By Elissa Farrow Messages and narratives of the future can create change. (Fuller, June 2019, Turku, Finland) Humans cannot describe sense and make sense of the world in the present without their images of the future. (Millar, September 2019, Mexico City, Mexico) Next year Athena (AI Robot) might be doing my presentation. (Jackson, September 2019, Bangkok, Thailand) I am diving in the cool ocean. I see sea creatures, plants and dappled greeny-blue light. I feel the cool temperature and the pressure of the depths. I hear the gurgles of my bubbles and the shhhh of my breath as I exhale.…
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By Umar Sheraz At the Asia Pacific Futurists Network 2019, I had the pleasure of interviewing Anita Hazenberg, the Director of the Innovation Centre Directorate at the INTERPOL Global Complex for Innovation. Below are some of her key insights. Umar: Thank you very much for giving us your valuable time. How do you think foresight fits into the work of INTERPOL and how has it helped in making your organization better in performing its duties? Anita: This is a very challenging question because futures and foresight is a very new area in our line of work. Two years ago, I…
By Satya Tanner In July 2019, I gave a presentation to neohumanist educators at their Global Conference in Salorno, Italy. The purpose was to go through a futures gaming process developed by Sohail Inayatullah called the Prout Parliament Game (1). We adapted it to the neohumanist education context, and the purpose was to enable participants to become more aware of their worldview and its limitations, as well as an understanding of how to make neohumanist education policy decisions free (somewhat) of sentiment. Introducing neohumanism and futures Neohumanism is a worldview based on the ethic of universal love that tries to…
By Sérgio Brodsky The futurist brand is a bit of a blur. Those outside the community don’t understand the Futures Thinking discipline and those inside have a hard time to explain what they do and how value is added from their craft. The future may be bright, but the present is a pickle. This is a fascinating challenge and the reason why I – as a recently anointed brand futurist – came to deliver a workshop at the 5th Asia Pacific Futures Network, themed under ASEAN 2030, which focused on culture, technology and security. And, when it comes to culture,…
Paid Essay Writing Service – How to Choose the Best OneThere are lots of paid article writing services available to choose 1ws – first writing service from, and finding the most useful one isn’t as simple as it may look. Even though a number of them assert that they have been more professional than many others, they are all pretty much exactly the same. In actuality, you can find only several great ones and the ones really should not be used for granted.It seems that most people still think that the world wide web is where everything is to be…
By Dr. Patricia Kelly The New Testament quote (Matthew 22:21) I adapted in this title contains Christ’s pragmatic advice about how to serve both God, the spiritual and Caesar, the pragmatic. I use Gaia in Lovelock’s terms (2016) as a single, interconnected living system composed of all living and non-living organisms. The quote seemed an appropriate metaphor for my experience working in engineering education. I am not an engineer. My background is Humanities, language, media and cultural studies, but I have now worked in and researched engineering education for over twenty years. This short reflection aims to support educators who…
When in April 2019 Notre-Dam in Paris was burning it was a very tragic and horrible incident to watch for me as a cosmopolitan. However, I also observed, as a resident in the Middle East, that despite breaking news coverage over the Western media, there were some other media channels that treated the incident not that much important because they and their audiences were remote both geographically and culturally from that context. They simply didn’t care. That made me wonder what humans value across the world over space-time and also if we should anticipate some significant change in this…
By Sérgio Brodsky Futurists and brand strategists have more in common than one might think. Whilst the former focuses on projecting unimaginable scenarios across the most varied contexts, the latter focuses on communicating a business promise that is expected to be kept. Despite having different lines of work, both, projections and promises exist to design the future. And, the use of strategic narratives is what unites both practitioners. In the case of brand strategists, strategic narratives can be deployed to communicate the very essence of a brand via visual and verbal identities or articulate a moment in time via advertising…
By Umar Sheraz, Awais Nazir & Saba Nazir About an year ago, the Journal of Futures Studies (JFS) blog was created as an experiment to explore the utility and facilitation that a blog could provide to an academic journal. This article reflects on the journey of the JFS blog, almost an year after its inception. Introduction The Journal of Futures Studies is a global watering hole of foresight practitioners and is an established journal with an impact factor and is indexed in the ISI web of Science. About an year ago,the idea of a blog was presented to the Journal…
By Peter van der Wel In my presentations, I often tell the audience about the very plausible possibility that in the future some of us (or even most of us) will become very much older, maybe even immortal. I tell them, for example, about the escape velocity theory. According to this theory, immortality will come within our reach when biotechnology develops faster than the aging process itself. This means that the people who lived are the first generation who are no longer sure that they will die. This train of thought always raises many questions among those present. For example,…