Category: Futures
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Hype cycles, heroic journeys and the wizards of innovation
I think of the Gartner Hype Cycle as a Hero’s Journey for technologies. And just like the hero’s journey, the Hype Cycle is a compelling narrative structure. When we consider many of the technologies in use today, we tend to recall that they were overhyped when they first arrived, but eventually found their way to…
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Seven billion spiders
Here, then, is what makes all members of the species Homo sapiens cultural animals. They come into the world quite incomplete, and pick up what they need to know, and more, by learning from life, and in very large part from one another. As at the same time social animals (and for them the social…
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Strategies in huckster narratology
A few new accessions to the critical futures lexicon, courtesy Stefan Collini’s dissection of the B-school blandishments of UK HE policy: One of the most revealing features of [the HE White Paper’s] prose is the way the tense that might be called the mission-statement present is used to disguise implausible non sequiturs as universally acknowledged general…
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Imaginable alternatives
Tobias Revell takes the mic at AmateurCities to give a designer’s take on critical futures and the SmartCity!* shibboleth: “Too often we are confronted with visions and stories of the future that say: ‘In the future everyone will live this way or that way. In the future everyone will have these things. In the future everyone…