Acting out stories of the future
“…in the year 2025, things have calmed down a lot. There are still some people living the cities, but on the whole they aren’t nice places to be. The only way to make a reasonable living there now is by prostitution, drug-dealing, or protection rackets. Those who aren’t involved in these lucrative trades struggle to make ends meet. They pull the copper out of the walls and rip out sinks and pipework to swap for food on street corners.”
No, this isn’t a prediction made from the Beyond Current Horizons programme, but part of the scenario used within the Utopia Experiment (more details can be found here). The experiment was led by Dr Dylan Evans who first came to my attention at the Futurelab Innovations workshop on Emotion Technology – at the time Dylan was an Evolutionary Psychologist and Senior Lecturer in Intelligent Autonomous Systems at the University of the West of England.
I’ll return to some of the work being done at UWE, particularly because it deals with robotics, autonomous systems (such as gastrobots) and emotional relationships with technologies (especially in light of the recent publication of ‘Love and Sex with Robots‘ by David Levy), all of which have implications for the ways in which we think about technologies and the use of technologies in the future.
For this post though, a pointer specifically to the Utopia Experiment. There are many ways to investigate and consider possible futures, some of the more traditional are highlighted in the Futures Review but also of course there are many different science fiction programmes and books that showcase ways of thinking about futures. But this applied project takes a rich scenario and invites participants not to consider it – but to live it – in order to understand how relationships develop, new communuities form and different ways of acting in possible future worlds.
Dylan is writing up the experiment (hoping to publish sometime in 2009 amongst other research he’s undertaking at Cork Constraint Computation Centre) – and in the meantime is drawing some of his findings and thoughts together for an article for the Beyond Current Horizons website. In particular he’s writing about some of the difficulties faced when thinking about the future.
As with all findings, articles and papers that are published on the Beyond Current Horizons website, there will be a post, comment or link here – so sign up for the RSS feed to this blog if you want to be alerted to new additions to the website.
