Co-creating Possible Futures of Light, Beyond Lighting. A Hybrid Approach: Format Design, Preliminary Findings, and Reflexive Learnings From a Foresight Practice, Based on a Creative Industry Event Series

The research context for this article is a specific lighting industry professional event, focusing on the possible future of light across the dimensions of body, object (both human-scale and building), and metropolis. Light becomes the theme to generate visions and insights about longer term developments from personal, social, and business viewpoints. The event was designed as a location-specific format for the multi-awarded Silo 486, Helsinki, by Lighting Design Collective. The format is inspired by Brian Eno’s 1970s “Oblique Strategies,” therefore an approach derived from fine arts and popular culture, within the constructivist episteme. The specific target of this event is thought leaders and/or the next generation of architectural, design, and creative industry leaders, with an invitation list of 15–20, selected according to the “Elite Club” open innovation principle (Verganti et al., 2008). The event was held three times, from 2014 through 2016, during the Helsinki Design Week, as integral part of its program. The authors were main initiator and moderator of the event, as they designed the format in 2014.

Building Scenarios With the Three Tomorrows

Postnormal times, as a concept and as a theory, was conceived in a futures studies context by futurists, yet there have some doubts regarding its applicability when engaging in actual futures research. The arrival of Sardar and Sweeney’s article “The Three Tomorrows of Postnormal Times” seemed to provide the missing method. Yet, despite the authors’ claim, the three tomorrows is not a method, nor does their article explain how to develop the tomorrows. However, it is possible to build future scenario using the three tomorrows not as a method but as an approach. As an approach, the three tomorrows offer a general structure in which it is possible to undertake a futures research. To prove it, this article presents a three-stage process that can help any researcher construct scenarios following the tenets of postnormal times theory.

Teaching Futures Studies From Disciplinary And Student Perspectives

Concepts from the Enlightenment and the historical origins of modern social sciences are used to discuss how futures studies deserves recognition as a social science in its own right and as a needed component of the curricula of other disciplines as well, especially in public administration. In focus groups, undergraduate students who had just completed a course in futures studies identified what they would emphasize if they become teachers of our field. They would emphasize critical thinking, individual relevance and empowerment, interrelatedness, technology as a two-sided agent of change, a risk management approach to understanding crises and opportunities, past efforts to anticipate possible futures, developing scenarios using the Societal, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political framework, environmental scanning and backcasting, and especially the importance of Enlightenment values in framing preferred futures. As teachers, they would use technology extensively but were sharply divided on whether futures studies should be taught in an online only format.

Extending the Participant’s Voice to Guide Artificial Intelligence Transformation Using Futures Methodology and Layered User Story Analysis

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a vital driver of the next wave of automatisation of Industry 4.0. It impacts product-based and service-based organisations and is becoming an investment stream in organisational transformation strategies. The transformation teams that deploy AI use agile incremental methodologies that ideally match the learning and adaptation requirements for the machine, as well as the human user who is the source of data and requires a service response. This research outlines a layered analysis process of 65 user stories (a common agile method of obtaining user requirements) generated via a participatory process, involving 110 participants in three workshop settings, in what they determined AI would not do. The results outline the workshop approach undertaken to generate user stories and the analysis of user stories via persona and futures methodology causal layered analysis (Inayatullah S. 1998. Causal layered analysis. Futures 30(8): 815-829). The final component of the analysis generated a futures focussed set of guiding principles that can be used as a lens to broaden the transformation teams perspective in AI deployment. Concepts also consider the importance of futures literacy as a key competency of AI creation teams.

Sexy Navigations: Adventures in Building Love in Postnormal Times

Love has literally been debated to death by thinkers since time immemorial. This article seeks to reframe the discourse on love to restore life and appreciation for its complex beauty and free it from the hopeless utopian project contemporary times have made it into. Likewise, the over-categorization of Western thought has doomed the concepts of sex and gender. By exploring our increasingly postnormal world, and in light of the recent pandemic, this article seeks to reopen the discussion of love, sex, and gender in our precarious times so that we can better understand our identities and pre-empt future conflicts and plot navigations for other impasses occurring beside and simultaneous to the quest for love. By analyzing the concepts of the Manufactured Normalcy Field and the postnormal tilt, we can open up new opportunities to challenge the conventional definitions and structures that hold back society from attaining more accepting, understanding, and preferred futures.

Zombie Disciplines: Knowledge, Anticipatory Imagination, and Becoming in Postnormal Times

This article does three things: first, it explores the erosions of traditional forms of knowledge and how this is impacting the way change is approached and understood; second, it expands on Ziauddin Sardar’s notion that imagination is central to unlocking new ways of being and knowing the world—and in particular, explores Marcus Bussey’s anticipatory imagination further; and third, we address notions of agency and suggest how, through a reimagining, an ontological shift from Enlightenment notions of Being to new notions of Becoming is available to us, which we believe is worth consideration given our postnormal context.

The Perfect Postnormal Storm: COVID-19 Chronicles (2020 Edition)

This essay addresses the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study in postnormal times phenomena: a perfect postnormal storm. The essay introduces basic concepts of postnormal analysis and provides examples of the acceleration of speed, scope, scale, and simultaneity of change in a number of human and natural systems and gives examples of the accelerating complexity, chaos, and contradictions that characterize phenomenon and systems as they become more postnormal. The related concepts of the layers of ignorance and uncertainty are explored related to the movement of phenomenon toward postnormal states. The importance of the idea of manufactured normalcy fields and resistance to or accommodation of postnormal burst, such as lag and tilt, can help to better understand the postnormal landscape. For example, the pros and cons of returning to “normal” raise fundamental questions about the logic and wisdom of the dominant growth and economic paradigm.

Monitoring Emerging Issues: A Proposed Approach and Initial Test

The increasing complexity and uncertainty of the future may stimulate demand for more monitoring emerging issues. Futurists have long advocated for monitoring the future on an ongoing basis or for tracking the findings of project work in practice. However, clients have historically been reluctant to invest time and money in monitoring, and little practical guidance is available on how to set up a monitoring. This article describes a pilot monitoring capability that is simple and practical to implement. It was developed as a “plug-in” to supplement an ongoing horizon scanning system. The monitoring system tracks the movement of emerging issues that were identified by horizon scanning. It provides a means to keep policy-makers informed about the progress of emerging issues and provides advance warning to develop an appropriate strategic response.