The event was held in the wonderful MAGIC PLAYroom at SMARTlab – which enabled the group to make use of an open creative space as well as a range of computers, non-digital resources, floor and wall projectors, fabrication devices…  The tools were available for all to use and the inspiration was provided by a range of experts.  Jessica Charlesworth and Michael Burton showed some work around futures and obesity.  Alex Hall provided insight into how artefacts  of today can be changed in both form and function by a range of future trends (more of this in the New Year).

During the course of the day we used ‘creative note-taking’ – finding ways to capture converstations and ideas beyond text and mindmaps.  The aim of this is to help ‘reframe’ conversations (changing speech to images, images to stories etc) and also provides a point of reference to further expore issues as they are raised.  Having such a wide range of methods for capturing rich conversations also helps in providing those who weren’t there with an insight into different aspects of the day (and in particular the conversations held and ideas developed).

Three very talented creators helped with this, Dave Clark captured the group’s conversations in images and ’scribles’, Toby Borland captured conversations and scribbles as 3D models and Martin Maudsley brought together conversations, images and models into a story.  Video outputs, designs and images will be shared soon, as will Martin’s summative story.

This Link goes to some of the images captured during the day – be great to see/hear what you make of them without any contextual explanation. Be even more interested in what they make you think about.

As an audience we can believe an alien present. It’s like today, only more so. Maybe an alternative version of today. We can also easily be persuaded to believe in a far future. We feel sure that someday, somehow they’ll have massive floating cities, or highways in the sky, instant food, and all the rest. We feel certain about this despite the fact that we can’t fund fast trains between our cities today, or permit genetically modified insect-resistant corn, or take any unified step toward large-scale 21-century developments. Even returning to the moon next decade seems far-fetched.

The near future – let’s peg it 2020 and beyond — is a blank because there is almost no vision of a near-future that seems both desirable and plausible.

There are, in fact, many visions of the period Kelly describes that are both desirable and plausible to some people, but what really intrigued me was this idea of an “alien present”. One of the things I’ve been saying to audiences over the last year or so has been “the difficult present is not the likely future”, meaning that it’s often easier to pick something confusing or challenging about the present to think about than it is to consider things that are genuinely sited in the future.

If the “future” is far enough away in time, it becomes an alternative or parallel world, chronologically separate from our own. “2186″ becomes, not a date, but as much of a location as “Fairyland” or “Toontown”. What Kelly calls the “near future” is somewhere that’s far enough distant from the present to appear different, without being so far away in time that it becomes easy for us to treat it as an alternative world rather than this world. The challenge is to articulate a future in a way that makes the causal and temporal connections to our own clear, and forces us to imagine reality, not fantasy.

There are a many aggregators and readers of varying shape, complexity and benefit – and one element of Twine I particularly like is that it sends me feeds that are not always tied directly to my interests, but sometime are on the periphery.

A link through to portraits of women through the ages was a great way to start the day this morning.  Not simply for the beauty of the images it shows, nor just for the way the artist has morphed them together.

An art historian could discuss the changes in technique, perhaps in relation to the changes in society and technical processes.  An interpreter may highlight the nature of pose and implied gesture of each ‘model’.  A fabric and fashion expert, perhaps the change of clothing, its relation to social affordance or the economic interpretations of jewellery, clothing and style.

I enjoyed it for two reasons.  The first that it reminded me that I must make more of my next opportunity in London to visit the National Portrait Gallery (and to make more of their digital collections) and second, that it prompted me to consider what the next 20, 30 years of portraits would include.  What changes would different experts pick out?  The change from egg yolk binding to emulsion polymors to enhanced graphics?  Would experts talk about the lost ability of an artist to mix paints, or salute the technique of adding digital layers upon initial representations?  Would the art historian explain RFID-embedded jewellery as symbolising surveillance or enabling new social interactions?  Would the changing landscapes be interpreted as demonstrating progress or lost pasts?

Contemporary representations of the immediate are often reified (or vilified) for very specific reasons – the brushstrokes, the perspective, the new approach, the social story etc.  What intrigues me is what is left unchanged in these representations (what persists), as well as what these images tell us about change and potential change.  I’m still looking for some good examples of images of possible futures that are built on top of the current context – that show the rate of change (rather than simply ‘jumping’ to depict a new future).  Suggestions would be most wonderful, after you’ve enjoyed the show, of course.

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.”

Long term futures work is not about predicting the future, but systematically investigating a range of futures so that short term actions are more informed about possible, probable and (through discussion) preferable futures. This systematic investigation is about understanding current and historic data, looking at trends and considering how those trends may develop. The forecaster Paul Saffo says that it is not predictions, but about mapping the ‘cones of uncertainty‘. As Saffo explains, uncertainty is cone-shaped because as you project further into the future there are more surprises. The longer the term the more uncertain or the less specific you can be.

Take your own work. You can be pretty accurate in statement one of what you will be doing in the next 10 seconds; statement two of what you will be doing in 10 minutes might have a little more uncertainty – the phone might ring, your coffee cup needs refilling or you’re back on facebook again. (Was your statement one right by the way?) 10 days time – your diary may suggest something but you can be less confident that it is 100% accurate, and the further you go, the more uncertainty there is. 10 weeks, 10 months, 10 years, the range of possible futures on the extremes of the cone become further from one another.

But BSF is about building the appropriate spaces for learning for the potentially the next 50 years. The level of investment in such infrastructure will surely not be around at this level again before that – so how can we ensure that the decisions being taken now will be relevant to the range of possible functions, learners and aims that the institutions may need to be cater for?

The answer, of course, is that we can’t. We can’t be certain that today’s decision is appropriate for tomorrow’s needs – there are too many factors that influence education: it’s expected role in society; numbers of pupils; types of learners; the aims of education; sorts of resources etc etc. But what we can do, is ensure that the decisions we make are as informed as possible. That we’ve investigated as wide a range of possible futures as possible to ensure that, not only are we prepared for a whole range of possibilities, but that we are actively working towards the preferable future that we want.

The Beyond Current Horizons programme is attempting to look at these long term possible, probable and preferable futures. The BCH blog is the scrapbook of developments that may be useful to provide insight into some things that may challenge the way in which we currently think about education (in terms of its aims, processes etc). Towards the end of March 2008 there will be a large collection of data and analysis, tools, and future scenarios that will also be of use in helping to inform more immediate decisions and strategies.

Long term futures work is about making visible some of the possible futures, detailing the cones of uncertainty, so that from longer term visioning and systematic thinking, we can develop richer and more informed nearer term visions, near term strategies and more appropriate immediate actions. By telling stories of our preferable futures, we can begin to ensure that our immediate actions go to creating and shaping the future that we want. To become involved in BCH please contact me or sign up to the blog and newsletter – all involvement is welcome. After all, the more informed our thinking can be, the better our use of the incredible resources of BSF.

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.