future

Intelligences

Tutorial: Using Ethnofutures to Build Resilience

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Tutorial: Using Ethnofutures to Build Resilience
Combine ethnography and forecasting techniques to produce grounded future scenarios for products, services, organizations, and communities. Instructors: JAN ENGLISH-LUECK (San Jose State University), ROD FALCON (Institute for the Future), ARMANDO AYALA (Meta), JASMINE LOW (Waymo), MELANIE BAILEY (Sage Intacct) Overview This video has been edited to protect the privacy of participants in the live tutorial. Integrate basic forecasting methods with ethnographic data collection and interpretation Integrate both data collection and analysis approaches to build resilience Discover use cases for applying these approaches in your own projects and organizations Ethnofutures combines ethnographic and forecasting techniques to produce grounded future scenarios for products, services, organizations, and communities. In this tutorial, researchers, designers, and strategists will learn the principles of ethnofutures and new tools for exploring and communicating resilient futures in their own work. The session reviews...

Perspectives

What’s Next versus What’s Valuable: Perspectives on the Value of Ethnography in a Future-Focused World

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by LOUISE VANG JENSEN & LEA MøLLER SVENDSEN, IS IT A BIRD A framework for ethnography and futures work that expands our understanding of the nature of change Ethnographers operating in the future-focused context of business consultancy face a core challenge. Our approach is holistic and human-centric, “based on the researcher sharing time and space with the people he or she wants to understand, establishing relationships with them and thereby experiencing life from their perspective” (Kirsten Hastrup et.al: Ind i verden, 2010). Our clients want to stay relevant in the future. They want us to predict future behaviours, aspirations and dreams; to demonstrate what will change, what will disrupt and how people will be different. We’re often confronted with the perception that ethnography is a toolkit limited to exploring present worlds, and therefore holding limited value to futures work and business strategies. This notion relies on a somewhat sci-fi view of the future as something disconnected from the now. As something...

Intelligences

Little Dramas Everywhere: Using Ethnography to Anticipate the Future

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J.A. ENGLISH-LUECK San Jose State University SAM LADNER Workday, Inc. JAMIE SHERMAN Netflix Inc. In this article, the chairs of EPIC2021 reflect on the idea of Anticipation, and what ethnography reveals to us that may not be readily apparent through other means. Looking backward at the year of planning a conference that was to be focused on the future, the authors describe various revelations that unfolded and revealed themselves over the course of time. They raise questions of method, of epistemological position, and ethical responsibility. The authors conclude that anticipation is very much an ethnographic activity, one in which we can ask difficult questions about power and practice. Article citation: 2021 EPIC Proceedings pp 7–14, ISSN 1559-8918, https://www.epicpeople.org/epic...

Intelligences

We Have Always Dreamed of (Afro)futures: Notes beyond the Dark Fantastic

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We Have Always Dreamed of (Afro)futures
Keynote Speaker: EBONY THOMAS, University of Michigan Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is Associate Professor in Educational Studies at the University of Michigan. She studies how people of color are portrayed, or not portrayed, in children’s and young adult literature, and how those portrayals shape our culture. As children’s and young adult literary empires continue to dominate publishing and Hollywood, she strongly believes that the field has the potential to become one of the most effective postcolonial, critical, and activist projects of all. A former Detroit Public Schools teacher and National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, Thomas was a member of the NCTE Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color’s 2008–2010 cohort, served on the NCTE Conference on English Education's Executive Committee from 2013 until 2017, and is the immediate past chair of the NCTE Standing Committee on Research. She is co-editor of Research in the Teaching of English, and her most recent book is The Dark Fantastic:...

Intelligences

Building Target Worlds: Connecting Research, Futures Exploration and Worldbuilding

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MARKUS ROTHMÜLLER Bridgemaker GmbH “The future” cannot be “predicted,” but “preferred futures” can and should be envisioned, invented, implemented, continuously evaluated, revised, and re-envisioned. —Jim Dator, Hawaii, 1995 This paper introduces a framework called Target Worlds, with which I hope to offer an alternative to putting users, personas or target groups at the center of innovation. Instead I want to promote a more prudent approach that balances social, environmental, technological and financial sustainability in innovation.Target Worlds thereby tries to overcome issues of focus, scalability and responsibility in innovation by tackling the core of the problem: the targets of innovation work. The framework merges concepts of investigating ‘worlds’ today, identifying desirable futures for tomorrow and worldbuilding as a hands-on approach resulting in target worlds as new point of departure for innovation teams. This paper serves as a recipe for building target worlds offering a step-by-step guide...

Intelligences

Come to Your Senses: Ethnography of the Everyday Futuring

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JANA JEVTIC Gemic REBEKAH PARK Gemic Our practices of research, design, and strategy create landscapes of possibility. Anticipation, an approach that has informed much of the recent ethnographic work on the future, is shaped by how these symbolic and material landscapes, and the forms of agency they make possible, are distributed. This makes anticipation politically significant, prompting an empirical question of when and with respect to whose experience broader future visions occur. Seeking to bring attention to processes of future-making that capture these disparities, we ground anticipation in lived experience. Drawing on two long-term fieldworks, we recognize significant variability in how the future manifests in the course of practical and reflective engagements in everyday life. To explore these engagements, we turn to “future senses” of memory, foresight, voice, optimism, and yearning. We then demonstrate how “future senses” can be productively integrated within conversations about advancing not only more diverse...

Intelligences

Cities as Anticipatory Systems: Analyzing “Weak Signals” to Explore Beyond the Predictability of Their Future

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NORA MORALES UAM Cuajimalpa SALOMON GONZALEZ UAM Cuajimalpa In the last decade, Future Studies have developed a very important corpus of theory and methods aimed to analyze the future of cities. Meanwhile the world is confronted with major challenges like climate change, global pandemics, migration, inequality and poverty, government agencies, professional urbanists, academia and other organizations, concerned with strategic planning, are looking for new ways to provide insight into how we approach unforeseeable challenges and integrate complexity and novelty for better futures. In this paper we reviewed the notion of “weak signal” as a retrospective exploratory method to think of cities as anticipatory systems (Boer, Wiekens, and Damhof 2018) of future emerging problems. Using qualitative retrospective analysis and secondary research we focused on three urban innovations in transportation, workplaces and food domains at different cities to understand how to anticipate unforeseen scenarios and explore new ways of generating...

Intelligences

Tutorial: Using Analogs to Research the Unknown

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Tutorial - Using Analogs to Research the Unknown
Instructor: JO AIKEN, Google Learn strategies to design research of inaccessible or future environments. Overview This tutorial was conducted at EPIC2021. Exercises and discussions have been omitted to protect the privacy of participants. Ethnographers seek insights by studying people in their natural environments. What if the thing you are designing will not be used for 20–40 years from now? What if the natural context is inaccessible—an infrequent event, a dangerous environment, an exclusive space? How do you understand environments and users that do not yet exist? This tutorial breaks down the complexity of conducting ethnographic research of environments that are unknown or inaccessible. Using real NASA case studies, Jo will walk you through frameworks and methods, such as analogs and scenario testing, for conducting practical research when you can’t get to the “real” field site. This interactive tutorial will include a combination of presented content, small-group activities, and discussion. Participants...

Intelligences

Tutorial: Designing Ethnofutures Research Projects

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Designing Ethnofutures Research Projects
Instructors: ROD FALCON, (Director, Technology Futures Lab, Institute for the Future), LYN JEFFERY (Director, IFTF Foresight Essentials) & VANESSA MASON (Research Director, Institute for the Future) Learn how to design ethnofutures research projects and expand the time horizons of your work. Overview This tutorial was conducted at EPIC2021. Exercises and discussions have been omitted to protect the privacy of participants. How do you take ethnographic data from today and turn it into futures forecasts, scenarios, personas, and stories about how the world could be different in ten years? How do you define a “futures” research domain, develop an ethnofutures interview process, and scope the right people to interview? And once you have your data, how do you use it to develop an informed, provocative view of the long-term future? Researchers leaders from the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a 50+ year nonprofit futures research group, will unpack the structure of an ethnofutures project, which translates ethnographic...

Perspectives

Facing the Future in Product Development: Prediction and Uncertainty in Decision Making

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flower heads with sky in the background
Prediction can create a false sense of certainty – at great cost. Can uncertainty establish a more effective foundation for product development? by HELI RANTAVUO, Spotify Foresight. Tends. Megatrends. Forecasting. Speculative design. Predictive modelling. Impact estimating. These are some of the established methods that researchers and analysts use in trying to understand what the future might look like, and how the organisations we work for and with approach the future. A variety of research and design techniques are available for us to make sense of the future in a structured way. Ethnographers and anthropologists know how to study the present in order to speculate on the future; design teams employ futurecasts and speculative design; futures research employs a wide range of methods that cut across disciplines. With the availability of big data, forecasting and predictive modelling is growing more and more sophisticated. Sometimes I wonder, does the maturity of our methods and frameworks make us feel too confident about...

Perspectives

Ethnographers Don’t Create Futures, People Do: Ethnographic Context and Facilitating Better Futures

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by DINA MEHTA & STUART HENSHALL, Convo Ethnographic context helps people see alternate possibilities and situations where decisions may play out—and create better futures. The future, of course, is inherently unpredictable. As the EPIC2021 theme Anticipation begins, “There are no future facts. Yet we humans constantly create potential futures.” People create futures when they begin to see alternate possibilities and situations where their decisions—and those of others—may play out. This creates choices and potential options, while also identifying risks, implications of operating in a different world, and new areas for research and exploration. To do this, organizations need to be able to learn about the world “out there,” as well as understand and shift their own positioning within it. How can ethnographers facilitate this quest to anticipate the future? Our work has focused on the organizational change needed for our clients to see and create new potentials. As ethnographers we bring stories into the organization,...

News

Practicing Foresight in China—A Public Event Hosted by EPIC China

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Foresight: a conversation with Martha Cotton (Accenture/Fjord) & Rui Rao (Tencent), hosted by EPIC China

How do businesses and organizations anticipate the future in China and the United States? Join a conversation with Martha Cotton (Accenture/Fjord) & Rui Rao (Tencent), hosted by EPIC China! Friday, August 27, 6:30–8:00 pm US Pacific Time / Saturday, August 28, 9:30–11:00 am China Standard Time REGISTER NOW Join Martha Cotton (Managing Director with Accenture…

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Intelligences

Scaling Futures: Foresight that Delivers Meaning and Value

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RICH RADKA, Chair Fuse Foresight WENDY CHAMBERLIN BOMA Project GEMMA JOHN Human City RAMESH LOGANATHAN IIIT Hyderabad This panel explores the specific reasons organizations generate ideas about the future, the methods they choose, how they act on foresight, and consequences for both business and society. Panelists address the theme of scale in various dimensions, such as how to appropriately scale our imaginings, scaling to multiple time horizons, scaling breadth vs. depth of focus, and thinking of scale in terms of organizational value creation. Panelists Rich Radka has 20+ years of providing deep human insights to corporate, scale-up and public sector clients in the arenas of  innovation, customer experience, strategy and forecasting. He brings inspired design thinking, and a practical human-centred approach to co-create solutions that involve customers, employees, partners and other stakeholders.Wendy Chamberlin serves as the Global Program Director for the BOMA Project, a livelihood development...

Intelligences

Tutorial: Calibrating Ethnofutures

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J.A. ENGLISH-LUECK San Jose State University ROD FALCON Institute for the Future ANDREW MARLEY San Jose State University Overview This tutorial introduces Ethnofutures to ethnographers who want to integrate forecasting methods and tools into their current professional practices. The goal is to translate ethnographic material into imaginative, but grounded, scenarios of their future users, services, and products. Practitioners, such as designers and business strategists, must imagine futures based on existing signals of change. Those signals can come from the activities of individuals, the organizations in which they work, as well as the larger social events around them. The forces fomenting change can be highly localized, such as a specific municipal policy on gig workers or also be global in scope, pointing to the role of gig work as a facet of contemporary transnational capitalism. Moreover, the future itself is scalable: Organizations toggle between data-rich forecasts that extend less than a year, to more speculative...