Article
Adam Cowart
PhD Researcher, Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design; Adjunct Professor, University of Houston, Foresight
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to address challenges in crafting prospective long-term stories in the Transition Design (TD) approach, and the importance of this skill set in Design Futures education in general, in order to weave long-term stories about the future in a manner that is both aspirational and compelling to inform on decision making and actions in the present. The paper contends that the challenge in this context is often not the content but the form of the story and how it is emplotted. The paper proposes the introduction of two storytelling methods to support durational and imaginative endeavors to articulate longer-term pathways: four-dimensional story arcs that add rising and falling “action” across multiple transition pathways to the future that are interdependent on each other to realize the preferred future successfully; and multi-temporal trajectories in which the traditional method of backcasting is complemented by nearcasting and middlecasting. The paper concludes with a durational storytelling prompt worksheet example to demonstrate how this approach to durational and aspirational futures storytelling can be practically applied in an academic or real-world context.
Keywords
Transition Design, Design Futures, Storytelling, Multicasting, Storyform
Introduction
Motivating the work
Story plays a central role in design and futures in both the theoretical and applied facets of the disciplines. Story enables us to understand and empathize with others, to propose hypothetical interventions and prototypes for immediate solutions and playful speculative artifacts for future design interventions. A recurring challenge in formulating longer-term futures, particularly in the participatory design and social innovation space, is the “catch 22” of imagining preferred futures and pathways to those futures: we often cannot conceive of a story in which the problem we currently face is resolved within the temporal constraints we place on the resolution horizon, and we cannot imagine extending the resolution horizon for fear of the implications of living in the problem space for the implied temporal time required. In The Geometry of Strategy, Keidel defines this as one of many polarities present in angular forms of strategic thinking, manifesting in long-term versus short-term thinking which “reflects the tension between the need to act in the present and the need to plan for the future” and he highlights several variants articulating this tension including “tactics versus strategies, urgency versus importance, execution versus vision and Peter Drucker’s famous dyad of efficiency (“doing things right”) versus effectiveness (“doing the right things”) (Keidel, 2010, p. 52). Put simply in a social innovation context, a conundrum arises in which stakeholders have no temporal space to dream, constituting a form of future fixedness (Cowart, 2024). It should be acknowledged that a key element to addressing this temporal narrative “stuckness” is to take a trauma-informed approach to future imaginaries. While others have addressed this (Brown, 2017; S. Jones & Howard, 2022) this particular paper focuses on how, in working with students and changemakers to explore the generative potentiality of design futures in both imagining and materializing plausible and preferred futures, two common challenges emerge during future formulations over long-term trajectories: flatland transition pathways and narrative sustainment of momentum.
The first common challenge encountered is the rudimentary crafting of an “and, and” narrative versus a story. What can be called flatland transition pathways. Noted screenwriting consulting guru Robert McKee distinguished between a narrative and story as being the difference between an “and and” narrative and an “and, but” story (McKee, 1997). “And, and” are narrative flatlands, a surface tale. “But” is the singular defining feature of a story. We can imagine a story told by a child as the “and, and” flatlands narrative: I woke up this morning and I got out of bed and then I made my own breakfast and I watched cartoons and mom and dad woke up and we played. As opposed to: I woke up this morning and I got out of bed and then I made my own breakfast and I watched cartoons BUT mom and dad never woke up. Now you have a story. The “but” signals change, dramatic tension, and transports the audience. This introduction of change, subtle as it might seem, has profound implications whereby “distinguishing a story from a series of sentences leads to the activation of affective, cognitive, and belief changes in story receivers (i.e., consumers of the story) that can eventually affect their attitudes, intentions, and behaviors” (van Laer et al., 2013). The solution to this challenge of flatland “and, and” future narratives proposed in this paper is to weave multiple narrative arcs into durational tales of transition, to avoid flatland pathways to the future.
The second challenge that often arises is one more familiar to storytellers – the challenge of the messy and sagging middle space. Perhaps no writer has ever lived who has not, at some point in time, opined that “I have a great beginning and a great ending… its just the middle that needs work!” Of course, the middle is the story, the “Fun and Games” (Snyder, 2005), the tipping point, where the plot thickens. Here, the challenge for future storytellers can be addressed by nearcasting and middlecasting, a multi-directional temporal approach that blends forecasting and backcasting to shape preferred future pathways. In the following sections, we explore these two challenges and propose solutions. First, however, we turn briefly to the history of long futures and foundational concepts in transition design, a design futures approach to addressing complex socio-technical problems.
A brief history of long futures
While futures thinking in popular media is typically presented as a recent development in contemporary culture, thinking and acting with long-term futures in mind is not remotely new. Seven-generation thinking is widely attributed to the Great Law of the Iroquois (Iroquois Constitution, n.d.). Kalpas are “in Sanskrit, “eon” or “age”; the unit of measurement of cosmological time” (Buswell & Lopez, 2013, p. 772). In Hindu and Buddhist cosmological traditions, kalpas fluctuate in length but can be anywhere between 16,000,000 and 1,300,000,000,000 years (What Are Kalpas?, 2016) or “the length of time it would take to wear away a stone… by wiping that stone with a piece of silk once every century” (Buswell & Lopez, 2013, p. 928).
In contemporary Western culture, Elise Boulding’s 200-year present expands the conventional present to include the previous one hundred years and the next one hundred years. By using “this approach to thinking about the transition we are in between centuries, and between the old and the new international order, we will have a better grasp of events that cannot be properly understood in terms of what is going on this year” (Boulding & Russell Boulding, 2017, p. 156). The longue durée seeks to explore and draw insights from long-term patterns of behavior or trends, and advocates for this perspective seek to explicitly differentiate it from the study of medium term periods of punctuated equilibrium in social and economic terms and short-term events (Braudel & Wallerstein, 2009). The Long Now Foundation, founded in 01996, seeks to frame “now” as 10,000 years in the past and 10,000 years into the future (hence the 0 attached to the beginning of 1996 to reinforce the temporal shift to long now thinking) using a wider lens than Boulding (Brand, 2008). More recently, a return to the concept of future generations and ancestors has emerged in the form of popular books challenging today’s citizens to be “better” ancestors (Wallach, 2022) and longtermism as a moral imperative (MacAskill, 2022).
Durationality and longtermism have a utility for imagination and morality. The implications of a past that is not the past and a future that is not the future draw a wide circle around how decisions and actions in the present are informed and inform the nested temporal space humans and the more-than-human inhabit. Practitioners of TD must be able to articulate and nurture durational stories of transition. Design futures thinkers and practitioners have likewise concerned themselves with broader time horizons (Bason & Skibsted, 2022; J. Hoffman, 2022; Lutz, 2021). While Boulding noted that a more expansive conception of the present allows us to “grasp” what cannot be appropriately understood from the position of presentism, she might also have suggested that without an expanded sense of the present, we cannot appropriately imagine and materialize positive change in the future.
Futures literacy in transition design
Transition Design is an emerging approach to systems-level transformation that brings together design, futures, ecology, and systems thinking (Irwin, 2018). The TD approach centers durational and long-term, iterative imaginaries in prospecting aspirational futures in which a wicked problem has been successfully resolved, to design ecologies of intervention to materialize this preferred end state. Futures literacy maintains that the future holds a utility for those who act in the present, a yet-to-be-determined space for imagination and inspiration to inform and inspire. The larger design futures space has been concerned with these same issues of how to address complex problems and the power of amplifying the long-term conceptualizing capacities of futures with the materializing ethos of design.
It is increasingly acknowledged within the futures studies community that operating with a largely verbal and theoretical bent over the past half century has afforded too little impact on actual future-shaping behaviours. Meanwhile, those in the design community recognize a need to interrogate the higher level consequences – the futures, the worlds – that their products, systems and other outputs help produce (Potter & Candy, 2019, p. 1).
The TD approach centers this intention of generative synthesis. Rather than isolating futures-oriented ontologies and activities in a distinct, defined, and confined territory within a larger design framework, TD weaves futures literacy throughout. In the initial stages of the approach, during stakeholder mapping, the voice of the stakeholder is captured in a “hopes and fears for the future” discovery exercise followed by an affinitizing activity where lines of agreement, disagreement, and complexity are organized. Likewise, the TD approach typically includes a two-step visioning phase in which the resolution of the wicked problem is articulated at various levels of scale and then encapsulated in a narrativization of the vision, an evaluative phase of the current state of the system, and a milestoning phase in which a series of short narratives telling the story of the long-term resolution of the wicked problem. Finally, ecologies of intervention allow for the weaving of a rich tapestry of potential systems interventions to nudge the system towards the aspirational future articulated by stakeholders earlier in the process (Irwin et al., 2015). The approach itself, while often employed sequentially, is iterative in how various representations and discourses about the future possibilities of a wicked problem permeate and inform each other: hopes and fears inform the plausible and preferred vision of the future, milestones articulate the pathway to the vision of the future, and the milestones inspire ecologies of intervention.
The recurring thread through the approach is the role of prospective storytelling, the anticipatory narratives that are emergent and unfiltered in hopes and fears, contextual and multifaceted in how the new world manifests itself in the vision narratives, sweeping and hopeful in the milestoning, and speculatively but precisely located and materialized in ecologies of intervention. One consequence of adopting a general transition design approach versus the more common framework in design and futures research is the absence of specific focusing and flaring methods employed at particular points in time, a common design futures framework approach to organize when to think broadly about the future conceptually, and when to focus in on artifact and speculative experience creation (Candy, 2010; Colosi, 2021). To adopt a more deliberate storytelling posture is to simultaneously operate at multiple levels of scale due to the hermeneutic nature of the story. To be a futures literate transition designer is to be a storyteller and a storylistener (Dillon & Craig, 2021a).
Challenges and Proposed Solutions for Crafting Durational Stories about the Future
The author has taught design futures and experiential futures for several years and has employed design futures methods in workshops and corporate settings. Critical to design futures is imagining longer term (the futures element) but also with high fidelity to take action and materialize in the present (the design element). “Durational” storytelling is a deliberately chosen word (J. Chapman, 2012, 2021) to evoke the long-term trajectory necessary for imagining futures, but also make explicit the imaginative ruggedness of the narrative itself to “hold up” along the journey. Flatland futures and the sustainment of narrative momentum are the two most common issues or challenges. The paper now explores these challenges and proposes solutions so that design futures practitioners and teachers can more effectively diagnose these challenges and have tangible solutions to support student learning.
Part 1: flatland pathways
In the 1990s, the discipline of foresight was diagnosed with the problem of “flatland futures” (R. A. Slaughter, 1998). The futures being imagined and articulated lacked depth and complexity. Slaughter acknowledges that
the dominant tradition of futures work can be said to be actively complicit in re-inscribing aspects of the past and present upon the emerging future… If FS [future studies]too was born in ‘flatland’, ie the taken-for-granted world of post-war modernity, it would, as I have suggested, have been imbued with interests typical of that time: predominantly interests in forecasting, prediction and control (Slaughter, 1998, p.528).
Slaughter then goes on to propose that “the central purpose of FS is not to serve the already powerful, not to explore the horizontal explorations of ‘flatland,’ the barren landscapes of the technological ‘wonderland,’ but to illuminate the way beyond limited and instrumental interests altogether to shared transpersonal ends” (R. A. Slaughter, 1998, p. 529).
Ken Wilber developed the concept of flatland as part of his integral theory work. “Instead of an infinite above, the West pitched its attention to an infinite ahead. The vertical dimension of depth/height was ditched in favor of a horizontal expansion, and emphasis not on depth but on span” which resulted in “An “other world” of any sort [that]was thrown over; and the eyes of men and women settled steely on the horizons not above but in front of them, settled coldly on this world, and this world, and this world again” (Wilber, 2001, p. 420).
Put succinctly, “To maintain a worldview is to keep the story straight” (M. M. Chapman & Chapman, 2022, p. 109). Here, we see echoes of the “and and” storytelling of transition pathways ubiquitous among milestoning in futures work. The common emplotment of futures imaginaries bears a striking resemblance in description to Wilber’s conception of flatland as “interlocking surfaces… valueless surfaces that could be patiently, persistently, accurately mapped” (Wilber, 2001, p. 428). To support the unlocking of social imaginaries, transition pathways must have depth and avoid the monotone “horizontal expansion” of flatland futures to support the crafting of the other pluriversal worlds (Escobar, 2018) necessary as an imaginative salve to the current world.
Echoes of this issue can be found more recently in attempts at crafting the transition pathways to preferred futures. While the problems of articulating a future image that is NOT flat may have been addressed, there is still the pragmatic challenge of articulating a pathway to that rich and nuanced future that isn’t itself flat and lifeless. Flatland transition pathways that lack nuance and depth can fail to harness the collective imaginaries of designers, futurists, changemakers, and stakeholders to ideate and propose ecologies of intervention to begin the messy and clumsy process of materializing systemic interventions to nudge the system in the right direction. The transition pathway needs sustainment, to be not just aspirational but compelling and evocative, to transport stakeholders through the dramatic tension and internal consistency of the narrative.
Trajectories as story forms over long horizons
Fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut begins his rejected master’s dissertation “Fluctuations Between Good and Ill Fortune in Simple Tales” by motivating his work and taking aim at how “the tendency in anthropology has been to ransack simple tales for facts or clues embedded in them, to fragment them, to neglect the manner in which they are told” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 1) and, in effect “revealing everything about a vase except its ultimate and unified affect when whole, which is to say: its form” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 23). He goes on to propose that “fluctuations between good and ill fortune in large measure determine form. This can be demonstrated graphically” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 28). Vonnegut uses the term “skeleton” to describe these graphical demonstrations of narrative form. Through his methodology of graphing simple tales, Vonnegut determined that there were eight archetypal forms of stories: “Boy meets Girl,” “Man in Hole,” “From Bad to Worse,” “Which Way is Up?”, “Creation Story,” “Old Testament,” “New Testament,” and “Cinderella.” Below, we touch on two examples to illustrate the concept of mapping fluctuations. B represents the beginning of the story, E for the end. G represents good fortune, I represents Ill Fortune.
Fig. 1: Boy Meets Girl
- Reproduction of image from “Fluctuations Between Good and Ill Fortune in Simple Tales” by Kurt Vonnegut, 1965y, p. 31. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Reprinted with permission from The Wylie Agency.
“Boy Meets Girl” is an archetypal story form. In terms of character and theme, “the leading character need not be a boy, and the thing desired need not be a girl. Nor is the formula restricted to love stories” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 27). The form of the story represents “any story wherein a character begins at a certain level of comfort, has good fortune which greatly increases his pleasure, is deprived of his good fortune, then recovers it again” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 27). “Man in a Whole” is another example of an archetypal story form. Someone has a certain minimal level of comfort, suffers a change of fortune, and then struggles to get back to where they were before the change of fortune.
Fig. 2: Man in a Hole
- Reproduction of image from “Fluctuations Between Good and Ill Fortune in Simple Tales” by Kurt Vonnegut, 1965y, p. 30. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Reprinted with permission from The Wylie Agency.
The form of the story, the fluctuations of good and ill fortune over time, catalyzed by an initial change, is a critical component to the effective telling of a tale. This graphical representation should look familiar to designers. Vonnegut’s mapping is textbook journey mapping, a popular and ubiquitous design method that “tells a story about an individual’s actions, feelings, perceptions, and frame of mind—including the positive, negative, and neutral moments—as he or she interacts with a multichannel product or service over a period of time” (Martin et al., 2012, p. 244). It should also be noted that Vonnegut was explicit and deliberate in his use of the term tale to denote “ a narrative which can be told or read in less than thirty minutes” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 1). This durational framing of the story’s telling is consistent with the inherent utilitarian employment of narratives in a futures contexts. Durational futures stories distill narrative time, in which the actual time space of the story occurs, into the fundamental unit of time it takes to imbibe the story, known as the discourse time (Liveley, 2017). Telling stories of distant or even radically distant futures requires a sophisticated usage of discourse time to communicate complexity as simply as possible, a mnemonic device (Schroeder, 2011). Most individuals and organizations cannot dedicate hours and days to unraveling speculative stories in a time-strapped world. A story about the future needs to be succinct and rich in the telling with change and implications. Future’s storyteller Kacper Nosarzewski emphasizes the need for immediacy and relatability in future tales. “My emotional structure, my emotional amplitude, or the emotional track of the story has to be familiar as soon as possible. Introduce patterns that will be recognized as familiar. And that will frame my reader into a situation where they suspend disbelief, and they buy into the situation” (Nosarzewski, Kacper, personal communication, October 24, 2022).
Vonnegut proposes a series of rules helpful to the TD storyteller in imagining and illuminating transition trajectories of change and complexity across long time horizons, that are “to be applied when stretching a tale on the time-fortune cross in order to make it reveal its form” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 43):
- “For graphic purposes, a tale begins when its focal character or characters experience changes in fortune, and it ends when those fluctuations cease. All else is background” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 43). Here, we see the foregrounding and primacy of change, a recurring theme in storytelling and futures. The background is the world, the stage on which change occurs. The ignition, the impetus for the story being told, appears at the moment of pertinent change, in which the change will causally lead to other changes that are also relevant to the arc of the narrative being expressed visually.
- “The intensity of good or ill fortune is expressed by the tale-teller in exposition or in the reactions of characters in his tale. If something seemingly bad or good happens in a tale, and neither the tale-teller nor his character are impressed, then nothing much has really happened” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 43). The change is meaningful for the inhabitants of this world, meaning the change has implications that are felt beyond the first-order impacts.
- “In order to make one story form broadly comparable with another, only major changes in fortune should be taken into graphic account” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 43). The scale of the individual events or moments, the plot points, must be, in relative size or dramatic gravity, commiserate with the relative scale of the overarching story being told. This is a critical component, that in this particular mode of story forming shifting from high-level to low-level can disrupt the process. Remaining at a particular level (world level, neighborhood level, individual level) is essential to avoid a wildly oscillating story form.
- “Each tale, regardless of the scale of its issues in the larger scheme of life, must be allowed in its own terms to reach graphic maxima of good or ill fortune” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 43). This speaks to the playing out of implications, allowing the storytelling gesture to complete itself. There is satisfaction in the conclusion of a well-told tale, whether happy or sad. Relief or catharsis. Particularly in student settings, the vision for the future is often hedged, cut short, and not allowed to “play out on its own terms” due to a number of potential constraints, including time for assignment deadlines and discomfort with thinking beyond a particular time horizon.
- “Special attention should be given to the state of good or ill-fortune of the focal character or characters at the beginning of a tale, and again at the end. The story-teller will customarily help, will emphasize the high, low, or medium condition of his characters at crucial points” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 43). The characters or personas of the world must be centered periodically, should the story not necessarily be human-centered throughout. What is the state of stakeholder groups or users at the beginning and end of the narrative? How have the forces of change shaped them, and how have they shaped the forces of change (changing them even more in the process)? A story in which nothing changes is about as valuable as learning from a future story undifferentiated from the present: not at all.
Braiding stories: emplotting multi-directional trajectories over long horizons
These emotional skeletons, the form of the story, are an essential and overlooked ingredient in telling compelling stories of transition. Variability and fluctuations in the story are critical to crafting compelling stories that efficiently evoke change. And by building multiple story arcs and weaving them together for a multi-dimensional transitional story form that can be succinctly told as a “tale” that covers significant temporal space, transition storytellers “orchestrate a symphony of changes. It’s change that obsesses brains and keeps them engaged” (Storr, 2020, p. 196).
In the context of the TD approach, four distinct story forms are necessary to “braid” together to balance both the complexity of narrating the resolution of a wicked problem and the simplicity of communicating these resolutions as “tales” in order for stakeholders to use the stories as future artifacts to brainstorm and materialize ecologies of intervention. The four trajectories are
- stories of dismantlement, in which facets of the old world are exited from the system by design;
- stories of maintenance, in which facets of the old world need to remain as a constant for the preferred future to be achieved;
- stories of innovation, in which novelty in the present can grow and support the preferred future state of the system;
- and finally, stories of seeds of the future, early and precarious saplings that require some degree of dismantlement elsewhere in the system in order to fully take root and begin to grow.
Fig. 3: Emplotting braided story trajectories over long horizons
While similar to existing frameworks such as the 3 Horizons (Curry et al., 2008; Sharpe, 2020), Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) (Geels, 2011), and S-curve representations of innovation, there are distinct differences. First, there is a difference in the introduction of a pathway of maintenance and care, which oscillates but remains relatively steady. This reinforces the need for caring and ongoing investment and support in particular structures and behaviors that might otherwise degrade or disappear over the long term. Second, the traditional H2 does not necessarily wind down in H3. Instead, innovation merges into the pathway of maintenance and care, more consistent with an MLP in which innovation crystalizes at the regime level. The third and final distinction is the delay of the future fragments, the deliberate and strong relational tie, and acknowledgment of interdependence between the need to dismantle and make space for emergence.
The deliberate use of these narrative trajectories provides a form to the prospective story. Again, “Offering only fragments would have been the precise equivalent of smashing a vase, of revealing everything about a vase except its ultimate and unified affect when whole, which is to say: its form” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 23). Rather than offering a fragmented and disconnected flatland narrative, the braided and interdependent formalism of this approach supports the crafting of rich and compelling future narratives that aid in transporting and activating stakeholders to imagine ecologies of intervention.
Part 2: Negotiating the sagging middle of durational stories about the future
Beginning Middle and End stories (BME) are “fallacies,” a way of configuring and emplotting information in such a way as to artificially arrive at narrative cohesion (D. M. Boje, 2014). In future narratives, the beginning is typically the present day, and the end is almost invariably an arbitrary future unit of time (10 years into the future, 25 years into the future) or an arbitrary time horizon (2030, 2050, 2100). The middle of the story is dependent on the beginning and end, held captive, defined not by what it is but what is around it.
As mentioned earlier, stories about the future are crafted in large part so that we (whoever we might be) might learn from the future and then take some form of action in the present. Design futures’ practitioners using stories to evoke particular sorts of futures, be they scenarios, artifacts, proto, or provotypes, create the conditions for the intended and unintended imbibers of these stories to engage in a form of narrative inquiry. Three-dimensional narrative inquiry spaces is a concept developed to encapsulate the “personal and social (interaction); past, present and future (continuity); combined with the notion of place (situation)” colloquially referred to as being in the “midst” of stories (Jean Clandinin & Michael Connelly, 2004, p. 50). In the previous section, we explored adding depth in a durational story using simple prompts and story forms. For imbibers of the future story to remain in the midst of the future through discourse time requires a degree of narrative energy to maintain interest.
Antecedents of this work derive from several years of academic and real-world experience exploring tensions between the expected and preferred future and the transition pathways adopted by each. This work began in 2017 as part of a series of corporate workshops led by the author. It was applied in an academic setting first in 2019 when the author taught a course at the University of Houston’s Foresight Program Advanced Strategy and Planning. The core exploration is captured in the figures below while approached slightly differently in a boardroom versus a classroom.
In a boardroom setting, participants are often divided up using a heuristic approach leveraging the Three Horizons or Futures Triangle (Inayatullah, 2008) and asking individuals to “self-identify” as either drawn to managerial, entrepreneurial, or visionary ways of thinking and acting in the workplace (when using 3H) or whether they are drawn to the weight of the past, push of the present, or pull of the future when thinking about the future (when using futures triangle).
Then, the managerial participants or participants who identify with the weight of past and push of present (typically at least half the participants) are placed in one group and tasked with a series of activities to first acknowledge they and the various teams represented are all in slightly different temporal spaces, the nested present (Hodgson, 2013). Next, they are asked to consider the organization’s direction over the next 5 to 10 years and craft a pathway forward based on current conditions, trends, forecasts, etc. Finally, they articulate the challenges that arise along this pathway and how they are addressed in the form of milestones. See figure 4.
Fig. 4: Forecast Diagram
The second group of entrepreneurial and visionary, or pull of the future, participants are asked to start from the position of the 5 to 10 years out, the end-state of the activity. They first go through a series of exercises to define an aspirational future, then work backward from the preferred future as envisioned to the present, crafting milestones framed as achievements. See figure 5.
Fig. 5: Backcast Diagram
Finally, teams are brought together, and each tells their story, working from the present to the future, and the future back to the present. Then, a discussion is facilitated exploring the complexity of the present and future space, areas of alignment and misalignment in the transition pathway, as well as how (typically) the first group “undershoots” the preferred future articulated by the second group and the second group “overshoots” in moving backward towards the present.
Fig. 6: Forecast/Backcast Alignments and Tensions Diagram
Ultimately, the purpose of this exercise is to leverage the skill sets and temporal comfort zones of all stakeholders so that the final strategic transitional narrative has a degree of internal consistency and plausibility so that it may act as the blueprint for learning and materializing the preferred future. What was NOT the original intention of this activity but served as inspiration for multicasting is the capability of this multi-temporal directionality to generate narrative momentum. Next, we turn to the challenge of narrative momentum and how to support designers and futurists in crafting durational stories about the future.
Multicasting and Milestoning
The TD approach typically suggests three milestones vividly imagined between the present and the desired future, some 75 years from the present. This constitutes a relatively simple beginning-middle-end transition pathway narrative. Milestones act as “signposts” of material change in the existing system (Strong et al., 2007). They are typically short narratives emphasizing systems-level change in the domain space under exploration. It should be noted that this 75 year timeline is somewhat arbitrary. The underlying motivation of the suggested timeline is that the wicked problems with which design futures often choose to concern themselves have no silver bullet solution – solutions will take decades to nudge the system into material transformation. With such a long time horizon linked by stories of transformation, the challenge of maintaining narrative energy and momentum in the near-term future, and avoiding the “sagging middle” of the overarching story is a challenge. This issue can be addressed by crafting milestone imaginaries that are multi-directional temporarily. Conventional backcasting does not resolve this issue; it derives energy and momentum from the normative aspirational future. A hybrid technique using “transition scenarios” was developed that partially addresses this concern, constructing a midterm scenario from a long term scenario, one driving force at a time to bridge to the short-term future and, ultimately, the present (Hines et al., 2019). In multicasting, practitioners move from both the present towards the future in a nearcasting springboard in which the present context and the resolved future are synthesized, and the future towards the present, converging in a middle ground, the intermittent scaffolding necessary to bolster and sustain the durational and long-term nature of the future narratives being weaved together. This approach can be called multicasting: nearcasting, backcasting, and middlecasting.
Nearcasting
Nearcasting is a proposed alternative and rejection of forecasting, taking as its momentum and imaginative spirit the long-term vision for the future and current realities. Here, we might consider nearcasting as the shorter-term futures thinking derivative of long-term thinking. Nearcasting more explicitly considers the three dimensions of the futures triangle: the weight of the past, push of the present, and pull of the future compete in the social construction of futures imaginaries (Inayatullah, 2008). Put another way, the nearcast narrative derives its fidelity and urgency from the present, but its aspirational trajectory from the distant, aspirational future, thus addressing the tension between acting in the present and planning for the future (Keidel, 2010). Returning to Vonnegut’s rules, “a tale begins when its focal character or characters experience changes in fortune, and it ends when those fluctuations cease. All else is background” (Vonnegut, 1965, p. 43). Nearcasting are those early, hesitant steps in the system, acknowledging the necessity of short-term fixes and survival and early interventions to nudge the system in the desired direction.
Backcasting
Backcasting is a well-established method in futures studies dating back to the early 1980’s (Robinson, 1982). The term is used to describe a reverse chronological approach to exploring alternative futures, emphasizing the preferred versus the projected future, and learning and exploring solutions to, versus anticipating, outcomes to long-term problems (Dreborg, 1996). As the fields of futures, design, and social innovation have evolved, so too has the role and approach to backcasting, more recently taking on pluralistic and participatory (Tuominen et al., 2014) approaches to its application as a method in larger explorational contexts. Backcasting is a highly malleable method that starts from the positionality of a possible (and generally preferred) future as defined by research and stakeholder engagement, and works backward to the present to illuminate possible pathways to futures that might not otherwise emerge in a forecasting approach.
Middlecasting
Employing middlecasting in constructing rich and robust future milestones is motivated by the need to craft compelling and durational stories about the future within a realistic timeline in which the wicked problem under exploration is resolved. This resolution takes time, so the speculative resolution occurs in a distant time horizon from the present. Strategic planning takes a typical time horizon of 3 to 5 years out; foresight and futures are between 10 and 20 years. Hence, durational stories that exceed this time horizon require unique storytelling tools to ensure meaningful and evocative stories that can inspire changemakers to envision the aspirational future and imagine ecologies of intervention that lead to this aspirational future.
Middlecasting provides the scaffolding on which to construct a midpoint, a middle space that draws on the short-term “thick future” tethered to the present in the 10-20 year time horizon and from the opposite end of the temporal spectrum, tethering the long-term “almost” achieved future milestone with the vision for the future. By connecting the short-term future with the present and the long-term future with the vision of the resolution of the wicked problem, a narrative gap must be filled, linking the short to the long-term futures. This is the space of middlecasting, of “Fun and Games” where the dismantling activities in the present and near term future are amplified and gain traction and speed, where efforts to dismantle, along with maintenance of generative legacy facets of the future, along with innovation efforts, support the emergence of new and hitherto unknown or “unimaginable” future facets to take root and grow in the system, which then also contributes to the demise of the old system and the adoption of innovative ways of being in this new world.
Procedural steps for nearcast, backcasting, middlecasting activity
- Articulate the vision of the future
- Nearcast towards the preferred future in the “thick” short-term present: In which we explore the near-term future we wish to bring about to begin the long journey of untangling the wicked problem.
- Prospect retrospectively backward from the preferred future to the “thick” long-term future: In which we articulate the long-term aspirational vision as it nears as a realized goal, where the wicked problem has been largely resolved.
- Buttress the “messy middle” that links the near-term future with the long-term future with the middle-term future, the radical middle space in which, arguably, the most significant shift in the system takes place: In which we tell the story of the messy-middle between the realization of a near future as a positive step forward and the aspirational resolution of the wicked problem
Another way of conceptualizing the multi-directional narrative momentum is to think of building a bridge across a wide and deep valley. Four teams of builders work together. One on each side of the valley, working towards the middle, and two in the middle, building upwards and then splitting off outwards in each direction. The intention is to draw on the energy and momentum of both the current context and the aspirational future, leading to a rich and durational narrative about the future.
Conclusion: Igniting Ecologies of Intervention
Crafting durational stories about the future is a practical exercise in storytelling and a critical skill set for design futurists who wish to shape meaningful change in the world around them. Stories communicate in order to support a shift in thinking away from the expected or projected future and articulate a preferred alternative future and pathways to that future. This shift is meant to inspire ideas and proposed ecologies of intervention that will slowly nudge the system toward the preferred future. Narratives help us make sense of the world, both in the past, the present, and the future, and act as calibrating or guiding stars, in which we will never manage a straight line forward but rather tack towards it, much like in sailing. These stories act as journey maps, transition pathways, through storworlds by forming and weaving long-term narrative threads together and scaffolding the nearcast and backcast with a middlecast.
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Appendix A
Procedural example: narrative trajectories and multicasting worksheet
Purpose: To support participants in thinking multi-temporally (from present to the near and medium term future, and from the distant preferred future into the long-term and medium term future) and across multiple narrative trajectories (working, not, innovation, future fragments) in order to design richer multi-facet ecologies of intervention that are reflective of the complex and multi-pronged approach needed to address wicked problems. The four narrative trajectories support the crafting of ecologies of dismantling, ecologies of maintenance, ecologies of innovation and ecologies of imaginaries. In essence, these series of prompts should help students or transition design storytellers braid or weave stories about the future – producing rich tapestries to add depth, richness, and nuance to ecologies of intervention and eventual roadmaps and plans.
Table 1: multicasting worksheet
Step 1: Nearcasting
In which we explore the near-term future we wish to bring about in order to begin the long journey of untangling the wicked problem. |
Step 3: Middlecasting
In which we tell the story of the system’s tipping point, the messy-middle between the realization of a near future as a positive step forward and the aspirational resolution of the wicked problem. |
Step 2: Backcasting
In which we articulate the long-term aspirational vision as it nears as a realized goal, where the wicked problem has been largely resolved. |
Part 1 Narrating Transition Trajectories
Not Working Where has the work of transitioning “out” already started and where is it happening next? What material manifestations of dismantling have occurred and where are there signs of successful non-material acts of winding down? Where are the areas most in need of dismantling that are currently “stuck” and may need time and other forms of intervention before we can begin the process of winding down? |
Not Working
Where are the clear signs of success in the dismantling and how has this manifested in patterns of life? Where has the dismantling been completed and where has it yet to begin and why? Where has this dismantling accelerated and where has it snapped back because of reaction and pushback in the system? What will nudge the system towards the additional dismantling that needs to take place. |
Not Working
What residue or trace of the old system still exists today? The last vestiges in the process of being stamped out? How has the dismantling of the old been represented in historical narratives? What possible emergent challenges have arisen that may need to be dismantled that were previously hidden or didn’t previously exist?
|
What is Working
What positive facets of the present have been carried forward into this future? What are the implications of this carrying forward? Have these facets carried forward unchallenged and unexamined? Or has it been a struggle to maintain them? If so, why? |
What is Working
How has the maintenance of certain traditions, rituals, and value systems been tended to? What has been sacrificed, lost, and gained by maintaining these areas, and how has the perspectives on them perhaps changed? With the gift of hindsight, what is the “timing” of this maintenance trajectory? Does it fluctuate up and down? Is it cyclical? What have been the challenges that have come with maintaining these areas? Where have these areas helped to accelerate the system into the preferred future, and where has it perhaps hindered or slowed these efforts? |
What is Working
What facets of the future vision exist today? What is already “on track” to achieve the overall vision of the resolved wicked problem? How has the reliance individually and collectively on this stable trajectory helped to realize the future vision? |
Emerging Innovation
What niche innovations (material and non-material) have started to bear fruit? How did they successfully emerge and how do they now manifest in this space? Are they ubiquitous to the point of invisibility? Or still carry a sense of novelty about them? |
Emerging Innovation
Where have innovations led to new and exciting possibilities? How have innovations carved out space for bolder and more aspirational future fragments to grow? Where, perhaps, have some innovations outlived their usefulness and now act as a minor but persistent barrier to necessary change in the system? Where have innovations led to “stuckness” in the system? |
Emerging Innovation
How have niche innovations become entirely or perhaps mostly invisible? Where have they long ago stopped being innovative and now simply exist? Where have innovations perhaps served the purpose they set out to serve and no longer are a part of the system but have been shed? |
Future Fragments
Where are the seeds of the future? Areas or facets of opportunity buried beneath the earth but present? What is perhaps too aspirational to achieve in the short term that, given the proper conditions and the dismantling of pieces of the existing system, could begin to grow and flourish in the medium to longer-term future? |
Future Fragments
How have seeds of the future begun to take root and grow, becoming present and influencing ways of being and knowing in the world? What future fragments are only now starting to tentatively emerge as the work of dismantling and innovation creates new spaces of opportunity for the future to begin to grow and flourish? |
Future Fragments
Where are there seeds of a future beyond the aspirational long term future that keeps the vision dynamic and always in the process of coming into being? What new energizing opportunities keep our vision from atrophying? |
Part 2 Deepening into the Future
Storyworld
Take these 4 trajectories and tell the “systems level” story, the storyworld, of these 4 trajectories and how they manifest over the time period in question, from the present to the outer limits of this future milestone. Imagine you are in this future-space. What do you see? How are things different from the present, specifically in relation to the untangling of the wicked problem? Individually, craft a brief “day in the life” of someone (yourself or otherwise) who has lived through this period of transition, and are now living at the end of this milestone story. Compare the “day in the life” with others in your group, now explore the gaps and tensions between the imagined lived experience of your future self/future persona, and the world you have collectively articulated. Bring the storyworld and the individual narratives together into a single, high-fidelity milestone narrative. |
Storyworld
Take these 4 trajectories and tell the “systems level” story, the storyworld, of these 4 trajectories and how they manifest over the time period in question, from the present to the outer limits of this future milestone. Imagine you are in this future-space. What do you see? How are things different from the present, specifically in relation to the untangling of the wicked problem? Individually, craft a brief “day in the life” of someone (yourself or otherwise) who has lived through this period of transition, and are now living at the end of this milestone story. Compare the “day in the life” with others in your group, now explore the gaps and tensions between the imagined lived experience of your future self/future persona, and the world you have collectively articulated. Bring the storyworld and the individual narratives together into a single, high-fidelity milestone narrative. |
Storyworld
Take these 4 trajectories and tell the “systems level” story, the storyworld, of these 4 trajectories and how they manifest over the time period in question, from the present to the outer limits of this future milestone. Imagine you are in this future-space. What do you see? How are things different from the present, specifically in relation to the untangling of the wicked problem? Individually, craft a brief “day in the life” of someone (yourself or otherwise) who has lived through this period of transition, and are now living at the end of this milestone story. Compare the “day in the life” with others in your group, now explore the gaps and tensions between the imagined lived experience of your future self/future persona, and the world you have collectively articulated. Bring the storyworld and the individual narratives together into a single, high-fidelity milestone narrative. |
Part 3 Ecologies of Intervention
Now that the milestone pathways to the aspirational future vision have been crafted, consider ecologies of intervention that take into consideration: Scale (individual to planet) STEEP (economic, social, etc.) Trajectory Pathways (not working, working, emerging innovation, future fragments) Brainstorm ecologies of intervention across all trajectory pathways to articulate: Ecologies of Dismantlement (to dismantle what isn’t working) Ecologies of Maintenance (to tend and care to what is working and needs to remain) Ecologies of Innovation (emerging spaces of innovation and dynamic, generative change) Ecologies of Imaginaries (future fragments that will become emerging innovation once physical and worldview conditions have evolved somewhat) |