Reflections on APFN2018 from a middle-aged designer/young futurist

KhaiSeng
KhaiSeng
Sep 1, 2018 · 5 min read

In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few. — Shunryu Suzuki

As I take beginner steps in Futures Thinking, coming from a background of design thinking and experience design, there was such a gold mine for learning at the 4th Asia Pacific Futures Network 2018 conference. I’ve attempted to put down some initial thoughts as deeper reflections simmer in the background. Here goes!

It is as meta as it gets

This conference has the highest concentration of PhDs I’ve seen, apart from an actual academic conference. To me, it means there’s a lot of intellectual weight put into this field. And because everyone is so intelligent, reflective and meta-cognitive, naturally futures thinking itself has turned out to be a meta-skill, similar to the ability to learn how to learn. I’ve always thought of design as also a meta-skill, but I’m realizing it’s not as meta as Futures Thinking.

How do I know? The true test of a meta-skill is when it draws people from extremely diverse backgrounds to the field. We had representations from fertility sciences, public policy, education, healthcare, sustainability, facilitation, coaching, technology, consulting, urban planning, spirituality, graphic design, financial services, mechanical engineering and design thinking. And that’s only the people I had the opportunity to meet! This is not something often seen in design circles I’ve had the chance to be in. It also shows how truly inclusive this field really is. 👍🏼

Time is relative

Yes I know Einstein said this a long ago, but I’m beginning to understand it in a different way. In the pre-conference evening panel, I heard that from a biologist’s view, 1000 years is a short time. There were also discussions around the Earth moving into a new geological epoch — the Anthropocene. This stretches my concept of time much further out.

Dr Anisah’s workshop on Day 1 unpacked it even more around our usual understanding of time being linear — there is a past, present and future in a straight line always moving forward. This sounded like common sense until she shared how workshop techniques used in Sierra Lione didn’t work so well because the participants could not map events on a linear timeline. They had a circular concept of time instead! Other fascinating ways to organize and describe time came up in our workshop discussions — by astronomical events, physical and conceptual spaces, events, networks, emotions and even by personal values. Another lesson I learnt is not to assume your workshop participants have the same constructs of even basic fundamentals like time as you do.

Dr Anisah exploring time by not talking about time

Do or do not

Dr Riel Miller brought in the concept of non-doing from Chinese philosophy. In my layman understanding, that doesn’t mean you just lie down and expect things to happen auto-magically. It means you still do things, but without efforting and grasping. There is an allowing for an emerging and adjacent possibility as you dedicate yourself to the present moment, without really focusing on specific futures.

Dr Riel Miller starting off with Lao Tzu

It sounds similar to the concept of flow, where you are doing but also not doing. When the duality disappears, what’s left is the formless void that is the pregnant space of possibilities — ready for people with anticipatory skills to midwife a new present into existence. I realise that what I just wrote may read like English but can sound like a foreign language or gobbledygook.

Giving new power to prayer

In multiple conversations, the concept of prayer came up. In the streets/temples/mosques/churches every day, people pray — assumingly about a (better) future. Apart from divine intervention, can we be skilled in creating interventions ourselves? Instead of going to the fortune teller, be the fortune maker.

There is also an assumption that power lies in whoever is being prayed to. Could there be another way? Where the prayer and prayee (?) both have different types of powers. In a way, I’m suggesting not to take away any (divine) power from the prayee, but see power as a non-zero-sum game and imbue the prayer with some power to influence the future themselves as well. That’s probably where futures literacy comes in.

Once you invent something once, you can invent it again.

I shared in the last segment of the conference that it was deja-vu for me. Design thinking started small and exploded in popularity around 10 years ago, and I’m confident Futures Thinking can do the same. It would be useful to learn from how other fields have expanded well as well as also learning from the growth pains that follow a field’s increasing popularity and power. Quick reflections on my personal lived experiences from the field of design thinking:

  1. Instead of speaking to the converted, scale by moving into other fields and speaking their language.
  2. Work where they are, not where we are — in terms of space, level of knowledge/skill and readiness.
  3. Make it easy to understand — yes there may be a multitude of methods, processes and perspectives, but have one that can be easily communicated, understood and practiced as a beginner.
  4. There will be naysayers who say that quality has to be maintained. But just because you aren’t a genius like Mozart, it doesn’t mean you should stop yourself from learning music. Have the conversation as a global practice on the polarities of quality vs scale and centralization vs decentralization.

All in all, it was an amazing 2 days that has filled me with gratitude from meeting people so willing to connect and share. While I may be considered a middle-aged designer now, it seems new life has been born as a young year-old Futures thinker.

It was an honour to meet all these change makers working at whole systems level

Side note: As a new personal practice, I’m really shooting from the hip here instead of my usual planning for days with 10–20 rewrites before I allow it to see the light of day. If for some reason I offend someone or step beyond boundaries due to my writing, that is not my intention 😊

KhaiSeng

Written by

KhaiSeng

Formerly led the Foolproof Singapore studio. User Experience designer/educator and developmental coach. Interested in mindfulness, Futures literacy and OD.

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