Future methods stream

Abstracts

Exploring future social values: An analytical method

by Luke Boyle, Arizona State University; with Lauren Withycombe Keeler, Luke Boyle, and Michael Bernstein

Scenarios and scenario development are important tools for describing mid- and long-term future arrangements that are inherently uncertain. As decision aides, these approaches often focus on describing future system arrangements, which can then be assessed for their implications for organizations or groups. What is often missing in such scenarios is a rich appreciation for the experience of being human in the futures described. However, the human experience of futures is critical to the ability of scenarios to inform sound policymaking, corporate social value creation, and responsible innovation. In this paper, we propose and test an analytical method for interrogating scenarios and other foresight products to understand the human experience implicit in them. A questionnaire was developed based on the nine dimensions of human thriving in the Human-Scale Development Approach and administered by the research team to the Future of Aging in Smart Environments Scenarios. Like responses were clustered in a virtual pile-sorting approach. The results are an exemplary set of twenty-three future social values which describe what may be important to aging people in the future based how their needs are systematically met or not. We argue that the results provide a richer picture of the human experience than the Future of Aging in Smart Environments Scenarios alone and are therefore a useful add-on to traditional scenario approaches. We conclude with recommendations for using the approach to deepen engagement with future human beings in the practice of scenarios and strategic foresight more broadly. 

‘Post’-pandemic hybrid experiments: Speculative methods for making collaborative futures

Rebecca Coleman, Bristol Digital Futures Institute, University of Bristol; with Martha King and Ella Chedburn

For many, the Covid-19 pandemic involved a rapid and large-scale shift from in-person to digital work, education, medicine, shopping and socialising. As lockdowns lifted and pandemic measures dropped, hybrid spaces, which brought together in-person and online elements, became increasingly common. Digital spaces were often described as more accessible and inclusive than in-person spaces by those with diverse lived experience. Today, a time in-between the days of strict pandemic restrictions and the ‘return to normal’, is a moment to reflect on how accessible, inclusive and sensory hybrid futures – as well as digital futures more broadly - might be shaped. This paper discusses a collaborative project with Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC), a digital arts organisation based in south Bristol creating thriving neighbourhoods through arts tech and care, which examined how political, ethical and embodied questions are not lost in a rush to return to in-person events. We developed a series of hybrid experiments that utilised popular and easily available digital and analogue technologies that we tried out at a community festival. We created activities that ‘stretched’ hybrid beyond the festival itself and experiences that people might take up and shape themselves. This paper draws on speculative design to consider the experiments as speculative methods; playful, open-ended and ambiguous approaches to probe and open up future possibilities (Wilkie et al 2015, Savransky et al 2017, Coleman 2017). It reflects on how speculative methods shape present-future relations and what they might offer to the collaborative making of futures.

On (not) missing the target - Technology Assessment and its Future Methods. Tracing scenarios, narratives, and their designated recipients

Paulina Dobroć and Janine Gondolf, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology/ Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) 

Wherever futures are addressed in research, scientists claim that their inquiry should be anticipatory, inclusive, accountable, and relevant to those outside the sciences. Accordingly, many scientific projects, and in particular technology assessment (TA), draw on methods such as scenario building, narrative, and discourse analysis as a pattern for interpreting ongoing projects and shaping future trajectories in line with this idea of social relevance. 

TA is conceptually committed to anticipation, inclusivity and complexity management (Grunwald 2019). For example, vision assessment (VA) analyses discourses around socio-technical visions to reveal social dynamics (Frey et al. 2022) and narratives to trace motifs and discursive shifts (Dobroć et al. 2023), building scenarios that make them visible and enable discussion of possible futures (Schneider et al. 2022). Such practice requires reflexivity, including reflection on different audiences and publics, such as society, science, or TA itself, which seeks to reflect on its practice. It is recognized that TA becomes an actor in different contexts e.g., future-making, as it actively engages with societal change, having emerged from parliamentary advice (Schneider/Lösch 2015). 

Our paper focuses on questions about the objects and subjects of TA research, its addressees and agents: for whom are participatory methods of TA, and who participates? How, if at all, do these analyses and results emerge from science? What, if anything, makes them assessable and relevant to those they are intended to reach? We reflect on the 'futuristic' practices of TA around two different projects (3D print/viable city). 

Dobroć, P., Bögel, P., & Upham, P. (2023). Narratives of change: Strategies for inclusivity in shaping socio-technical future visions. Futures, 145, 103076. 
Schneider C, Lösch A. (2015) What About Your Futures, Technology Assessment? An Essay on How to Take the Visions of TA Serious Seriously, TATuP.) 

Artificial intelligence for climate action: states’ perspectives on opportunities, risks, ideas and future imaginaries

Marie Francisco, Linköping University; with Kyungmee Kim

Researchers have studied the ethics, governance, and potential of artificial intelligence (AI) for climate action and sustainable development. These are timely discussions as regard to the opportunities and risks of technologies like machine learning, satellite imageries, big data analytics or image computing on climate mitigation and adaptation. But less attention has been given to perceptions about these technologies, and how they impact AI development and sustainability pathways. 

How environmental governance actors envision AI is likely mediated by broader discourses and ideas about solutions to address climate change and the type of future they aim for. Ideas and discourses are important links in how policy outcomes are shaped, and institutions developed. Technologies are not neutral and are also susceptible to be impacted by these processes. This is important for AI, which encompasses many pervasive technologies that contribute to how environmental problems are made knowable and governable. With this paper, we first aim to contribute to this discussion by unpacking how Canada, Colombia, Egypt, France, Morocco, South Africa, South Korea and Sweden make sense of AI for climate mitigation and adaptation within their policy reports, white papers, and international pledges. This mapping exercise secondly opens avenues to explore what ideas, discourses, and goals these eight states tap into when imagining AI and its applications for climate action. We also pay attention to what framings are left ignored, what risks and opportunities are emphasized over others, etc. Thirdly, we discuss these results and their potential impact on sustainability transformations. 

Policy labs as a method to steer towards sustainable and fair mobility futures

Malin Henriksson, The Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI); with Kelsey Oldbury

In this paper we analyse how public actors reason about how citizens can be involved in the planning of a sustainable and fair mobility future. Using a ‘policy lab’ methodology, we have engaged public actors from a municipality located in the south-east of the Stockholm region in a series of workshops on the theme of citizen engagement in the future planning of a more sustainable and fair transport system. The workshop series has been established as a bridge between a research program centred around a neighbourhood Living Lab and established institutional planning processes at the municipality. The aim of the paper is therefore to explore how policy lab workshops shape public actor views on citizen participation as a means to steer towards a sustainable and fair mobility future, and specifically what kind of arena policy lab workshops create for public actors to engage with questions of citizen participation. 

Citizens are seen as (passive) users or consumers that make rational choices based on their interest – which often seem to collide with time savings, or possible to travel comfortable. Citizen participation is regarded as “messy”, … Within a sustainable mobility framework on the other hand, citizen participation can assume a consensus-building role to build legitimacy and acceptability for sustainability. In a critical transport policy agenda, citizen participation can function as an arena for a genuinely political debate about possible mobility futures. It is however rare that citizen groups are viewed as potential partners in the transport debate. 

Preliminary findings suggest that participants in the policy lab are positive towards citizen participation and regard citizens as an important source of knowledge, but do not necessarily consider citizens as co-creators of future mobility systems. In the study, the policy lab methodology works to facilitate research evidence uptake into policy and practice. Policy labs remain under conceptualised and empirically. 

The futures of oil

Bård Lahn, TIK Centre, University of Oslo

How are existing methods for making futures knowable and governable bound up with the materiality of oil? Timothy Mitchell (2011) has argued that oil has been instrumental in producing a specific perception of the future during the 20th century, by providing the fossilized energy needed to underpin visions of limitless economic growth. At the same time, oil has been closely tied to ideas about a future marked by limits – whether in the form of resource scarcity and “peak oil” or ecological constraints and carbon emissions (e.g. Urry, 2013). The latter has become increasingly prominent in recent years, with scenarios for zero-carbon futures becoming a central focus in discussions on climate policy and energy transition.

This paper proposes an empirical approach to studying how oil matters for attempts to know and govern futures. It suggests that by studying the specific tools that have been built to govern the extraction and consumption of oil – energy models, economic forecasting, and estimates of geological resources – we may gain new insights into the role of oil in contemporary ways of knowing and acting on the future. The approach will be illustrated by examples drawn from ongoing work on the governing of Norwegian oil extraction.

Web archiving as future making practice
  
Jessica Ogden, University of Bristol 

Sociotechnical imaginaries have been a subject of great interest for STS, providing a site where scholars can investigate how futures are collectively held, institutionally stabilised and publicly performed through science and technologies. This paper will examine the ways that sociotechnical imaginaries for the Web are mobilised through the actors and practices associated with archiving the Web for ‘the future’. Drawing on ethnographic research into web archiving at different institutional and grass-roots organisations, this paper articulates the collective imaginaries that animate this work, as well as the implications it has for the Web itself. The paper discusses the materiality (infrastructure, labour), visions and moral agendas that are marshalled in service of web archiving by examining how web futures - or visions for what the Web should be - are imagined and put into practice by web archivists themselves. Methodologically, practice (as action, artefacts and tacit knowledge) acts as an organising site for the study of future-making, enabling access to how sociotechnical actors anticipate and envision futures as sites of possibility. I argue that studying web archiving practices act as a form of future-making practice across three planes: 1) the ‘how and who’ of web archiving shapes what is saved for the future; 2) web archiving fundamentally changes the nature of what the Web is; and 3) practices act as a place where sociotechnical imaginaries for possible web futures can be observed.

Policy labs as a method to steer towards sustainable and fair mobility futures

Kelsey Oldbury, VTI - Statens väg- och transportforskningsinstitut; with Malin Henriksson

In this paper we analyse how public actors reason about how citizens can be involved in the planning of a sustainable and fair mobility future. Using a ‘policy lab’ methodology, we have engaged public actors from a municipality located in the south-east of the Stockholm region in a series of workshops on the theme of citizen engagement in the future planning of a more sustainable and fair transport system. The workshop series has been established as a bridge between a research program centred around a neighbourhood Living Lab and established institutional planning processes at the municipality. The aim of the paper is therefore to explore how policy lab workshops shape public actor views on citizen participation as a means to steer towards a sustainable and fair mobility future, and specifically what kind of arena policy lab workshops create for public actors to engage with questions of citizen participation. Citizens are seen as (passive) users or consumers that make rational choices based on their interest – which often seem to collide with time savings, or possible to travel comfortable. Citizen participation is regarded as “messy”, … Within a sustainable mobility framework on the other hand, citizen participation can assume a consensus-building role to build legitimacy and acceptability for sustainability. In a critical transport policy agenda, citizen participation can function as an arena for a genuinely political debate about possible mobility futures. It is however rare that citizen groups are viewed as potential partners in the transport debate. Preliminary findings suggest that participants in the policy lab are positive towards citizen participation and regard citizens as an important source of knowledge, but do not necessarily consider citizens as co-creators of future mobility systems. In the study, the policy lab methodology works to facilitate research evidence uptake into policy and practice. Policy labs remain under conceptualised and empirically.

Making scenarios work for long climate-forestry futures

Marie Widengård, Gothenburg University; with Sara Holmgren

What is climate-smart forestry? Scenarios have become a common tool to come to grips with the question of climate-smart futures, but how does time itself matter in scenario creation and planning? By drawing on a performative approach to time, we explore how the usage of time influence the choice between different climate-forestry scenarios. We analyse the temporal work of a Swedish scenario study, and reveal how time is extended, aligned and circulated in support of the intensive Swedish climate-forestry model, now and in the long-term future.

From Near-Certain Futures to Unknown Unknowns: (In)security and (Un)certainty of a Climate Change Technofix

Joshua Wodak, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

Nine days after the Paris Agreement was forged, eminent climatologist Kevin Anderson declared that “the world has just gambled its future on the appearance in a puff of smoke of a carbon-sucking fairy godmother.” His declaration was no mere off the cuff remark, after all, it was published in the journal Nature. In turn, in this presentation I explore “the world” that Anderson inveighs against, in terms of future-oriented methods at play in IPCC modelling, in the context of a (singular) “future” that prefigures such knowledge production and regulation. 

That is: there is an irresolvable conflict between the inevitability of ‘climate overshoot’, as marked by the formation of the Climate Overshoot Commission in 2022, and the unfathomable unknown unknowns intrinsic to the “carbon-sucking fairy godmother” of Negative Emissions Technologies. How then, do the climate change technofixes proposed by Synthetic Biology and Climate Engineering attempt to render the future knowable and governable, when gambling has become the most apt analogy for the insecurity and uncertainty of any such futuring? I explore what is at stake when contested visions of how the future is made mappable and measurable come to terms with the realm of unknown unknowns. When our options appear to not only have been reduced to gambling, but a manner of gambling where predictability and probability not only exceed the limits of what can be known, but what can be known about what can be known… Therein, the presentation contemplates the unthinkable questions that our current situation demands we ask, and perhaps even try to answer.

Reshuffling futures in energy transitions

Claudio Coletta, University of Bologna

Energy transitions, similarly to every process of innovation (Rip 2018), are featured by a future-oriented work of scenarization negotiated among heterogeneous entities. Especially in these cases, the scenarized futures are subject to capture and selection by specific actors to deal with uncertainties and orient actions toward certain futures (Andersson 2019). In observing an empirical case of energy transition in the City of Gothenburg (GBG), the paper addresses the future-making practices that revolve around the notion of risk, not only as something to avoid given the climate crisis but also, in Schumpeterian terms, something to embrace in order to challenge and overcome an awkward situation, thus bringing innovation. We argue that the climate discourse produces a collision between the idea of innovation and the idea of transition in the future making practices of the GBG case. First, we invite to relationally reconsider Anderson’s (2010) threefold model based on preemption, precaution, and preparedness, as the risk framework reshuffles temporal relations of such modes of ordering. Secondly, we invite to rethink the governance of energy transition in GBG through the notion of “time infrastructuring”, a set of practices activated to take into account multiple temporalities that are hardly manageable and yet build the mission of achieving climate neutrality.

Organizers

Daniel Andersson, Marie Widengård