Past + Future = Present Action
a beginner’s guide to time travel and shape shifting
Introduction
Look Around: Up, Down, Backwards, and Forwards
While seeking to address a problem, it is common to look at what is right in front of you: the common ways the problem is currently talked about; its stereotypical definition. However, by peering across spatial and temporal planes, a broader understanding of how the problem became wicked and how it might resolve can help you and your collaborators get unstuck and see new avenues inspired by past pathways. The Spatio-Temporal Matrix helps us see beyond the common and current.
A Day in a Future Life
From there, it is helpful to make future visions tangible by imagining the everyday implications for someone engaging in a future world in which the wicked problem in question is resolved. Starting by understanding what beliefs and values must change for the problem to be resolved as well as how stakeholder hopes, desires, fears, and concerns will shape what change is possible, one can develop a broad understanding of how the future world would be different. From there, taking out a magnifying glass and sketching out through narrative the everyday implications of such a future will allow you, your collaborators, but also members of the community you would like to engage to wrap their heads around what the future could be like if there is collaborative effort to work towards the resolution of the problem.
How might we get there?
Lastly, once a future vision is established, it becomes possible to trace back from that future to imagine what events and interventions might have had to occur to get us there. This is known as backcasting. Charting these hypothetical events can provide insights and ideas for interventions to pursue now and in the near-future as you start peering from the present into the next 5, 10, 20 years of realistic action.
Framing areas of the wicked problem as tame tractable problems takes a wildly complex problem space and turns it into something that more traditional problem solving practices (communication design, product design, interaction design, service design, policymaking, activism and organizing, program development, engineering) can grapple with and propose and design interventions to address. It is important to recognize the differences between a strategic plan and a forecasted futures. Plans are often rigid whereas futures are often more pliable. Plans are ways to get to a (single) future, whereas futures are ways the future may end up. As you and your collaborators proceed to enact change, to plant trees that will grow and ripple across the system, you want to propose plans yet ones that are flexible enough to allow for uncertainty, leading to multiple futures. You want to create, “projects in the present, informed by the future”.
Spatio-Temporal Matrix
Each question in the spatio-temporal matrix is targeted at unlocking an insight about the past, present, or future that might inspire or inform interventions in the now and near.
In order for a wicked problem resolve in the future, the beliefs that underpin it and keep it wicked will also need to resolve; to shift. The following exercise was useful in terms of completing both the spatio-temporal matrix and the next phase, a future vision. I identified the top beliefs that underpin the wicked problem now—many of them pulled from my original wicked problem map. Then for each belief, I came up with a foil to that belief that aligns with a future in which the pathology of the current belief is resolved.
I found the “past” column a very effective way of summarizing the events and insights from the Multi-Level Perspective Grid (MLP) completed in the last assignment, Mapping a Socio-Technical Transition. While at first I expected the rows of the matrix to map to the rows of the MLP (high level <> landscape, primary level <> regime, lower level <> niche), this was not always the case. This was particularly true in the difference between the everyday activities which the lower systems level row asks about and the incubation-quality of the niche. The MLP process would benefit from tracking shifts in everyday activities, informed by social practice theory.
A Vision of a Resolved Future
As the spatio-temporal matrix alludes, visions of a resolved future are instrumental in aiming and informing efforts to address a wicked problem.
I began the process of creating a narrative of everyday life in a resolved future by completing the above “shifts in beliefs” exercise. Then I brainstormed concepts for future interventions that could be necessary to influence a future in which the wicked problem is resolved. I sketched some of the most promising concepts out to get a sense of how they might manifest.
After mulling over the beliefs, concepts, and stakeholder relations I noted a revised set of “guiding beliefs”.
- I honed in on the idea that you are responsible for the emissions that you have caused, directly or indirectly. This challenges the “accomplice” or “bystander” role that anyone who drives a fossil-fuel car or purchases electricity created with fossil-fuels. Rather than pointing the finger at industrial sources and automobile manufacturers, we have to accept there are fingers pointing at ourselves.
- I recognized that many of the concepts I created were about the visibility of pollution. We either try to hide pollution by moving its sources outward or we deny our responsibility for it but similarly shifting its production behind the scenes to the transport or manufacture of our valued goods. If it is harder for us to deny the ways we indirectly commission emissions then we will have to take responsibility.
- The final core belief is that having clean air is worth the effort, recognizing if a large shift is needed then that is what it takes. In the future, there is a willingness to stomach change for clean air.
Finally, I thought about the qualities of a resolved future. What are the measures, metrics, and norms that will be true then? This helped me move from more abstract beliefs and concepts to tangible effects. Finally, I started to think about potential future scenarios or narrative threads that could illustrate this sought after future best.
The narrative of “budgeting air emissions as a family”, including how such emissions are measured and how credits are bartered, struck me as fundamental and complex enough to allow for consideration of a variety of influences such a regime change would have. Here I thought about how that system might evolve. Then I identified different story points, essentially official and unofficial “touchpoints”, for this new system. I quickly identified that portraying an enthusiastic, savvy character in opposition to her foil would allow for an interesting comparison, debunking the idea that a resolved future requires full and total cooperation. Finally, I laid out the two storylines in parallel.
Designing Interventions
To begin the process of designing interventions, I decided to use the method backcasting. I started by defining some of the high-level statements that would have to be true in 2050 (in 30 years) for the problem of poor air quality in Pittsburgh to be resolved.
I then backcasted from this resolved state to the present. I found as I went that many of the ultimate objectives I had would need to be reached before the 2050 ‘deadline’ if the toughest objective, “no illnesses due to poor air quality”, was to be achieved. It is important to note that this process was very abbreviated and a richer exercise might uncover a number of other pathways and rely more heavily on research. A formal backcasting exercise could become a fundamental tool in the transition design toolkit. It would be interesting to complete backcasting within the framework of the Multi-Level Perspective Grid.
Possible Near-Term Interventions
Micro/Niche
- Accountability for Emissions: Self-contained Continuous Sensor**
- Electric Car Ride-sharing Fleet (mix Zipcar and Uber/Lyft)
- Powered Bicycles
Mezzo/Regime
- Electric Cars with a Longer Range
- Encourage Public Transit Ridership Through Marketing and Service Improvements
- Get High-Emission Cars Off The Streets with an Age Restriction or Penalty**
Macro/Landscape
- Shift to Nuclear Energy as Primary Source**
Project Definition
Project 1: Accountability for Emissions: Self-contained Continuous Sensor
This project emphasizes making it possible to hold sources responsible for their emissions. It could be used to keep a guerilla eye on industrial sources by modernizing a practicing known as “fenceline monitoring”. It could also enable monitoring of smaller sources for which it is currently too expensive or impractical to monitor, such as automobiles (particularly heavy trucks) or chimneys. A large component of the project would involve developing a low-cost air quality sensor that could monitor all six criteria pollutants and continuously stream and save this data to the cloud. This could be used at first for private use but eventually could be used for regulation of large and small sources.
This project is at the niche/micro-level because its development does not need the support of the regime and thus could happen in a niche. It also works on the level of the everyday by making everyday actions—uses of polluting mechanisms—visible through monitoring and tracking over time.
Project 2: Get High-Emission Cars Off The Streets with an Age Restriction or Penalty
This project is aimed at removing high-emission cars from commission so that the fleet that is on the streets becomes zero or low-emissions. Fortunately other states, particularly California, have programs that could be used as a model. Pittsburgh may not have jurisdiction to introduce and enforce such a program so support might need to be found at the county or state levels.
This project functions primarily at the regime/mezzo-level because it shifts the regime/problem head-on. Such change is often difficult because it directly challenges the status quo—people’s comfort zone. This is why shifts in the regime like this are often enabled by a pressure or shift from the landscape.
Project 3: Shift to Nuclear Energy as Primary Source
This project is focused on shifting the main fuel source for electricity generation away from fossil-fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas and towards nuclear energy. History (represented below) has shown that it is more effective to grow nuclear energy production than the production of other preferable sources such as solar or wind. This would be a long-term project as the development of a single nuclear energy plant, not to mention enough nuclear plants to power the U.S., is a sizable task.
While this project seeks to fundamentally shift the regime (in Geels’ technological substitution or de-alignment/re-alignment sort of way), it could only take place with the blessing of a shift at the landscape. Therefore project efforts should take advantage of landscape momentum, notably climate change, the deterioration of the stratosphere, but even rising gasoline costs, to paint nuclear energy as more appealing in the U.S. For better or for worse, past catastrophic events at nuclear plants have soured the public’s trust in them; a landscape truth that would need massaging.
