Tag: Futures

Posted on

Bedlam and Then Some: This is not the Future

One of the many methods used in futures studies is what is called environmental scanning. “All futurists do environmental scanning,” write Theodore J. Gordon and Jerome C. Glenn, “some are more organized and systematic, all try to distinguish among what is constant, what changes, and what constantly changes” (p. 3). The process, which includes several distant early warning techniques (e.g., expert panels, literature reviews, internet searches, conference monitoring, etc.), helps inform the pursuits of issues management and strategic planning. According to William Renfro, President of the Issues Management Association, issues management consists of four stages: identifying potential future issues, researching the background and potential impacts of these issues, evaluating issues competing for a corporation or nation’s operations, and developing appropriate strategies for these operations (see Renfro, 1993, p. 67).

A little further afield, science fiction is another place we look to “see” the future (Hollinger, 2010; Woodgate, 2004). Citing Marx’s reification and Baudrillard’s simulacrum, Adam Roberts (2006) writes, “Science as simulation is the reason why fictional science, or ‘SF’, is so much more fun to watch than real science…” (p. 113). Spaceships, robots, cyberspace: These all exist in some form in the real world, but the widespread perception of these contrivances come from science fiction books and movies. “In the context of SF,” Roberts writes, “this reification works most potently on the interconnected levels of representation of technology and the technologies of reproduction” (p. 113). At varying levels, we look to science fiction to show us the potential directions in which technology is going.

Derek Woodgate (2004), founder of The Futures Lab, calls this method the “wide-angled lens” approach (p. 52). Analyzing the work of William Gibson, Woodgate (2004) writes, “Here, in the various levels of connectivity, we need to study the patterns and signals suggested by the ‘lens’ and models. More important, we must be able to recognize the patterns and make connections between seemingly unrelated data in a way that will provide us with powerful and effective future leverage points” (p. 60). As much as Gibson denies being a predictor of any stripe, his work is invariably consulted as a map to the future of technology.

The above approaches represent applied systems thinking for future planning. I briefly outline them here in order to analyze a few trends I’ve witnessed in recent science fiction, trends I do not believe are reliably predictive. As a member of the Futurist Board of the Lifeboat Foundation and fancying myself an amateur futurist, I enjoy dabbling in the techniques of futures studies. Pointing out the wrongs is much easier than getting it right, nonetheless, the following are four misrepresentations of future technology that I’ve seen popping up on movie screens:

Star Wars

Holograms: We all remember how futuristic Princess Leia’s message to Obi-Wan Kenobi looked when beamed out of R2D2’s projector in the original Star Wars (1977), and holograms have persisted throughout the series. Dennis Gabor was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971 for his invention and development of the holographic technique for 3-D image representation. Since then they’ve shown up all over the science fictional universe in film, television, and novels: Total Recall (1990), Vanilla Sky (2001), Paul Levinson‘s novel The Pixel Eye (2003), The Island (2005), Avatar (2009), the Fringe television series (2008-2013), Spike Jonze’s her (2013), The Giver (2014), and perhaps most famously in the Star Trek series, home of the Holodek, as well as the aforementioned Star Wars films.

The best holograms have the resolution of old, black-and-white television. No one is going to turn away from the high-definition flat-screens found on every surface these days to look at a choppy, transparent, 3-D ghost.

her

Voice-activated Interfaces: This is another invention that’s been used throughout science fiction, from Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward (1888) to Star Trek. While the movie her (2013) uses voice activation throughout, there’s a particularly unlikely scene showing main character Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) checking his email while riding home on public transportation. That scenario is currently as commonplace as they come, but he’s doing it via a voice-activated interface. It’s like widespread adoption of the Bluetooth headset: Can you imagine everyone everywhere reciting commands to their communication devices? It would be Bedlam and then some!

Using a microphone for information input is the opposite of listening to headphones. The former is impossible to do in a crowded car, bus, train, office, or living room, while the latter is happens more often than not. I’ve also never really seen how modality can be expressed via voice. Without a supplementary input device, how does one, for instance, differentiate between writing, editing, and just talking?

Elysium

Exoskeletons: Robotic and semi-robotic exoskeletons are often shown as military contrivances used to augment human strength and agility. They’ve appeared most recently in Elysium (2013) and Edge of Tomorrow (2014). While these provide nice narrative crutches by keeping humans in the fore, and one can easily envision other uses for them, the future of warfare is largely unpersoned. Remotely controlled devices like missiles, bombs, satellites, and drones are the more likely path of future skirmishes. For an excellent speculative tale on the latter, see Daniel Suarez’s novel Kill Decision (2012).

Cloud Atlas

Round Screens: Outside of a radar room, I’ve only seen round screens in one movie. The Wachowski brothers’ adaptation of David Mitchell’s brilliant novel Cloud Atlas (2013) is full of bad ideas, but this has to be the most wrong-headed. Like the hologram, round screens look futuristic, but the grid as a textual and architectural form predates Gutenberg (see Hurlburt, 1978; Williamson, 1986). Unless we stop using symbolic language, its displays need to be rectangles. Screens, like the pages they emulate, require right angles.

To paraphrase Kenneth Burke (1974), science fiction provides equipment for living in future and alternative worlds — even when it gets it wrong. As Elizabeth Grosz (2000) writes, “History is made an inexhaustible enterprise only because of the ongoing movement of time, the precession of futurity, and the multiplicity of positions from which this writing can and will occur” (p. 1021). Science fiction’s speculative trajectories often show us what’s possible, even if its just by showing us what’s not.

References:

Burke, Kenneth. (1974). The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Glenn, Jerome C. & Gordon, Theodore J. (2003). Futures Research Methodology, V2.0. Washington, DC: AC/UNU Millennium Project.

Grosz, Elizaneth. (2000, Summer). Histories of a Feminist Future. Signs, 25(4), pp. 1017-1021.

Hollinger, Veronica. (2010, March). A History of the Future: Notes for an Archive. Science Fiction Studies, 37(1), pp. 23-33

Hurlburt, Allen. (1978). Grid: A Modular System for the Production of Newspapers, Magazines, and Books. New York: Van Nostrand Reinholt Co.

Renfro, William L. (1993). Issues Management in Strategic Planning. Westport, CT: Quorum Books.

Roberts, Adam. (2006). Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge.

Williamson, Jack H. (1986, Autumn). The Grid: History, Use and Meaning. Design Issues, 3(2), pp. 15-30.

Woodgate, Derek (with Pethrick, Wayne R). (2004). Future Frequencies. Austin, TX: Fringecore Publishing.

————-

Special thanks to my futurist friends Scott Smith, Frank Spencer, Stuart Candy, Jamais Cascio, Bruce Sterling, and Emily Empel for getting me psyched about futures studies in the first place, and to Lily Brewer and Kathleen Tyner for providing additional texts and inspiration.

Posted on

Occupy the Edges: Boundary Objects

Managing the concept of time is never easy. Tangling with the temporal in an institution is a complex issue among many complex issues. Institutions use narratives to remember, and, as Charlotte Linde (2009) writes, “to work and rework, present and represent the past for the purposes of the present and the projection of the future” (p. 3). In what Stock (1983) calls a “textual community,” people in an institution or community determine which narrative texts are relevant for reference and which resonate with the shared beliefs of that institution or community. Members use references to the same narratives.

In a recent post on her website, futurist Emily Empel brought up the problem of communicating across boundaries between communities of practice. In this case, communication between business institutions and futures studies. Brand recognition is as much of an issue in this environment as it is anywhere else, hence Empel’s concern. “We are a cult where the code words are scenario, uncertainty, and emerging issues,” she writes. “Our clients speak revenue, profit, and predictability. Business and futures need to develop a common language in which advanced foresight becomes an integral and actionable piece of the strategy puzzle.”

A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. — Martin Heidegger

Business interests and futures studies represent what Etienne Wenger (1999) calls “communities of practice.” These are communities of workers united by a similar goals, practices, and vocabularies. To the social scientist, the differences in these vocabularies are analogous to Kaplan’s (1998) “logic-in-use” and “reconstructed logic,” where the former is the native language of a community, and the latter is the language it uses to explain its work to those outside the community. Participation and reification of the practices of a community unite them, but also distinguish them from others and from the outside world in general. Their distinguishing features create boundaries.

Peripheries emphasize similarity and boundaries emphasize difference (Wenger, 1999). Where boundaries exist, as they obviously do between businesses and foresight work, we need to create peripheries. As posited by Star and Griesemer (1989), boundary objects aid this effort by translating differences between communities of practice. Boundary objects cab be “artifacts, documents, terms, concepts, and other forms of reification around which communities of practice can organize their interconnections” (p. 105). Star (1989) outlined a set of criteria for such objects as follows (the brief descriptions are my own):

1. Modularity: Something for everyone.

2. Abstraction: Limits information to what is useful.

3. Accommodation: Maintains usefulness for all.

4. Standardization: No surprises.

“When a boundary object serves multiple constituencies,” Wenger writes, “each only has partial control over the interpretation of the object” (p. 108). For instance, in typical scenario planning, parties in dispute can stay in dispute as they try to work out a future solution. As Stewart Brand (1999) puts it, they can “continue to disagree about the past and present (since such a scenario can represent a different version of what happened in the past) and at the same time allows them to agree about what possible futures they face together, and which of these might be most desirable for all” (p. 118). Communities in dispute are the extreme case, but we are currently surrounded by the extreme case. Our world is all edges and no middle ground.

Scenario planning is still one of the most versatile tools in use and can help businesses manage and temper the temporal. As Bruce Sterling (2002) put it, “a good scenario will slice through layers of time like a cake knife” (p. 217). Good scenarios are not predictive or probable, rather they are explorations of possibilities — plural. Brand (1999) concludes, “We don’t know what’s coming. We do know we’re in it together” (p.123).

References:

Brand, Stewart. (1999). The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. New York: Basic Books.

Heidegger, Martin. (1994). Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row.

Kaplan, Abraham. (1998). The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Linde, Charlotte (2009). Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Star, Susan Leigh (1989). The Structure of Ill-structured Solutions: Boundary Objects and Heterogenous Distributed Problem Solving. Working paper, Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine.

Star, Susan Leigh & Griesemer, James R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19: 387.

Sterling, Bruce. (2002). Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the next Fifty Years. New York: Random House.

Stock, B. (1983). The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Wenger, Etienne. (1999). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

——————

Special thanks to Kathleen Tyner, Emily Empel, Frank Spencer, Scott Smith, Stuart Candy, Jamais Cascio, Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, and my other friends in futures who’ve taught me so much.