REHEARSING
It’s all fine and well that I am a creatively slippery and forward reaching amphibious thinking being you might say. But what is the point of all this design fictioning? How does working speculatively to rethink our shared futures connect with urgent demands, rapidly changing contexts and conditions and needs in the present? My thoughts exactly, but then I really mean precisely our thoughts!
Thinking ahead about change and adaptation for long-term sustainable futures is indeed highly challenging. It needs us to understand our present world and its many entanglements. But it also asks that we look further back into our histories and legacies to understand better how we have arrived in these presents and the means and consequences of earlier value chains and conscious and less motivated decisions and strategies.
WHO
The content, tools, activities and resources gathered here may be used by a variety of participants (individuals and groups, from 2 to 8 and groups of eight on a particular topic or tentacle. They are suitable for students, teachers, designers and researchers, policy-makers to strategists.
It is you who will need to self-diagnose your needs and situate your interests, chart your journey but also your critical reflections and return to your present worlds and original motivations and reassess them.
What might you appreciate or anticipate differently?
What might you need or want to change and in what ways?
Who you are—in your own skill and expertise set—as a person and group will impact on how you pull through this entangled world.
Who are you when you’ve travelled with me and how now might you think and act? Yes, it’s a kind of rehearsal for a long-term and sustainable future!
WHEN
You can use the different items on offer in my Den as you wish and in the order that you choose. You might find it useful to look into the Toolkit first to get your bearings as it was as a moving-thinking shape and time-shifting creature! The OCTOPATLAS engages you in a range of scenarios that shift in time and space, fiction and veracity.
Generally, you’ll need to keep your wits about you and I suggest revisit and rethink the relations between the different items on offer here. Using something a second time might not land you in the same time and place! Change is my other name.
You can pop in and out of fiction and fact when you wish, and I’ve added some resources to provide some of the behind-the-scene materials and projects that have influenced the times of my stories and the narratives of my worldings.
HOW
Here are some pointers (oh, that was a many armed action!) to how you might get to know me, more about the Northern Sea Route and yourselves.
This I see as especially important in how you might return from acts of ‘futurescaping’ to motivated actions in what may become a reconfigured and alternative present (and paths to different futures, near and far).
MY THREE REHEARSING EXERCISES
