I keep promising an in-depth post about the Media Evolution collaborative foresight cycle I was involved with late last year. Apologies, but this is not that in-depth post—partly because I’m currently very busy working on the next collaborative foresight cycle (of which ME do three each year), among various other client-facing things. But this post is at least a taster for what I’m doing in those foresight cycle projects.
The basic model is this: ME chose a topical theme of enquiry, then put the call out to the Malmö scene—business, municipal, academic, arts, NGOs—for people who would like to do four days of futures workshopping round that theme. They run the workshops, and a number of scenarios are thus produced.
Prior to the previous edition, the scenarios would be bundled with essays from practitioners in pertinent fields, and/or participants from the workshops, and published in a neat little physical book.
As of the previous edition, which was themed around “the future of digital work”1, the scenarios are converted into proper fictions before being put into the book.
That work of fictionalisation was done by me.
We launched the book a few weeks ago (February 27th) with a seminar featuring short talks from two experts in the field who had also provided essays for the book. Their talks were bookended by me reading from one of the stories I wrote.
This is a video of me reading that story, which is titled “Village People”, and responding to a few questions from ME’s Martin Thörnqvist.
The book is available for download as a PDF, or for purchase as a handsome physical book—or, if you’re in the neighbourhood, you can probably just wander into ME’s headquarters in uptown dockside Malmö and blag a free copy? (Just don’t say I said so.)
The book also explains the method and the purpose of the project as a whole, from ME’s POV. If you want to hear about my own experience of it, and my thoughts’n’feels re: the theme, uh, don’t touch that dial? I’ll write it up some time soon2.
- Which is basically “say ‘AI’ without saying those two letters”, so yes, you can believe I had some opinions about this one. Between this project and another one, just coming to an end, I’ve spent rather more time thinking about the topic than I had planned to… ↩︎
- If you want it done sooner, feel free to commission me to write it for some other website, or to come on your podcast or whatever… we’re at the stage where the only thing that cuts through the deadlines is another deadline. ↩︎
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