Creating Future News

I’m at a crucial stage of my final year thesis: the part where I need to produce, where I need to create a cohesive whole, an entire vision of what my idea will look like.

I attend OCAD University, Canada’s largest art school, where I study Advertising. In our thesis program, you can choose two paths: solve a problem that an existing company is facing through advertising, or start your own company and advertise that.

I chose the later.

And the idea behind my company is a weird one.

My startup is about creating a new kind of news: speculative journalism. It reports future news stories based on current events. Its mission is to create a more informed society by figuring out possible outcomes of today’s key decisions. We’d all have a better worldview if it was a longer view, one that had a good understanding of where today’s most impactful decisions and events were taking our world. An informed present, my thinking goes, knows its futures.

That idea, as weird as it is, comes from the practice of speculative design.

Speculative design is a way of solving unanswerable problems by speculating and designing on possible outcomes. Design solves problems, but not all problems have an elegant solution. A speculative designer seeks to lend comment to complex problems that don’t have solutions that can be easily mocked up.

Global Warming is a good example. There’s no quick fix, or elegant, yet complex solution as there’s too many stakeholders to account for. A designer could speculate on a future rid of global warming and do what all-great designers do: give form to their thinking. They might craft an artifact that would engage present viewers’ minds into questioning our current attitudes towards global warming, making viewers wonder about the future they want and the one they don’t. The conversation that the piece starts is where the design truly lives: coaxing people to engage at a level of depth they wouldn’t have if they didn’t have an experience with a tangible object from a time they’d never experienced, yet.

A designer could speculate on a future rid of global warming and do what all-great designers do: give form to their thinking.

My thesis packages these ideas into the constructs of journalism. My eventual company would publish long articles, written in the narrative style of the best longform that story-tells rather than reports. The articles would cover current issues, rigorously researched and astutely extrapolated into the future with the use of speculative writing, or fiction.

This potent mix of researched fact and narrative fiction would allow people to visit a plausible future, one that would seem real and tangible, filled with hard fact and imagined ones (that were grounded in fact), describing our current world, but through a different vantage point.

The time seems right for this kind of venture. Art projects like the Yes Men’s special edition of The New York Times have come before it, and The Economist started The World If. Vice has gotten into the world of futures with Motherboard, releasing a speculative design film of a future not so far from our own next week (starring Pamela Anderson! Big names taking on design fiction, people!) and Slate has a blog, co-produced with Arizona State University and New America all about how new technologies shape our future. And finally, Scout, a recently well funded Kickstarter initiative hopes to write articles on technology, economics and morality and bring them to life in the future with a paired science fiction story.

My initiative proposes to join these extraordinary and well-produced group of precedents, yet utilize a different format. Rather than separating fact and futures, it combines them into one compelling narrative. And unlike some futures initiatives which come out once or rarely, my initiative functions like the news does: acting as a constant feedback loop with the world. When a major event happens, my website will report its future outcomes.

It’s important to realize that this initiative isn’t in the prediction business. Predictions are small, squelching imagination and the opportunity for raw human ingenuity to occur. This new news initiative functions in the world of possibilities. No one can predict the future, but reporting what’s possible can expand the mind’s worldview.

As I’ve recently started describing it, the job of this new news initiative is to beta-tests futures.

That’s the key idea of the advertising campaign: #futuresinbeta.

There are many questions on the table as I try to figure out the grand scheme of things:

What’s the name (right now it’s Spectus) and what will the identity look like?

How do we convince people to read this?

How do we create a cohesive communications platform around this?

How does the UI separate fact and fiction transparently for readers in articles?

Is there are way to have users generate future possibilities?

It’ll all come together!

The first product has launched. It’s a weekly newsletter that catches you up on that week’s major story by contemplating its future.

Now the rest needs to follow.