Four Futures: a Speculative Method

An intro to a Speculative Tourism method we use to free our political imaginations from utopian and dystopian biases

This post is a first in a series documenting methods used in Speculative Tourism workshops. This effort to document our existing methods and experiment with new ones is kindly supported by the Mozilla Foundation.

Adapted from the eponymous Peter Frase 2016 book, Four Futures is currently our basic method, the starting point for most Speculative Tourism workshops.

slide taken from Frase’s presentation at the 2016 book launch

In his book, Frase describes four extreme but possible scenarios for the future of human society after the inescapable collapse of capitalism as we currently know it. To come up with those scenarios, Frase first describes to axes of grand shifts in global conditions: towards either a more equal or more class-divided society, and towards more plentiful or more limited material conditions.

Frase then writes a chapter for each quadrant created by the juxtaposition of these axes, where he names the society it births and attempts at fleshing out its intricacies.

We absolutely adore the framework of the book, and decided to extract it, sans Frase’s content, and use it in our workshops. It has since proven to be an excellent jumping board for the kind of responsible speculative thinking we aim for. Below is a description of our version of the process.

To begin this exercise we ask ourselves broad questions about the future, and when we have enough of them we try to identify those of them that have two distinct qualities:

1. We are truly uncertain of what the future holds for this issue.
2. We can roughly place the possible answers on an axis between two extremes.

Such questions and their matching axes can be, for example:

• What is the future of social castes? The answers lie somewhere between equality and hierarchy.
• How will the future look for societal relations? The answers could lie somewhere between solidarity and individuation.
• What is the future of the tensions between Nature and Culture? The answer lies somewhere between humanity prevailing over nature, and nature prevailing over humanity.

We call these questions “Axes of Uncertainty”.

We proceed to take two of these axes and cross them, creating a matrix. In the example below we’ve created a matrix with two of the axes mentioned above:

We then attempt to imagine how a future society might function in each of these quadrants, again in broad strokes:

Note that the answers are never obvious. The phrasing of the questions, the two qualities at the ends of an axis, and the contents of a quadrant are all open to interpretation. So is the length of descriptions: it could be a single word or a full paragraph. A shorter definition is not necessarily better.

Here is a matrix I made in a workshop earlier this year with the same axes. I was in a different mood and wrote much longer descriptions. I also imagined something completely different for the upper-right quadrant. It is just as valid.

An interesting thing usually happens in this stage; even though we purposefully chose issues about which we are uncertain, some quadrants seem to us clearly as either good or bad:

The beautiful thing about the Four Futures method, is that there will always be a quadrant or two that surprises us, that our judgement does not automatically categorize as utopian or dystopian:

At this point in a Speculative Tourism workshop we will tend to choose one of these unexpected quadrants, the ones we can’t judge as quickly, and flesh it out (using advanced methods) into a future scenario that we perhaps wouldn’t have otherwise conceived.

This is what we’re aiming for when we speak about “freeing our political imagination” in our project.

As a final note, starting a workshop with Four Futures has proven to be a very good conversation starter for collaborative writing. In many of our workshops the amount of participants necessitates that people write together (which is often good in and of itself!). We then start things off by asking each participant to come up with a single Axis of Uncertainty, and then walk around the room, pitching axes to each other and trying to find a juxtaposition that seems interesting and perhaps surprising. It’s a good way to find writing partners who’s minds go to very different questions than one’s own, which can lead to more fruitful dialog and more robust speculations.