4. The future doesn’t exist: Scenarios and prediction
‘The future is not predictable, but it can be shaped.’ Stuart Candy
I’m writing this in a deserted office in East London in June 2020. This part of the city, which is normally bustling and noisy, has fallen utterly silent in the last two months. For the first time since I’ve been here, I can hear the call to prayer echoing over the streets from the East London Mosque.
This is both the most-expected and least-expected future. When it comes to pandemics, we’ve had so many warnings and near misses, we could not have been more prepared. At the same time, no-one predicted the way this would unfold: social distancing, a third of the world in some kind of lockdown, and economies deliberately paused.
The tentative pathway out of lockdown for the 2.6 billion people currently experiencing some form of confinement is unclear and qualified, and will certainly be interrupted by major shocks. (As I write this, protests in the US over racist policing are being inflamed by the administration, and in Asia, the onset of the wet season has already seen several massive typhoons. The world doesn’t pause, even if many of our plans have to.) Any forecasts for the next few years are speculative, at best.
Alongside complex systems, much of my work involves modelling possible futures — creating rich scenarios of futures using narrative, design and gaming. Projects like CrimeForce: LoveTeam with Jordan Prosser, a narrative deep dive into the future of pop music and genetic surveillance, fall into the realm of what Stuart Candy has described as ‘experiential futures’.
So what’s the point of looking to the future? Why bother trying to predict what is fundamentally unpredictable?
Futures Studies
‘The future does not exist. The ultimate reason to engage in futures work, then, and especially to create scenarios — which are merely tools to help us think — is to enrich our perceptions and options in the evolving present.’ — Stuart Candy
Futures Studies is a loose label for a diverse field of practitioners including academics, consultants, scientists and artists. Emerging from post-World War II thinktanks, it’s grown to be a bustling field of international thinkers who draw on history, earth system sciences, politics and sociology.
The core principle across the spectrum of Futures Studies is this: the future cannot be predicted.
Futures Studies is an active process of identifying trends, contemplating possibilities and sketching scenarios. What futurists provide is not a prophetic timeline of the years to come, but set of scenarios that embody the different directions our society might go in.
A scenario is an imagined vision of the future, described in graphs or text or images. The value of this Futures Studies lies not in the accuracy of any given future scenario, but from having a range of them.
Futurist Daniel Bell wrote back in 1967:
‘What is central to the present future studies is not an effort to ‘predict’ the future, as if this were some far-flung rug of time unrolling to some distant point, but the effort to sketch ‘alternative futures’ — in other words, the likely results of different choices, so that the polity can understand costs and consequences of different desires.’
Although technically there is no limit to the hypothetical alternative futures we could imagine, in practice, futurists tend to limit their speculation to a few archetypal scenarios — typically, four.
Jim Dator from the Hawaii Research Center for Future Studies justifies this practice by saying:
‘Over the years, we have learned that all of the billions of images of the future that exist in the minds and actions of humans can be lumped into four “generic” images of the futures that serve as motivations for human individual and group behavior. Whenever we are asked, “so what is the future,” we reply, “there are four alternative futures.”
The names for these scenarios change around a bit, but I’ve come to know them as Growth, Collapse, Discipline and Transformation.
How to make a scenario
In 2016, filmmaker Jordan Prosser and I were in residence at the University of Melbourne Lab-14 Studios to develop scenarios about the future of youth culture and genetic surveillance.
Our approach to creating these scenarios was a method we call ‘turning the dials’. In this process, you take something that might change in the future, and imagine several different possibilities for how it might change.
In our CrimeForce project, we asked the question, ‘In the year 2050, how much does the government track the population genetically?’ There’s a spectrum from ‘a lot’ at one end to ‘not that much’ at the other.
We could pick four points on that axis and for each one ask ourselves: What might the world look like if in 30 years time if there is massive genetic surveillance? What might it look like if there is very little? What kind of choices might take us there, and what might it look like to live in that future?
4-quadrant models
Many future scenarios are presented in the ‘4-quadrant’ format. These basically use the ‘turning the dials’ approach on two axes.
Taking our first axis of ‘how much does the govt track the population genetically’, we then add another axis. This time, for us, it was, ‘How widespread is countersurveillance technology?’ At one end of the spectrum, countersurveillance tech is widely available to the general public, and at the other end, it’s tightly controlled.
We place these two axes on an X and Y graph, and we create 4 quadrants, outlining four possible futures. Now it was a case of imagining what each of these worlds might look like — which is a creative exercise of speculating, questioning those speculations, and trying to imagine possible second order consequences for each of these outcomes.
The 4-quadrant model comes up again and again in futures practice. Some examples:
Creating scenarios is storytelling
Maybe one of the most useful things that this process taught me is that devising future scenarios is a creative exercise.
This is true whether you’re doing it yourself, brainstorming on a piece of paper, or if you’re producing economic forecasts for a government agency. No matter how much you dress them up in numbers or statistics, any scenario is a creative fiction.
The question, then, is whether or not they are useful.
Experiential Futures
Most future scenarios end up as a slide on a powerpoint presentation, or as a graph on a pdf on some organisation’s website. If that’s where your scenario ends up, I think it’s probably pretty useless.
For me, a scenario becomes useful when it becomes a provocation for discussion, reflection and planning. The best way to make that happen is to animate that scenario in some way
Stuart Candy coined the term ‘Experiential Futures’ to refer to visual media, film, industrial design, theatre and games which embody elements of hypothetical futures. It’s a practice that seeks to ‘de-abstractify’ how the future might look using the tools and techniques of the arts.
Stuart Candy’s guerilla futures approach is a great example, installing ‘future artifacts’ in urban spaces to prompt people to consider the future. This is a plaque commemorating victims of a pandemic that hasn’t happened yet.
My favourite futures practitioners are UK futures studio Superflux. They create physical manifestations of possible futures, using video, story and sculpture. Their recent Mitigation of Shock is a brilliant example of the form. Superflux director Anab Jain explains it:
‘(Mitigation of Shock) is set in a future Singaporean HDB apartment that looks out onto the flooded city that has been transformed to mitigate the effects of climate change … Inspired by permaculture, we adopted the principles of circular farming, reuse of waste, companion planting and soil health to create a permanent, indoor agriculture system, in a situation where outdoor farming is not much of an option. The idea is to make the home more of a multi-species microcosm — rather than growing systems on the periphery, you live through and amongst them … Looking out (of the apartment window), one can see a different, very wet and humid Singapore, that despite rising sea levels and flooding, is thriving within a seemingly re-wilded landscape.’
For CrimeForce, Jordan and I turned our scenarios about biosurveillance into an interactive experience for a live audience.
In the year 2050, a member of a popular boy band has been murdered, and the police are on the hunt for his killer.
This story takes place in four different futures — four different possibilities for what the world of 2050 might look like. The characters are the same, the crime is the same, but in each scenario, the world is very different — and in only one of these scenarios does the killer get caught.
It is up to the audience to help solve it, by making decisions in the present day that might lead to the future where the murderer gets caught.
Within that playful framing, we bring in discussions about the ethics of DNA databases, algorithmic justice and the evolution of pop culture.
The framework we developed for CrimeForce — exploring future scenarios through a live game where players shape the future through decisions in the present day — is endlessly adaptable. We’ve already repurposed it to explore the future of nature documentaries, the future of rewilding and ecology, and the future of medical research.
We’re currently turning it into a piece looking at post-covid politics through the lens of a love story set in 2035, drawing on the brilliant Grey Briefings scenarios.
Why is this useful at this moment? Well, because right now our situation is very chaotic, we feel like events are rushing at us out of our control.
Often futurists create scenarios to help break us out of the assumption that the future is going to look like the past. Imagining different visions of what the future might look like is a way of reminding people that things do change, quite drastically.
But right now we’re obviously in a moment of massive change. We don’t need to be reminded that abrupt and serious change is possible — we’re seeing it. We’ve crossed a threshold and we’re in a state of real future shock.
In moments like this, as Noah Raford pointed out, scenarios can help us make of what we’re seeing. The onslaught of news and current events can be confusing and chaotic. Future scenarios allow us to say, the future might look like this, or this, or this.
Every new headline can then be considered in the light of those scenarios. You can say, ‘Ahhh, this piece of news feels like it’s moving us towards the ‘Pyramid’ scenario, and this piece of news feels more like we’re trending towards the ‘Leviathan’ future.’ So scenarios become a way of helping us process information in an otherwise chaotic news environment.
In that way, generating and reflecting on future scenarios should simply be a part of our cognitive toolkit — a way for us to better handle the present moment, as well as a way to act proactively in the face of complexity and fear.
‘It may be the end of the world as we know it, but other worlds are possible.’
— Anab Jain
1. We live in systems: Becoming aware of what surrounds us
The disasters were designed by us — cuckoo clocks vs ants nests — the humility of systems thinking — seeing deep patterns — my practice as a writer, theatre artist and game designer, tools & techniques for thinking about the world
2. How to make a model: The art of systems modelling
What is a model? — maps on napkins vs satellite images — as simple as possible but no simpler — Best Festival Ever: modelling a disaster
3. A snapshot of everything: Tools for systems mapping
Mapping a Swedish forest — thousand year old oak trees — resilience assessments — a walk through the woods — Democratic Nature —
4. The future doesn’t exist: Scenarios and prediction
Why bother trying to predict the future? — the practice of creating scenarios — there are four possible futures — CrimeForce: LoveTeam
5. Narrative in systems: How to tell stories about complexity
Are theatre shows systems models? — underdog narratives & police procedurals — perspectives on an Indonesian rainforest in 95 Years or Less
6. Creating an experience: What design and dramaturgy teach us about worldbuilding
Theatre as rehearsal for revolution — dramaturgy & design thinking — tactility in Get The Kids and Run — collective experiences in Gobyerno
7. Don’t play games, make games: Interactivity in complex systems
Games are systems — game theory in Temperature Check — calculating risk in Busy Mayors — skilltesters vs decision-makers in Run A Bank
8. Lessons learned
Final thoughts — steering 9 billion people through a century of climate and global change — working with time instead of against it -
