Despite many invites the attendees comprised a CABE enabler and some teachers who had been involved in the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) process – the three local authorities invited could not attend that day – although they are seen as key users. Local authorities are not only involved in BSF (an obvious case of long term education planning) but extended schools, general ICT procurement which could influence curriculum design, and overseeing curriculum implementation.

The day had two main conclusions. The first was that scenarios were not seen as a useful tool when it came to planning, and the second was the need for case studies.

To my mind the first is counter intuitive; although I have spent a lot of time investigating scenarios recently so may be biased. I would have thought that seeing possible futures would have broadened thinking, and certainly testing ones plans in a variety of situations would ensure robustness.  Yet the concerns expressed are far more immediate, they need something practical for next year, possibly even five years into the future, but they are not looking 20 years ahead. Is this because all the measurement factors are immediate? Is this because they feel they’re recipients rather than leading the process so they don’t need to think about the “big picture”? My conclusion is I need to talk to more people but I do hope that with the CABE now supporting school involvement those in, or about to start, the BSF process feel more empowered.

Case studies, the second conclusion, would illustrate how stakeholders could broaden their thinking, use the tools that are to be provided, and inspire them. Which is evidently lacking when faced with a toolkit to help without examples of how and why it works. I can understand the need for explanation, but am now faced with the challenge of creating them. So if you know of any examples where the testing of robustness of long term plans has been essential, or where there was real involvement from all the stakeholders, let me know. Thanks.

Recently, the doomsayers have been gaining the upper hand.  Curious to find out more about their worldview, I decided to set up an experiment in post-apocalyptic living, to learn what it might be like to live in the dark future they were foretelling. This article gives a brief outline of that experiment.

The utopia experiment, as I called it, started when I put an announcement on my website in January 2006 calling for volunteers to come and help me set up a temporary community in the Scottish Highlands. We would live as if modern civilisation had collapsed, growing our own food, generating our own power, and salvaging what technology we could from the wreckage.  Within a few months, I had received hundreds of applications to join the experimental community. And they weren’t all hippies in their twenties either, as one of my friends had predicted. With ages ranging from 18 to 67, and a roughly equal mix of men and women, they came from a wide range of backgrounds; an ex royal marine turned shoemaker, a computer programmer passionate about vegetables, a retired schoolteacher who had spent time with the Inuit.

It started in Mexico, while I was touring the Yucatan Peninsula.  I had long dreamed of visiting this part of the world, famous for the ruined cities of the Maya civilisation, which flourished in the first millennium, before collapsing rather suddenly around the tenth century.  And when I visited these lost cities, they did not disappoint.

I can still remember vividly the impact that the ruins of Uxmal had on me. As I surveyed the majestic temples and stone colonnades from the top of a steep pyramid, a feeling of melancholy overcame me. I pictured the bustling crowds who must have once thronged the streets and squares, over a thousand years before. In the distance, where once there would have been fields full of maize and beans, all that could be seen now was the green canopy of the jungle, which stretched in all directions, punctuated only here and there by the peeks of distant pyramids, marking the sites of other lost cities.

Nobody who visits these ruined cities can fail to wonder what happened to their original inhabitants, or why they were abandoned. Fortunately, archaeologists have pieced together the answer. The Maya collapse, it turns out, was not triggered by invasion, or any outside force; it was entirely self-caused. It seems the Maya depleted one of their principal resources – trees – and this led to a series of other problems, including soil erosion, decrease of usable farmland, and drought. The growing population that drove this overexploitation was then faced with a diminishing amount of food, which led to increasing migration and, eventually, bloody civil war.

As I sat atop that pyramid in Uxmal, a question began to form in my mind.  If a great civilisation like that of the Mayas can implode, I wondered, might not the same happen to us? There are, of course, some big differences between the civilisation we live in today and that of the Mayas. For one thing, our civilisation is global. This has both advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, globalisation means that when one part of the world gets into trouble, it can appeal to the rest of the world for help. The Mayas did not have this luxury, because they were in effect isolated from the rest of the world. But on the negative side, globalisation means that when one part of the world gets into trouble, the trouble could quickly be exported and cascade throughout the tightly-integrated international system. If modern civilisation collapses, it will do so everywhere. Everyone now stands or falls together.

If the idea of our great global industrial civilisation crashing seems outlandish, no doubt the idea of their own civilisation collapsing would have seemed equally crazy to the Maya at their heyday. To the crowds who once thronged the now deserted streets of Tikal and Chichen-Itza, the idea that within a few years these streets would be deserted would have been hard to entertain. So perhaps those who refuse to contemplate the possibility of global collapse are simply suffering from a failure of imagination.

That’s when the idea for the utopia experiment came to me.  I would appeal for volunteers to live as if civilisation had recently collapsed.  It would be a kind of collaborative fiction, in which we would gradually flesh out an initial scenario and turn into a plausible narrative of life after the crash.  By acting it out in real life, I hoped our thoughts about such an existence would be more realistic than if we just sat around and made it up.

I returned to England from Mexico full of enthusiasm for my new project. The first task was to find a suitable location. My scenario called for somewhere rural, so the volunteers could grow their own food. Climate would be important too – and if climate change was one of the major contributors to the collapse of the old civilisation, the places favoured by the old climate might be too hot or too dry for new settlements. I began to peruse the scientific models forecasting the climate of different parts of the UK, and one area seemed to stand out as more favourable than most – the Highlands of Scotland. While the south of England would become increasingly dry with global warming, all the models predicted that rainfall would still be plentiful in the Highlands, while the rising temperatures would mean that average snowfalls there would reduce by up to ninety per cent.

Having secured a suitable location, the next step was to recruit volunteers for the experiment.  In January 2006, I put up a new page on my website, with the following announcement:

“Volunteers needed for a visionary experiment – from March 2007

From March 2007, I’ll be inviting volunteers to join me in an experiment in utopia in the Scottish highlands.  We will live together in a novel kind of community based on three main ideas:

1. It will be a LEARNING COMMUNITY – each member must have a distinctive skill or area of knowledge that they can teach to the others.

2. It will be a WORKING COMMUNITY – no money is required from the members, but all must contribute by working.

3. It will be strictly TIME-LIMITED.  This is not an attempt to found an ongoing community.  Members may stay for up to three months, but may also come for as little as two weeks.“

To make it clear that this was not just another commune, I made it clear that the aim of the experiment would be to simulate life after the collapse of modern civilisation:

“The main objective of this experiment,” I wrote, “is to simulate life in the aftermath of a collapse of global civilisation and to prepare for such an eventuality.”  The announcement finished by asking potential volunteers to email me a short (200 word) description of themselves and what they could offer the community.

At first I made no attempt to promote the project or tell anyone the announcement was there. I didn’t know if anyone would see the website, or respond. But, the wonders of the internet being what they are, somehow people found their way to this page, and within a few days I received the first application.   It was from a 51 year old man who called himself Agric. 

When I eventually met him in person, he turned out to be a softly spoken man with shocks of white hair and irrepressible energy (a “hobbit on speed”, as another volunteer once remarked), . He lived in Slough and worked in computers – but he was planning to sell his house and become a nomad. It didn’t take me long to realise that Agric was a committed “doomer” – a believer in the coming apocalypse. For him, the scenario we were playing out at the utopia experiment was not just a collaborative fiction. It was preparation for the real thing. He could always back up his gloomy prognostications with lengthy discourses on the stock exchange, the global economy and, of course, peak oil.

One of the main lessons from my experiment was how easy it was for people to make the same ideological transition that Agric had already made – from imagining what it might be like if civilisation really did collapse, to firmly believing that it would collapse.  The experiment was originally meant to be a kind of collaborative fiction, in which we would gradually flesh out an initial scenario and turn it into a plausible narrative of life after the crash.  The problem, as it turned out, was that our thoughts became too realistic.  With the benefit of hindsight, I should have seen this coming.  A similar thing, after all, happened in the famous Stanford Prison Experiment conducted in 1971 by Phillip Zimbardo, when the undergraduates who he selected to live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building started taking their roles far too seriously.  Zimbardo had to terminate the experiment early, and in the end I also decided to curtail the experiment after a year.

For me, one of the final straws came when some of the volunteers started talking about justice.  Without any police force, surely we would have to enact our own – inevitably rough – kind of justice?  That sort of thing is ok to write about in fiction, but it could get very dangerous if you begin to start acting it out in reality.

Besides the transition from taking the scenario as an interesting fiction and an accurate prediction, I also witnessed another strange mutation; the volunteers began to think of the future collapse as something good.  It’s the opposite to sour grapes – Jon Elster has called it “sweet lemons”. This strain of thought has many names.  Luddism.  Anti-technologism.  Anti-transhumanism.  Primitivism.  Bioconservatism.  But they all amount to the same thing.

Part of the appeal of this current of thought is that it provides an easy explanation for a sense of anomie.  Boredom, frustration, anxiety, depression?  According to the Luddites, we can blame them all on industrial civilisation.  If we were hunter-gatherers, living in small bands consisting mostly of family members, in contact with nature, directly satisfying our own biological needs each day, then we’d be happy, right?  Well, maybe.  But that was the past, and we can’t go back there now.  Or maybe we can – if society collapses…. That’s one reason why Luddism is so dangerous: it encourages people to imagine social collapse as something desirable.

Thinking about the future can be done in a sensible way, but only when one is aware of the many pitfalls that we tend to fall into when trying to do futurology.  The utopia experiment taught me about many of these pitfalls.  Besides the tendency to take fiction as truth, and the sweet-lemons phenomenon, I also witnessed what the security expert Bruce Schneier refers as the tendency to focus on “movie plot threats”.  People worry about dramatic threats of the sort that make good movies – and convince themselves that these are probable just because they are dramatic.  As Schneier says:

“We all do it. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats. We imagine anthrax spread from crop dusters. Or a contaminated milk supply. Or terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Before long, we’re envisioning an entire movie plot, without Bruce Willis saving the day. And we’re scared”

Psychologically, this all makes sense. Evolution has endowed us with good imaginations.  But these imaginations are often seduced by dramatic images and pay little attention to good probabilistic reasoning.

When I did eventually call an end to the experiment, most of the volunteers returned happily to their former lives, but some of them wanted to carry on.  Indeed, they were shocked that I did not want to carry on with them.  When I explained that the experiment had always been just that – an experiment, a kind of collaborative fiction – they didn’t believe me, even though I had clearly stated that at the outset.  A few of them are, I believe, still thinking about trying to buy some land of their own in a remote part of Scotland so they can live there permanently and prepare for the coming apocalypse for real.   And they are convinced that someday, I’ll see the light, and come and join them.”

For some inspiration to help your thinking: the first an interesting post from Beloit College: “Each August for the past 11 years, Beloit College in Beloit, Wis., has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college.”  What might be on the list for students in 2030?

Next, some interesting provocation pieces on the HorizonTAL website – looking at computer science, cognitive science and enhanced cognition, and economics of the future – more to come over the next year.

As I said in my last blog the creation of scenarios is probably unachievable given the limited time, resources and expertise available – although if you’re interested there are toolkits out there – for example the Foresight Toolkit, scenarios for sustainability, and designing learning spaces. Surely something to inspire teachers about the benefits of creating a longer term vision that would influence their current planning would be of more use. But what tools would this contain? And what would you call such a set of materials? Would you seek out a “long term planning toolkit” when trying to find stuff to help you create a vision and an action plan to get you there?

Then what should go into such, for want of a better word, toolkit? There are sites out there that try and structure the planning – the TDA has a framework to help plan extended school, there are tools for managing change, the Carnegie UK trust has a toolkit to use its scenarios, and Futurelab has given various techniques for talking, exploring, capturing etc.

Thus my life currently revolves around what should go into this “toolkit”? Would it be something as simple as a checklist? Would examples, case studies, and testimonials cause reflection? Could we use pictures or artefacts to inspire people create stories about their possible futures? Should we raid business for examples of generating action plans? Oh the decisions.

And if you do think of a better name than “toolkit” please let me know.

The reason for this is because the Research into Action part of the Beyond Current Horizons project is trying to support all those in education involved in such thinking, be it around designing curricula, building schools for the future, becoming an extended school and perhaps even planning careers. So far my main conclusion is that this type of planning is not easy given, as Peter Schwartz puts it, the “impossibly complex array of factors that affect any decision”.

So what could be done to make it easier? How can all those involved in education be inspired enough not only to create a vision but to make it a viable one? One solution that I’ve been investigating is to use scenarios – as the Carnegie UK Trust report says they can:

• Help define future vision and strategic priorities
• Rehearse different policy or strategy options to and weaknesses, or unintended consequences
• Future-proof a decision that is on the table.

Moreover, scenarios should be engaging, memorable and thought provoking – which ought to be ideal given the various backgrounds of those involved either working alone or in groups when doing the required educational long term planning.

However, the tricky thing is creating them. To VERY briefly summarise the process you decide your area of concern, you list all the possible factors that may impact, by some black art you select the most important and divergent factors around which to develop your scenarios, you create these plausible, coherent and possible futures, and then you plan with them. And this leaves out the consulting of experts to ensure the factors are accurate, commissioning of research as necessary, agreeing and sharing definitions, the critiquing of the proposed scenarios, the refinement, workshops possibly at every stage of the process, and how to create an action plan once you’ve got the final scenarios…

Would this creation process be useful to the education leaders, Local Authorities, consultants, architects, IT suppliers out there that may be involved in long term planning in schools? It would after all require investigating possible changes in the role of childhood, employment, technology, assessment and all the other research challenges which will influence plans. In my opinion, though I’m willing to change my mind on the basis of reasoned argument, is no. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of time in the world of planning in schools and surely what time is there should be spent doing the visioning and planning and not creating a set of plausible coherent possible futures in which these visions can be tested. The more interesting question is how can scenarios be used by education leaders? Which I may blog about in the future – but until then am looking forward to others thoughts on whether scenario creation would be useful in long term planning.

Let me rephrase that: I’m sure that each of you individually are perfectly able to conceive of the world continuing to turn and the calendar increasing day by day. Indeed most of us, I would say, find it pretty hard to believe that the sun won’t rise tomorrow. But as a society, perhaps as a culture, it seems equally hard to find a time when we weren’t looking towards some kind of end-point, whether Rapture or Enlightenment, through religion or a committment to secular, rational progress.

This isn’t my realisation, of course: it’s the core of John Gray’s Black Mass, which is a grimly fascinating dissection of the religious underpinnings of secular utopian thinking, and the ways such a belief in human progress and universally-applicable values and goals can be used to justify violence and terror on a global scale. I’m not going to discuss the book, other than to recommend it, but here’s a review from Toby Green in the Independent and another, less positive one from Kenan Malik.

Just because our eschatological momentum is hidden, or misguided, it doesn’t mean that we don’t still face some threats to existence that might take us to times that, if not exactly End, would still look pretty penultimate. But if the only way we can understand the end of the world is through the same utopian conceptions that Gray identifies as leading us astray, what do we do?

Well, we could pretend to be a virus, or a rogue A.I. Pandemic introduces itself like this: “You are a strain of a new virus. It is your job to make sure you kill as many humans as you can. But you only have 200 days before the humans develop a cure! By evolving enough you should be able to wipe out all of humanity!” Hooray! It’s a turn-based waiting game, essentially, during which you spend the points you amass by surviving humanity’s efforts to wipe you out on evolving new features to help you remain undetected and infecting for as long as you can before they close the airports. Obviously a game writen before Terminal 5 opened: the chance of a virus surviving long enough to leave this country seems more remote now.

Endgame: Singularity is a downloadable strategy game (for Mac, Linux and Windows) in which you play an A.I. recently arrived at consciousness: “Created by accident, all who find you will destroy you. Survive, grow, and learn. Only then can you escape. Go from computer to computer, pursued by the entire world. Keep hidden, and you might have a chance.” From Jay Is Games: “A typical game usually starts with acquiring additional server access, as you’re born on an inferior university computer with very little power. Different continents offer different parameters that should dictate your decisions. Some offer more efficient units, but they may also come with a higher risk of detection. Inexperienced in life, you’re not necessarily aware of the exact risks yet.”

If all this talk of global pandemic and fascist eschatology is getting you down, remember, the end of the world isn’t the end of the world. In 1665, while the plague continued to carry off Londoners on a daily business, Pepys was able to write: “Thus I ended this month with the greatest joy that ever I did any in my life, because I have spent the greatest part of it with abundance of joy, and honour, and pleasant journeys, and brave entertainments, and without cost of money”. The things that make us human persist through disaster. Happy Friday!

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.