submitted to the journal Futures in AUG 2015 - this is a pre-peer review version

Abstract

This article describes FoAM’s transdisciplinary, participatory approach to experiential futures. We introduce several practices with a primary focus on “prehearsals” and “pre-enactments”, interactive, immersive situations where participants can experience futures in the present at human scale. We explore aptitudes and techniques that are inclusive of multiple ways of knowing and learning, in order to probe futures from different perspectives, as well as foster engagement and commitment amongst diverse groups of people. We discuss why working with futures is particularly relevant in times of social and environmental turbulence and suggest that a more widespread futures literacy can increase agency in uncertain conditions. We focus on “future preparedness” and “inhabiting uncertainty” as mindsets to be developed through experiential learning, based on techniques from improvisation, play and meditation. We investigate what experience can contribute to the field of futures studies, looking at embodied, multi-modal, holistic explorations of futures. We provide examples of FoAM’s recent works to illustrate our experimental approach to futures, aiming to bridge the gap between future visions and the uncertainty of everyday life.

Keywords: Experiential futures; inhabiting uncertainty; improvisation; Future preparedness; time travel; futures literacy; everyday futures

In this article we describe a range of approaches to experiential futures as practiced by FoAM, a distributed lab for speculative culture. We discuss why working with futures is particularly relevant in socially and environmentally turbulent times and suggest that a more widespread futures literacy can increase agency in uncertain conditions. In asking how these experiences can contribute to the field of futures studies we suggest embodied, multi-modal and holistic explorations of futures as both supplementary and complementary methods. We focus on aptitudes and techniques able to bridge the gap between future visions and the uncertainty of everyday life.

We approach futures with an emphasis on diversity and participation and find it essential to acknowledge and incorporate multiple ways of learning and understanding. Working with diverse groups of people often brings differences in interpretation to the surface. Exploring the same issue using multiple modalities, including words, sounds, images, movement, or spatial orientation avoids privileging a single mode and rather fosters a coexistence of diverse perspectives. As a form of multi-modal embodied learning, experiential futures has the potential to be inclusive of, and speak to, a wide range of people. It can provide ways to extend the experience of the present moment to include larger temporal scales of the “Long Now” (Brand, 1999) and foster the evolution of “ambient foresight” (Candy, 2010), a futures literacy embedded in the habitual behaviours and actions of daily life.

Integrating multiple ways of knowing and creating immersive experiences has been the cornerstone of FoAM’s work since our inception. We began as a mixed reality lab (Milgram et al., 1995) combining art and technology to create responsive environments, where participants could experience the effects of their actions on their surroundings, in real-time and on a human scale. We gradually focused our work on cultural, techno-social and environmental contexts, which led to working with futures as a way to introduce long-term thinking from layered temporal and systemic perspectives. In this article we bring together insights gained through developing and facilitating situations in which the participants themselves co-create images of the future (or parallel presents), grounded in their own assumptions, hopes and fears.

Our approach to “experiential futures” is akin to what Stuart Candy describes as “interventions that exploit the continuum of human experience, the full array of sensory and semiotic vectors [aiming to] juxtapose […] the abstractness of future with the concreteness of experience.” (Candy, 2010). At FoAM this translates to designing interactive, human-scale experiences which we call “prehearsals” and “pre-enactments”. Prehearsals are short improvisation exercises that are usually a part of our futures workshops, while pre-enactments are immersive situations, complete with costumes and props that can last for hours, days, weeks or longer. Prehearsals and pre-enactments invite the participants to explore behaviours, assumptions and ideals in challenging and unpredictable conditions, in order to gain a deeper understanding of how their individual and collective experience might contribute to possible futures. These experiments provide temporary, relatively safe, delineated zones for testing visions of the future as experiential prototypes.

We see prehearsals and pre-enactments as parts of a more general “lab approach” to everyday futures where any “what if?” question can be translated into an experiment able to be performed in the present. A way to entangle futures into daily life to such extent that strategic foresight gives way to ambient foresight in a real-life lab where images of the future can be refined through experiential learning, in a continuous iterative refinement of being alive in the long now.

“A foresight culture therefore emerges at the dawn of the 21st century. It is a culture that routinely thinks long-term, takes future generations seriously, learns its way towards sustainability and brings 2the whole earth back from the brink of catastrophe.” –Stuart Candy (Candy, 2010)

At the core of futures practice is a positivist assumption that while the future may not be completely knowable, we can shape, understand and prepare for it however the unknowable multiplicity (Calvino, 1996) unfolds towards the present. Being prepared for an uncertain future may appear paradoxical, yet this mindset might be exactly what is needed in the contemporary global turbulence, as climate change, global weirding, economic and social crises promise to destabilise our best laid plans (IPCC, 2014). In such uncertain times, the tools and knowledge of futures studies may help people to make sense of the weak signals and tangled forces felt from human scale to planetary scales. A broader and earlier access to the future-oriented tools and practices could lead to a more widespread capacity for foresight, an essential aptitude for dealing with uncertainty in the long term. Rather than providing both context and content as pre-packaged images of futures, we consider it important to encourage do-it-yourself and do-it-together attitudes towards creation and exploration of futures. Such ubiquitous co-creation of futures would require an opening-up of futures studies, exposing the “discursive technologies for manifesting future possibilities [located] on an ontological spectrum from what if, to as if, to is.” (Candy, 2010)

The process of exploring the search-space of multiple “is-ness” has been well documented in the Futures literature with the assumption that it is ultimately beneficial (Schwartz, 1998; Schultz, 2012; Sardar, 2010). Awareness of the multiplicity of futures and the possibility of influencing the course of one’s own life is the foundation for a pervasive future preparedness. In FoAM’s professional coaching programme we observed that one of the most common symptoms of burn-out was a paralysing feeling that the course of the future cannot be changed, that a strategic plan once laid out must be executed, regardless of changing conditions in the present. However, if the future is not perceived as fixed or inevitable, the fatalistic fear and tension dissolve as alternative paths appear and with them a re-newed sense of agency, driven by a re-discovered curiosity 1. Two distinct approaches to “Future Preparedness”, both firmly grounded in present experience are “visionary adaptation” and “inhabiting uncertainty”. Visionary adaptation suggests that the vision of a preferred future both guides and evolves through iterative feedback-loops with the actuality of the unexpected present. Inhabiting uncertainty is concerned with acknowledging the unknowability of the future (and indeed much of the present) and finding ways to thrive in unpredictable conditions. Both perspectives foster an awareness of the interaction between hindsight, insight and foresight, between alternative and preferred futures. This awareness can stimulate a sense of agency based on an understanding of things which appear constant and variable in one’s environment. “The Future” and “Uncertainty” can therefore appear less monolithic and unsurmountable, but rather form an ecology of possibilities and challenges through which one can navigate, equipped with the means to operate in uncertain conditions.

“[O]ur relation both to the past and to the future is far more complicated than it seems to us. In the past, behind us, lies not only that which really happened, but that which could have been. In the same way, in the future lies not only that which will be, but everything that may be.” –P. D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum

Future preparedness calls for a familiarity with manifold models of change and an ability to navigate between them as appropriate. The path of least resistance is often to ignore any change, continue business as usual (sometimes beneficial, other times a disastrous strategy). A resilient approach encourages a more fluid response with the aim of returning to a normal or stable state as soon as possible. An adaptive system would incorporate change and transform itself into a new (ideally improved) state in response to that change. Finally, a revolutionary change is one which radically transforms the system or significantly destabilises it in such a way that returning to a previous state is usually impossible. These models of change more or less correspond with the “Four Generic Futures” (continue, collapse, discipline and transform) as described by Jim Dator (Dator, 2009).The Panarchy model, which focuses on ecological and social systems undergoing change, identifies cycles between similar phases: exploitation, conservation, release and reorganisation (Gunderson & Holling, 2002). In “Beyond Resilience: Visionary Adaptation”, Vinay Gupta suggests the need to clarify when each of these different responses to change might be appropriate (Gupta, 2009) and suggests a way to balance long-term visions with crisis responses of resilience, revolution and adaptation, which are inevitably focused on short-term fixes. Strategies and plans based on preferred futures can turn out to be wishful thinking, yet they are also reservoirs of the values and principles of the people involved. Without them responses to change can only be reactive. However, when held too tightly in times of rapid change, long-term strategies can easily become obsolete or counterproductive, preferred futures might turn out to be impossible futures. Conversely, improvised tactics might be what’s needed for survival, but they are usually immediate, non-systemic solutions. How can we keep preferred futures alive, while at the same time responding appropriately to current change? We believe the answer lies in tighter feedback loops between vision and adaptation, where knowing how to respond to a situation comes from iterative prototyping of alternate and preferred futures.

In the field of design the creative process (which often takes uncertainty as a given) tends to be iterative. Ideas are usually developed cyclically rather than linearly, from a minimal working version into something fully developed. Each iteration is usually tested, if possible with actual people and in real-life settings. Prototypes are evaluated and adjusted if needed. Well performing prototypes can then be extended with new features. A design can always fall back onto a previous iteration, so the more testing, the more resilient, or well adapted the design can become.

Visionary adaptation suggests that there are responses to uncertainty that go a step further than resilience, towards what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “antifragility” (Taleb, 2012). An antifragile system, such as evolution, grows stronger when faced with uncertainty and adversity. For example, the media service Netflix uses their “Chaos Monkey” to perform intense randomised stresstesting of infrastructure in order to prevent catastrophic failure. “By building a server architecture that expects failure, the system as a whole can learn how to withstand bigger and tougher obstacles even if they don’t know exactly when or how they will occur in real life.” (Benson, 2013)

Chaos Monkey is to server infrastructure what disaster drills are to human systems. They are usually organised on a large scale by military or government agencies in charge of disaster response. Examples include the NNNI (Niˇsta Nas Ne smije Iznenaditi, or Nothing May Surprise Us), nation-wide “societal defence and self-protection” drills in the former Yugoslavia, or the Zombies used by the CDC (Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, 2015) in the USA to raise awareness about the need for hazard preparedness. These doom-scenario exercises are developed to inculcate necessary skills and attitudes needed for a prompt response in a crisis situation such as a war or an epidemic. The idea is not necessarily to prepare for a specific disaster, but to cultivate behaviours, insights and reflexes applicable in catastrophic situations. Skills can be learnt, tactics and strategies memorised, but they can only be tested in complex, messy situations as close as possible to reality. In such situations participants are required to act, react and improvise to put their skills into practice. Not only do they learn what they can and can’t do, they experience their reactions emotionally, physically and mentally. In disaster drills, participants play out responses to a possible future and learn from their experience. Even if they know that a Zombie plague is highly unlikely, experiencing the actions, thoughts and reflexes improve the participants ability to deal with the threat of infection in a real crisis.

While drills for potential disasters have become an established practice, there aren’t many examples of drills or exercises for other, less disastrous types of futures. Disaster drills may be good for training short-term tactics and responses, but don’t usually examine long-term visions. War games and military simulations can be appropriate for teaching strategy and planning but are less well suited for civilians. Drills designed for future preparedness would ideally incorporate a multiplicity of futures (preferred and otherwise) and a layered approach to time. They would require short-term tactics as well as adaptive long-term strategies. Testing alternative or preferred futures through experiential exercises can foster feedback-loops between ideas and experiences, encouraging a non-deterministic attitude leading toward visionary adaptation.

“You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.” –Charlie Parker

“The most calamitous failures of prediction usually have a lot in common. We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is. We ignore the risks that are hardest to measure, even when they pose the greatest threats to our well-being. We make approximations and assumptions about the world that are much cruder than we realize. We abhor uncertainty, even when it is an irreducible part of the problem we are trying to solve” –Nate Silver (Silver, 2013)

If we can take for granted the plurality of futures, the inherent uncertainty of prediction and that the target of futures studies is inevitably situated in the present, we can work with these multiplicities in the here-and-now; in a present moment which includes multiple layers of the “long now” – from the “now” of a heart beat, to the “now” of today, to the “now” of an ideology or civilisation. This atemporal perspective of living in a mosaiced overlap of perpetual present moments can help integrate our capacities for hindsight, insight and foresight. Rather than working with futures to create monumental strategies, we see the need to develop foresight as an aptitude attuned to uncertain, changing conditions in the long now. Other aptitudes that take uncertainty as a given include observation, curiosity, frugality, irreverence and equanimity. What can we extrapolate from these aptitudes to encourage us not to shy away from uncertainty, but to inhabit, embrace and evolve through it? What if we need to experience what it is like to live with uncertainty in the present in order to become comfortable with the unknowable futures? What can be learnt from existing dispositions that flourish in uncertainty, such as meditation, play and improvisation?

“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is” –Alan Watts (Watts, 1951)

Perhaps similar to the layering of time in the long now, meditation techniques can encourage practitioners to see the present moment as something outside (or encompassing) the stream of time (Kabat-Zinn, 2005). Deepening the insight of this “infinite moment” necessarily improves meditators’ observational skills, so they may better discern minor changes (such as weak signals) and liminal patterns (such as trends and drivers of change) that co-exist in the present. Furthermore, a non-judgemental attitude that one adopts when meditating can also help the practitioner observe their emotional and physical reactions to emergent situations. Introspection and observation developed through meditation allow the practitioner to approach uncertainty consciously and make choices beyond instinctual reactions to fight, flight or freeze (KabatZinn, 1991; Ch ̈odr ̈on, 2003). For a meditator being immersed in uncertainty provides an opportunity to develop faculties of mindfulness and equanimity and should therefore not be avoided, but embraced and inhabited.

A very different approach to uncertainty is play. A playful or irreverent disposition toward uncertainty can lead the players in unexpected directions and thereby away from inevitability and the extrapolation of existing biases. While playing, the participants tend to be in a state of high emotional anticipation, absorbed in their present actions and interactions, immersed in their immediate surroundings:

“Play is an activity which proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted, and outside the sphere of necessity or material utility. The play-mood is one of rapture and enthusiasm, and is sacred or festive in accordance with the occasion. A feeling of exaltation and tension accompanies the action.” –Johan Huizinga (Huizinga, 1970)

Not much is certain while playing, entire worlds can be created and destroyed yet the players can emerge (relatively) unscathed. Unstructured play is an ultimately heuristic endeavour, where players willingly throw themselves into the deep, making and breaking the rules as they go along. There is a unique combination of lightness (Calvino, 1996) and seriousness in play that is essential for thriving in uncertainty. When players hold reality as lightly (yet earnestly) as when they play, they can open up a range of possible futures that may not be so readily accessible through the usual channels of consensus reality.

Similar to play, improvisation approaches problems on the basis of common sense, previous experience and intuitive responses. Originating in the field of theatre and performance, improvisation relies on spontaneity and synchronicity to resolve uncertainty on the spot. Dramatist Keith Johnstone warns that we “mustn’t try to control the future or to win” (Johnstone, 1987) during improvisation. Instead, he says, we should rely on (and improve) our skills of observation and interaction. Bertold Brecht trained his actors to think on their feet by suggesting that “we should agree to discuss nothing that could be acted out” (quoted in Johnstone, 1987). Improvisation provides insights into intuitive and habitual responses to a situation, as well as the thrill of being able to shape the evolution of the situation through direct experience. One of the key elements of successful improvisation is that the participants can trust and build on each others actions. Experience of uncertainty can become less threatening when approached from such an amenable, pro-active perspective.

Meditative, playful and improvisational attitudes thrive in uncertainty. They inhabit it without worrying about the past or the future. They could be seen as counterpoint to strategy, which tends to focus on risk assessment and careful adherence to a plan. However, inhabiting uncertainty does not imply indecision nor does it eliminate the need for planning and analysis. Instead, it offers different types of adaptive, real-time and experiential decision making processes (from “stochastic tinkering” (Taleb, 2012) to structured techniques such as “Discovery-driven planning” (McGrath & MacMillan, 1995)). It invites us to hope, anticipate and openly explore (im)possible futures.

“In postnormal times, the world has both centrifugal and centripetal tendencies: transcendence and collapse; integration and fragmentation. History didn’t end with Fukuyama. Collapse contains the fractal seeds of transcendence. Things come together as they fall apart. Ours is not the flat world of Thomas Friedman, but the ‘unevenly-distributed’ future of William Gibson. It has contours. […] In this context, our best weapons are imagination, creativity, and a recognition of the sheer contingency of the times in which we find ourselves.” –Justin Pickard (Pickard, 2012)

Experiential futures could be seen as a foresight-centric response to inhabiting uncertainty. It is an attempt to bring the worlds of tomorrow into the present in a way that can be experienced directly. In the absence of functional time-travel, such attempts will need to rely on more mundane techniques borrowed from theatre, design or psychology. The emphasis on a multisensory experience of the what if? and as if encourages a diverse rather than singular range of work, including speculative artifacts, videos, interactive installations, games or “guerilla” interventions in public spaces¹⁾.

“The design and staging of experiential scenarios is a political, practical and perceptual-level intervention. It is praxis oriented and more than a little messy; a tactical attempt to manipulate the quirks of the human information processing system, especially our evolved preference for the immediate and tangible over the remote and abstract, to give those quirks a better chance of operating in our collective long-term interest, rather than against it.” –Stuart Candy (Candy, 2010)

Experiential futures suggest ways to develop knowledge (and eventually wisdom) from abstract data and information through interactive experience (Shedroff, 1999). By stimulating affective responses it provides a means to encourage exigent actions to align with holistic, long-term perspectives. Along similar lines, Miguel Pina e Cunha and his colleagues propose a “real-time foresight” which builds on the art of improvisation; “Traditional foresight consists of the planning/acting sequence, while improvisation conjoins planning and action.” (Cunha et al., 2012). The notion that futures can be played and improvised in the present enables iterative analysis since ideas are actively prototyped, tested, improved or discarded. As such, experiential futures can provide an antidote to apathy, disinterest and fear, which seem to be common responses when faced with the uncertainty of an ominous, singular “Big Future”.

“Knowledge about the future shouldn’t be an overly abstract concept lacking relevance, but rather an inspirational call to action with traction” –Jose Ramos (Ramos, 2002)

Immersive improvisation can take futures outside the comfort zone of words, text and displaced responsibility. Hearing or reading something doesn’t penetrate as deeply as understanding gained through experience. To truly know the world we need to engage with it through situated interaction (Merleau-Ponty, 2002), using our minds, as well as bodies with their intricate systems of embodied and enactive cognition (Varela et al., 1991; Wilson & Foglia, 2011). It would follow that understanding of futures may also require more than words, no matter how well researched and crafted they are. Therefore experiential futures have the potential, or perhaps even a responsibility to (re)connect rational analysis, abstract speculation and embodied knowing.

If the desired outcomes of experiential futures include multiple ways of knowing and improved capacity for action, so too should the process used in the research and creation of such experiences. There are numerous fields the practitioners can draw upon to help design these processes. Different approaches will “have distinguishing strengths …[y]et none by itself is really a ’perfect’, all-purpose approach …The primary lesson we have learned …is the value of mash-ups: combining and layering different techniques to enrich outcomes.” (Curry & Schultz, 2009)

At FoAM we encourage a broad, transdisciplinary (Nicolescu, 2008) and cross-cultural foraging of techniques and methods, allowing us to adapt to working in a range of different contexts and with people from all walks of life. We have found the following methods and approaches useful in our (experiential) futures experiments;

• Process facilitation²⁾, collaborative innovation and coaching to move beyond circular critique of the status-quo and towards participatory envisioning of alternatives;
• Learning journeys (e.g. Adaptive Edge (2011)), visual ethnography and field-work as experiential forms of research;
• Techniques from clinical psychology such as role playing and psychodrama (Blatner, 1996), as well as flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 2002) and transpersonal psychology (Grof, 1985) to prompt interaction and engagement;
• Performing arts, in particular historical re-enactments (Lu ̈tticken, 2005) and improvisation (Johnstone, 1987) to encourage spontaneity and immersion;
• ARGs (Alternate Reality Games)³⁾ and LARPs (Live Action Role Playing games) (Stenros & Montola, 2010; Stark, 2012) to stimulate imagination of how things could be otherwise;
• Interactive installations, transmedia storytelling and physical narratives (Authors & Author, 2013) to create mixed reality environments;
• Experience design and prototyping (Buchenau & Suri, 2000) to learn from iterative experiments;
• Dance, butoh, yoga and martial arts to enhance the physicality of the experience;
• Disaster drills, war games (Cornish, 2005) and negotiation simulations (Fisher & Shapiro, 2006) as examples of experiential prototypes for possible futures;
• Even ancient techniques from futures’ pre-history (Schultz, 2012), such as divination, invocation and visualisation (Cuhls, 2014) can be used for probing the participants’ associative and unconscious responses, or as wild cards to shift the atmosphere.

Combining such a disparate range of techniques in a futures exercise can extend the primarily analytical strategic foresight methods (e.g. driver research, written scenarios, critical discussion, reports, etc.) to incorporate the benefits of multimodal learning and understanding (e.g. critical, emotional, provocative, creative, etc.). The process and results are interrogated from different directions, and each modality used to inform others. Whichever tools are chosen, they should encourage open, non-hierarchical conversations informed by multiple modalities, without prioritising any one in particular.

Selecting appropriate techniques depends heavily on the practitioners’ background and the context in which they’re operating. We find it important to make explicit that both participants and facilitators shape the process and its outcomes, and that our intentions and assumptions will influence the results. Thisapproach shares some similarities to “Integral Futures” as proposed by Slaughter (2008). In the words of Floyd, Burns and Ramos: “Methodology, though, is about more than the tools used: it involves careful attention to the stance taken by the practitioner in the use of tools to enact knowledge and understanding” (Floyd et al., 2008). Not only can different methods steer the process towards particular types of outcome (Curry & Schultz, 2009), but holding onto any particular methodology too tightly can sometimes disrupt the flow of the process itself. Rather than imposing a top-down methodology, a practitioner can prepare a methodological framework beforehand, which is then adapted through observation and interaction with the group dynamics. The resulting processes tend to be a collage of techniques that speak to a range of different people and can collect various responses and insights into a coherent whole.

In FoAM’s futures experiments we aim to surface preconceptions, patterns of thought, behaviours and actions the lenses that can influence and shape the participants’ experience of the world around them. By making these lenses apparent, they can be discussed and perhaps become more malleable.

“The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present.” –Paul Saffo (Saffo, 2007)

Our experiential futures work focuses on creating holistic, immersive situations with an emphasis on human-human and human-environment interactions, connections and relationships as they evolve over time. We introduced the terms “prehearsal” and “pre-enactment” to describe these embodied experiences where future scenarios (or alternate pasts or presents) can be explored and stress-tested, by subjecting them to the randomness of social improvisation in an immersive setting (Author & Author, 2013, 2014). FoAM’s experiments in “speculative culture”5 can be seen as rehearsals for futures that might come to pass, as enactments of the possible. Any images of the future that arise from these experiments are necessarily influenced by the participants’ beliefs and knowledge rather than being primarily based on data originating in futures research. What these images may lack in perceived accuracy or objectivity, they gain by providing subjective insight into the lives and paths of the people involved. There are no spectators in prehearsals and pre-enactments, only participants. The initial conditions include a predefined backstory, a set of rules, a location and a time-frame, but the characters and the events are created emergently by the people involved. The participants are invited to imagine who they would be and what their life would be like in the pre-enacted future and to improvise accordingly. They gain insight about themselves, about their interactions with others and about the group as a whole (be it an organisation, family or community) as they experience a possible future. This embodied experience helps to surface existing strengths and weaknesses (of people and situations), as well as bring out what is most interesting and valuable in a scenario. We noticed that scenarios that are closer to the present tend to be easier to inhabit, and perhaps more useful to enact than far future scenarios, which usually appear as caricatures of sci-fi novels, where participants find it more difficult not to fall into the trap of playing fictional characters.

The difference between prehearsals and pre-enactments lies in their duration and complexity. Prehearsals are short improv exercises that can be self contained, or incorporated into a wider process. Pre-enactments are larger scale and longer term productions, which include more detailed worldbuilding and speculative design of props, costumes or accessories (e.g. prototypes of technologies or media).

A prehearsal is an improvised situation of short duration (generally less than an hour), a quick-and-dirty test of an instance in a scenario focusing on the player’s behaviours and interactions, using minimal props and setup. The prehearsed situation should be familiar enough to the participants, so they can focus on the content rather than the form of the prehearsal. For example, the situation could be a reception, press conference, train ride, a coffee-break or anything else that is related to the core question the group is exploring. The challenge for the participants is to place themselves in this familiar situation, while imagining that it is happening in a possible future.

Pre-enactments are inspired by large-scale re-enactments⁴⁾, but rather than enacting an historical situation, the participants pre-enact a situation that might exist in their future. During a pre-enactment, a scenario comes to life as a “firstperson experience”. Once the pre-enactment begins, the participants engage with each other and the environment to simulate what their life might be like in a very specific possible future. In order for the experience to be believable, the broad strokes of a scenario need to be filled with mundane details of everyday life, including things like food, clothing, shelter, tools, work-spaces, interfaces, events, rituals, etc. Elaborating an experience in such detail can point to inconsistencies between the ideas in the scenario and the gritty reality, between the images of the future and their embodied manifestations.

At FoAM designing a prehearsal or pre-enactment ⁵⁾) begins with co-creating a range of scenarios which are translated into short backstories. The backstory describes enough of the context, atmosphere and physical setting for the participants to feel able to temporarily inhabit the scenario. The practical details of the exercise are summarised in a script (aka The Survival Guide) which includes instructions, questions, rules and guidelines.

Once a prehearsal or pre-enactment starts, the participants are encouraged to stay in the role of their future selves for the duration of the experiment and immerse themselves in the situations that unfold. By experiencing a (sometimes uncomfortable) scenario as if it was real, the pre-enactors can train their situated introspection and adaptation skills. The deeper the immersion, the more valuable the experience.

The discomfort, elation and fragility that can emerge during pre-enacting is best situated within a comfortable and familiar context, with a well defined transition before and after the experience. The experience itself may be confronting, so it is imperative for the participants to have a safe space where they can share and understand the implications of their experiences. In order for a prehearsal or pre-enactment to have sustained, long-term effects, an in-depth debrief and reflection phase is needed, to translate the insights into an applied understanding. It is important to note that prehearsals and pre-enactments can be considered complementary to other futures techniques. While they can provide embodied, experiential learning, they can’t replace analytical research or strategic planning. We tend to use reflexive techniques to translate experiential insights into “early warning systems”, as well as concrete actions and measures that can be implemented.

In a prehearsal or pre-enactment the participants are invited to behave as if they temporarily exist in the future they’re enacting. This means that you act as yourself not as a character or a superhero, but as your plain, mundane self, with all your strengths and weaknesses. While speculating about the future of the world, your organisation or community, you play out what your role in that specific future might be. You enact who you might become, what you might be doing and how you might get there, given what you know about yourself and the enacted scenario. As you improvise, you observe how you react to other people and the situation as a whole, as well as how your actions affect them. This requires an honest introspection, a relatively evolved self-awareness and full commitment to the simulated experience. While it might seem like a casual role-playing exercise, pre-enacting futures can be quite demanding.

By facilitating and observing numerous prehearsals/pre-enactments, we found that one of the main challenges lies in managing the threshold between real life and “the magic circle” (Huizinga, 1970). What Huizinga calls the magic circle is the arena where play (or a ritual) unfolds and is clearly separated from ordinary life, in both time and space. Once the players step over the threshold, different rules apply, ordinary actions acquire a special meaning and the players are invited to explore and experiment within its confines. It can happen that a participant doesn’t “see” the threshold as an entry-point to an alternate state,

which can “break the world”, disrupting the experience for others. Similarly, a participant can remain on the threshold even though they agree to participate, they do not (for various reasons) engage with the experience. Other problems arise when participants don’t understand that they should remain themselves once across the threshold they end up playing another character. Alternatively, a participant can cross the threshold and end up somewhere else, in a different world from the other players. These threshold glitches can, of course, lead to hilarious interactions and misunderstandings, but they tend to turn the pre-enactment into more of a speculative fiction, than a (self)reflexive experience. While speculative fiction can be a valuable way to represent futures, we tend to find that the futures that emerge from improvised performance in pre-enactments tend to be more relevant if the participants draw on their own personalities, backgrounds and life experiences.

We don’t propose general solutions to these challenges, as each of the groups we worked with responds differently and some people find embodied improvisation too uncomfortable to even try. Considering that it is difficult to know who will react in which way, we try to prepare the participants beforehand using various creative techniques. For example, guided journalling (describing “a day in my life” or a personal future history), as well as conducting individual or group exercises (improvisation, meditation, visualisation) can help ease participants into both the content and form of the experience. Deciding on specific roles, tasks, activities or other actions where the participants can prepare to “do” something specific can help as well. Setting the scene in a familiar situation can lower the threshold, since participants already know how to behave. Having a physical “threshold” that the participants cross (a costume or accessory for example, or a simple ritual they go through as they enter and exit) demarcates the magic circle and gives the participants “permission” to step into their future selves. Finally, having experienced improvisers as facilitators, “game masters” and/or participants can help with initiating and guiding emergent situations. As with every practice described in this article, there are no clear-cut answers, no linear paths to a successful future self. “The future is a process, not a theme park” (Sterling, 2002)

The insights presented in the previous sections are primarily derived from practice-based work, collected through observation and qualitative evaluation of experiential futures experiments, in workshops, exhibitions and other participatory situations. In this section we describe a few recent examples.

Food Futures (FoAM, 2014a) was an exploration of how relationship between food, health and the environment might develop in four generic futures(Dator, 2009). Scenarios were translated into menus using ingredients assumed to be challenging or abundant in each extrapolated context. During the Edinburgh Science Festival we hosted a multi-course “gala dinner”, each course composed of foods that might be eaten in the different futures. Locally foraged wild garlic soup for the “discipline” scenario, or potato-peel chips with fermented seaweed in the “collapse” scenario for example. Each course began with a short speech by delegates from different futures. Each speech introduced a series of issues, questions or conundrums for the diners to discuss while eating and drinking in a convivial atmosphere. They took notes on the table-cloths, they argued, they made new friends and extensively explored the implications of each scenario.

During the opening of the Future Fictions exhibition at Z338, the same scenarios were translated into a flow of finger-foods for a standing reception, adapted to a different season and location. In an adjacent lab and reading room, the process of creating the Food Futures menu was visualised and described. On both occasions presenting abstract futures as “edible” increased engagement and provided a participatory context for lively, in-depth discussions.

Borrowed Scenery (FoAM, 2012) was a story about an alternate reality (past, future or parallel) in which plants formed a central aspect of human society. By “borrowing” (Takei & Keane, 2001) the setting of everyday life in the city, it attempted to infuse habitual activities, such as walking or eating, with a vision of a possible future where insatiable economic growth is superseded by an atmosphere-based economy in which nature has a voice. Borrowed Scenery evolved over two months in Ghent (Belgium) and online. It revolved around a speculative “patabotanical lab” populated by fictional characters who could only be known through their physical traces (letters, library, fieldnotes, abandoned tea-parties etc.) and an online game. FoAM collaborators functioned as their “research assistants” who recruited members of the public in their fieldwork, expeditions and experiments. These included an expedition through the city as an edible resource, a master-class in HPI (Human-plant interaction), an ambient botanic garden choir, etc. The events combined present day concerns, examples of existing methods and speculative alternatives, in an irreal, but not impossible fictional world. Borrowed Scenery presented a compelling vision of a preferred future which was connected to people and initiatives already on their way to realising (parts of) that future. It provided a place for guided discussions and offered a range of multi-modal entry points for professionals and curious audiences alike.

Futures of Doing Nothing (FoAM, 2014b) explored the negative space around the “Future of Work” and concerns surrounding often unsustainable contemporary work ethics. It took shape as a workshop and series of pre-enactments, which used a critical futures approach (Inayatullah, 2004) to investigate the deep societal and cultural causes beneath the malaise of workand stress-related illnesses. We explored alternative myths, worldviews and systems that could produce a preferred future in which productive work and idleness co-existed to create a fairer, more sustainable society. Each participant wrote personal anecdotes describing the world and designed a set of instructions for themselves, which if applied in their daily life could begin to steer their quotidian routines towards their desired future. At the end of the workshop we held a prehearsal in the form of a reunion. The participants imagined having lived in their preferred future for ten years, and were returning to meet each other again. The conversations provided fertile material for several longer-form personal pre-enactments. In these pre-enactments we guide the participants through an experience of living as-if they already are their future selves in present day situations and involving unsuspecting bystanders. For example, one participant created a public “lab for rituals” for a day. Her insights from the pre-enactment have been translated into a research project and further public experiments. Supported by FoAM, she has since been actively transforming her professional life into a manifestation of a preferred future. In a way, Futures of Doing Nothing could be seen as an exercise in “sympathetic magic” (Frazer & Fraser, 1994) to invoke aspects of alternative futures in the present. Lucid Peninsula (Time’s Up, 2014) 9 applied futures techniques in the creation of a fictional storyworld with roots in the real problems of environmental pollution and destructive techno-social archetypes. Both the process and the results were designed to encourage a state akin to lucid dreaming. We used futures techniques as worldbuilding devices and combined them with improvisation, design thinking and surrealism to create a rich fictional world. Stories from this world were used to develop a range of experiential formats; a physical narrative (Authors & Author, 2013), an interactive installation and HCI demo (Dionisio et al., 2015) and a set of cards for a self-guided prehearsal, that extended the work beyond the gallery walls.

We have also experimented with a range of short-form prehearsals, less involved than the previous examples, but no less effective. These prehearsals were incorporated into futures workshops in order to include aspects of experiential learning in the process. For example; a prehearsal involving an entry-, reviewand exit interviews was used to help an academic institution find a new research chair; in a session with environmental NGOs we held a prehearsal which involved working with antagonistic stakeholders to improve the relevance and feasibility of their initiatives; in a workshop bringing together inhabitants and urban planners who looked at impacts of urbanisation on their rural neighbourhood, the prehearsal consisted of designing a local newspaper and an event where policy makers were faced with concrete alternatives, in words, staged photographs, food and drinks which reflected the desired futures of the inhabitants.

We found that the more directly relevant the issue is for the participants, the more engaged they tended to be. Not only would they enjoy the simulation, but were keen to translate experiential insights into appropriate actions and follow them through in the months and years to come.

Prehearsals and pre-enactments provide an example of an experimental“lab approach” to futures. Such an approach evolves through cycles of iterative development, where images of the future are re(de)fined through experiential learning, testing and evaluation. “This is a unique kind of laboratory one that creates a dialogue, listening carefully with an open mind to all the voices, and then tries to translate them, mix them, and amplify them to prototype and develop alternatives.” (Tiesinga & Berkhout, 2014)

By consciously navigating between abstract speculation and embodied actuality, the aim is to entangle the futures we imagine into the lives we are living to such extent that strategic foresight is transformed into ambient foresight. Until “unshocking the future” (Smith, 2014) becomes an integral part of quotidian practice; until a “normal everyday ordinary future” (Near Future Laboratory, 2014) consciously emerges from subtle changes in daily life; and until possible futures are brought within everyone’s reach and appear as tangible and pliant as they really are.

Entangling experiential futures into the fabric of everyday life is no small task. We are at the beginning of investigating how experiential futures techniques such as prehearsals and pre-enactments can become more effective and applicable across different scales and contexts. We are interested in taking both the simplicity and complexity of these experiments to their extremes; from designing pre-enactments at larger scales (cities, countries) and longer term (weeks, months or years) to working with individuals to develop personal, daily ambient foresight practice. Further experimentation is required to resolve the threshold problems between real-life and the magic circle of simulated experiences. We assume that a better understanding of expectations, presumptions, mental and emotional frameworks that participants bring into an experiential futures exercise can help to improve both engagement and commitment. This woudl also suggest that further investigation into the difference between learning from representation or performance would be productive (Author & Author, 2000). The evaluation and analysis of experiential futures methods is another extensive topic in need of research, that could help shed light on the perceived benefits of experiential approaches. We believe that scrutinising and sharing futures tools and techniques is key to a more widespread futures literacy and continue to develop and invite contributions to the Futurist Fieldguide (FoAM, 2015).

Considering the breadth of futures studies and our peripheral involvement in the field, there are almost certainly things we have overlooked, rediscovered or misunderstood. There are many threads and connections that this paper touches on, which could benefit from a more in-depth investigation. When it comes to integrating futures into everyday life, there is much transdisciplinary study and field-work necessary to discover the most applicable theories and practices.

“Futures research and knowledge should not be the preserve of a select number of institutionally privileged teachers and researchers that have access to ridiculously expensive journal subscriptions.[…] Futures research and knowledge is meant for the world. […] for humanity to thrive if not survive in the 21 century we will not just need a global knowledge commons, we will need a global foresight commons.” –Jose Ramos (Ramos, 2013)

(post review)

(post review)