A Festival of Futures: Recognizing and Reckoning Temporal Complexity in Foresight

Abstract

The future is too often constructed as a linear continuation of past and present, a trajectory that clearly leads from now to then, thus partially stripping it of its complex and unexpected nature. Tempting as it is to conceptualize the future as a neatly unfolding pattern, such a commitment to linearity narrows the range of plausible futures imagined and offers a false sense of certainty. Instead, we contend, what is needed are foresight tools that seek not to know futures, which is ontologically fraught, but to excavate the multiple temporalities packaged in narratives, expectations, and actions. There are multiple and wide-range temporalities and knowledges that come to bear in shaping the future and our ideas of it. These temporalities engage memories, imaginations, and promises that manifest in important yet hard to capture ways. Drawing from experimentation at Emerge, a public art, science, and technology festival at Arizona State University, a case is made that opening up nonlinear futures through the materiality and experiential basis of art and design serves to generate the conceptual space to explore multiple timescapes and better engage anticipatory capabilities. As a new mode of foresight, Emerge represents a shift to mediated futures (Selin 2015) that construct concrete and ideational spaces designed to explore potential futures and perform anticipation. Such work demonstrates the crucial and evolving role that foresight methods can play in fostering anticipatory capacities such as reflexivity, perspective-taking, and responsible decision-making.