Future Anachronisms Activity

ELLIOTT MONTGOMERY

Elliott’s research explores the ways hypothetical future props might be deployed in the service of imagining, prototyping and evaluating visions of possible futures. He brought this commitment to experimental, participatory methods for designing futures to the Design Rounds. The snapshot of practice Elliott facilitated was a workflow designed to introduce students, teachers and administrators to a process by which one’s experience of today can spark speculations of what is possible in the future. The learning objective was to instil in students a speculative sensibility that grants them, as citizens, a greater sense of agency to shape the future they wish to inherit.

Elliott began the Future Anachronisms process by underscoring the importance of seeing the future through multiple dimensions. The STEEP framework introduces dimensions by which to consider the future: Social, Technological, Ecological, Economic and Political. Priming learners to be self-aware about which dimension(s), they lean heavily on has people question whether, for example, they typically see technology as the salvation while ignoring political pathways to change. Scanning for signals in contexts outside of our go-to dimensions immediately revealed our biases and illuminated pathways less travelled.

The worksheet has a clear procedural elegance. Although designed for elementary through to secondary school contexts, the participants determine the level of complexity of their prompts. Similarly, the flexible co-creative exercise could be a 30-minute generative task or a deep dive two-day long activity. The four-step process has pairs of participants creating a prop, a future anachronism, by way of reflecting, imagining, envisioning and embodying different potential futures.

Step 1 – Select a Signal This step begins with identifying a signal, an event that exists now that could be scaled or disruptive in the future. The speculative move here is to see the signal as the possible future hiding in plain sight today. The caution, however, with respect to Hannah’s critique, is to question if this is a future we should actively deviate from.

Step 2 – Imagine the Consequences Ensure that a critical perspective is brought to the future already seeded. A meshwork-like diagram, called a Futures Wheel, radiates out from the original signal and participants fill in multiple circles to consider the direct and indirect consequences if this future were to come into being. Here, the learner conceptualises concrete yet fictional forms of this not-yet-realised future by asking what behaviours we would see, what businesses might pop up and what social movements might make headline news.

Step 3 – Envision a Document The visual move also serves to make this future believable.2 The instruction to create a prop from this future world brings to life the scenario that is emerging. The prop, a metonym for this future scenario, introduces a situated yet speculative provocation of what this future might offer or threaten. Whether a passport, psychotropic or permit, the discursive prop sets up how to debate, refine or evaluate this future.

Step 4 – Detail a Scene This step navigates the transition from envisioning to enacting. The instruction to create and perform a scene using the prop draws on the value of experiential engagement and the lessons that come not just from prototyping but from performing the physical, social and emotional interactions the prop instigates.

Beyond the evident deployment of activities that make visible to get to a place of making believe the four steps also integrate an analytical, critical approach with a performative, creative one. In partnering an analysis of the cause and effect of dynamic, interconnected systems with making and embodying the relational future artefacts new feedback loops are engaged. Reminding us again that for fine points to be fleshed out, assumptions to be troubled and new lessons to take hold, the act of rehearsing the implications is the bridge for exposing what needs to be believed.