tools, how might students engage in immersive roleplay of the educational experience of the future? How might such tools reinvigorate our understanding of story, and what can be done with Design Fictions?
- What new skills will designers and others need to develop in a world in which we will be collaborating with non-human design partners? For example, the skill of giving good prompts to get the best responses from AI-based collaborators may take over from knowledge finding skills.
- How might immersive VR and AR experiences help to convey transdisciplinarity?
- How would using a truly equity-centered approach change the answers to these questions? How would including students as designers of their own experience change the balance of power, the agreements about the purposes of design education, and the possibilities that would be generated? How might including community members who are outside of the design world change the expectations and possibilities for the role of designers and therefore for design education?
Multiple possible futures are always in play at any one time, as 3 Horizons makes apparent, but without intentional effort to disrupt the status quo those futures that offer a more just, sustainable, world but that threaten entrenched power structures, will never come into being.
How the process of thinking about the future, and designing it into being, is done is as important as the end result. Designers create the intentional environment and shape the world in which we live. Having a critical appreciation of that role, and understanding that values are built into our designed world is essential to creating a more just and
equitable future. Bruno Latour argued that technology is society made durable (1990) and the same argument can be made for design more broadly. The National Equity Project argues that “our current systems perpetuate inequity by design” (NEP, 2022 italics in original). The future will happen, but it will not happen by itself. The question, even the moral imperative, that frames design and design education is: whose future do we want to live in?
Acknowledgements
No-one works alone. I’d like to acknowledge my colleagues at Prospect Studio—Sonya Lopes, Jenny Hoang, and Tiara Grayson for our fulfilling and evolving work together; and my earlier colleagues at Collective Invention and The Idea Factory, notably Erika Gregory, Arnold Wasserman, and Jamais Cascio, who first introduced me to some of the seeds that have grown into the work I do today. With gratitude.
References
Dubovicki, S., & Dilica, K. (2022). Biographies of the future as a creative method of visioning in education, Journal of Futures Studies (27, Issue 1). https://jfsdigital.org/2022-2/vol-27-no-1-september-2022/biographies-of-the-future-as-acreative- method-of-visioning-in-education/
Iskander, N, (2018, September 05). Design thinking is fundamentally conservative and maintains the status quo, Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2018/09/design-thinking-is-fundamentally-conservative-and-preserves-the-status-quo
Latour, B. (1990). Technology is society made durable. The Sociological Review (38(1_suppl), 103–131) https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1990.tb03350.x National Equity Project. 1720 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94612, USA. https://www.nationalequityproject.org/
Sharpe, B. (2020). Three horizons: The patterning of hope (2nd ed.). Triarchy Press. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=GrJJEAAAQBAJ
Tankersley, J. (2018). Reimagining our tomorrows: Making sure your future doesn’t suck, Unique Visions Inc. https://www.uniquevisions.net/book/
Wilkinson, A., & Kupers, R.(2013, May). Living in the futures, Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2013/05/living-in-the-futures