by Epaminondas Christophilopoulos The exploration of the future, a tradition as ancient as humanity itself, has evolved from oracular predictions to sophisticated, data-driven forecasts, reflecting a deep-rooted concern for what lies ahead. The 20th century’s broad use of “forecast” has given way to a focus on participatory, qualitative methods in futures studies, emphasizing the importance of foresight over prediction. This shift recognizes the future’s inherent uncertainty and the value of exploring different alternative futures to inform decision-making processes and improving futures literacy among organizations and societies, and in this direction, art can make a substantial contribution. Arts in various…
Author: Abril Chimal
by Karina Vega, Mercedes Baltazar, Patricia López, León Ruiz and José M. Ramos Echoing insights from critical Futures Studies (Sardar 1999), the cultural critic Mark Fisher (2014) argued that the future has been “canceled”, reflecting on our collective inability to imagine something beyond the current capitalist-industrial system. The epistemic boundaries of both action and reflection are maintained both by the political economy and the discourses in late capitalism. Trapped in a zeitgeist of constrained imagination and the “weight of the past” (Inayatullah 2008) we are often unable to develop alternative visions of futures which we would prefer to exist in.…
by Chris Mayer By introducing students to multiple disciplines, a general education curriculum provides students opportunities to acquire the knowledge, skills, and habits of mind necessary for meaningful lives as citizens and members of the workforce. As currently designed, general education curricula do not provide students opportunities to demonstrate integrative learning related to the multiple disciplines they have studied. They also do not prepare students to systematically explore, think about, and gain insights from the future to make better decisions in the present. Using strategic foresight as the framework for a general education capstone course would address these gaps. Enhancing…
Camilo Maria Ricardo Q. Lopa Inspiration for this paper stemmed from a desire to make the foresight practice more proactive in transforming the present and creating a better future for everyone. In some cases, it is not merely enough to tell people about what could happen in the next few years. There also needs to be a follow-through or an answer to what people can do to achieve their preferred futures. However, transformation is arguably a difficult task because the world is far more complex today. For example, in the Philippines there are informal meetings to reimagine Katipunan Avenue in…
by Sohail Inayatullah This piece is In memory of Johan Galtung (1930-2024), author and editor of over 150 books and considered one of the founders of the disciplines of Futures Studies and Peace Studies. The interview was originally published in the Prout Journal, (Vol. 4, No. 1, 1989), 16–20, we republish it with minor editorial changes. Image from Transcend Peace University – www.transcend.org INAYATULLAH: We would like to hear your views on the present crises facing humanity, your vision of the future and on your interpretation of PROUT – the Progressive Utilization Theory – especially as related to your work…
By Roar Bjonnes Introduction This article looks at the development of green economics over the past decades and analyzes its various forms, including green economics, sustainable development, and green capitalism and concludes that none of these offers comprehensive system change and a viable solution to our current economic and environmental problems. Instead, the author argues, we need a new economic system beyond capitalism, one that can structurally replace it. The article introduces some of the main thinkers within the alternative economic movement over the past decades, from Karl Polanyi (1944) to Kate Raworth (2017), from E. F. Schumacher (1971) to…
By Javeria Masood What does tomorrow look like post COVID-19? How can we become better ancestors to our future generations? Human beings are cognitively not good at thinking about the long-term, without barriers of plausibility at present. That is why futurists help decision makers connect with the future emotionally to develop empathy in order to kick-start better decisions today, and also to stay ahead. Year 2020: Raza has been working at a reputable private enterprise for the last four years. He was very excited to get the much-awaited promotion to be an Assistant Manager for the technology division. Two…
by Karla Paniagua, Abril Chimal, Patricia López & Edgar Flores The following paper describes the achievements of a foresight workshop designed and executed through 2022 to identify the long-term scenarios created by undergraduate students concerning the metaverse and the creative industries in Latin America. The working model recovers elements from Voros’s (2003) foresight approach, Bleecker’s Design-Fiction, Candy and Dunagan’s (2016) Experiential futures model, Kjaer’s (2014) macro trends model, and Bishop & Hines (2012) futures archetypes. The experience was facilitated by three teachers collaborating with 123 undergraduate students from CENTRO (Mexico City). The main conclusions include nine scenarios for the…
by William Halal This article focuses on one of the great challenges facing all of us today — how can we resolve the raging conflicts fomented by social media? Conflict has always been a problem, but the digital revolution has raised it into one of the great challenges of our time. Facebook and other social media platforms inherently provoke the differences that drive today’s wave of “post-factual” nonsense. Statistica reports that 70 percent of Internet users think fake news causes confusion, and 83 percent say disinformation harms politics. One analyst framed the problem this way: “In the past, wars were conducted with weapons. Now it’s…
Written and Illustrated by Marc Ngui Welcome to Dee Double Dub is a 12 page black and white comic which proposes a radically optimistic and speculatively pragmatic vision of a eutopian human habitation in the Detroit River region of North America circa 2200 CE. In the proposed scenario,a Global Green New Deal has paved the way for an extensive retooling and restructuring of human civilization, which has transformed it into an equitable culture that respects the environmental boundaries of the planet. The D.W.W. Urbiome (Detroit-Windsor-Waawiyataanong Urbiome) is an ecologically integrated metropolis situated on the Detroit River in the Southern Great…