In many futures conversations, the most important futures are the ones no one names. Sometimes they’re avoided because they feel too political, too uncomfortable, or too implausible. Sometimes people assume others don’t want to hear them. Sometimes they’re hard to...
Curiosity is often treated as a personality trait, a thing that you either have or don’t. But in futures and foresight work (and no doubt in other creative practices), curiosity functions more like a muscle that can be strengthened, weakened, or neglected over time....
Planned obsolescence is often discussed as a moral problem, and so it is. It does real damage, socially and ecologically. But it’s also something else: a future assumption baked into design. Products designed to fail, wear out, or become obsolete rely on a very...
Futures work asks people to question assumptions, imagine alternatives, and sit with uncertainty. None of that happens when participants are passive for too long. One of the most useful ideas I’ve borrowed from teaching and learning design is Wes Kao’s State Change...
Futures don’t become actionable because they’re clever. They become actionable because people recognise themselves in them. That recognition only happens through participation. That means participants speaking, listening, reacting, disagreeing, building on each...
When futures work fails, it’s tempting to blame the method. Maybe the scenarios were too abstract. Maybe the time horizon was wrong. Maybe the data wasn’t robust enough. Sometimes that’s true. But more often, what I’ve seen is something else: the futures work didn’t...
