As the world locked its doors in 2020, the d.school looked outward to build a global community through conversations with futures scholars, practitioners, artists, activists and pioneers to explore, expand, and extend how we see and shape a more positive, inclusive, just future. We wondered: what are the practices we could all learn to approach the future with a sense of personal and collective agency, steeped in possibility and imaginative hope.
These questions framed the foundation of our new d.school futures series, a monthly public collaborative learning session where we invite future focused thinkers, scholars, artists, community connectors and amplifiers to share ideas, practices, experiences, mindsets and possibilities with us.
Our hope is to support our individual and collective capacity to imagine new futures, to expand our belief in what’s possible, and to be more inclusive in bringing those futures to life.
“Each of us individually can shape, not only our personal future but the future that we all live in.”
Series 1: Afro-Rithms From the Future
Our series kicked off with an exploration and imaginative game play with Dr. Lonny J. Avi Brooks and Ahmed Best, futurists, writers, scholars, researchers, performers, producers, game designers, curators, futurists, and co-creators of the Afrofutures podcast. They were joined by their collaborators, The Famothers, and their co-creator of their Afro-Rithms From the Future game, Eli Kosminski of the Equitable Games Group.
Building off of the traditions of Afrofutures–a practice based on the Black experience that combines science fiction and fantasy to reexamine how the future is currently imagined to envision alternative futures–Afro-Rithims from the Future is an interactive story-telling game designed to support new conversations, new dreams, new artifacts, and communal visions of the future.
“Worldbuilding as the process of constructing a complete and plausible imaginary world that serves as the context for a story.”
Series 2: Brave New Worlds
Award-winning futurist Leah Zaidi joined our second d.school futures series for an imaginative conversation about designing for the multiverse. Leah is an Associate Editor of the World Futures Review and the founder of Multiverse Design, a foresight consultancy that blends strategic foresight, systems thinking, and storytelling to design for complex problems.
Together we explored questions such as: What if we could crowdsource a better future? What if we could craft some images today of the future that we want to believe is possible, so that we could actually accelerate that future becoming a reality? How might the practices of foresight and worldbuilding help us imagine new products, new professions and even new industries that might (and should) exist in that more perfect future?
Worldbuilding has its roots in science fiction, where it is necessary to create imaginary worlds that bring together a coherent set of choices around environmental, political, artistic, and technological possibilities to create a new, believable, reality.
“What has interrupted your ability to think and dream about the future?”
Series 3: Reclaiming Multiple Histories to Shape Multiple Futures
Time travel is one of our greatest tools in dismantling oppressive structures to create anew.
Justice pioneers Aisha Bain and Meredith Hutchison, co-founders of Resistance Communications, helped us explore how creativity, art, and story help us move expansively across generations of past and future in our third d.school futures session.
We explored what it means to ground our work in the intergenerational transmissions of the past to create expansive visions of the future. Who came before us? Whose histories have been erased? How might we reclaim their stories to enlighten new pathways forward?
Aisha and Meredith are artists, activists, visual facilitators, and pioneers for justice, using their interdisciplinary craft to weave cultural narratives of equity and justice. They led us through our own metamorphosis - journeys from our past to our futures, prompted by questions such as:
What has interrupted your ability to think and dream about the future?
What’s something you don’t know about your past but you long to know?
Who do you want to walk with you? Who do you want to bring with you?
“The power of great narratives is to get the reader to see stories in ways they’ll never forget. ”
Series 4: Sparking the Race for Humanity
Award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and novelist Minister Faust shared the power of science fiction and pro-social competitions to shape more inclusive, equitable futures.
Pro-social competition starts with design-driven questions and have the potential for mass activation of innovators and co-creators:
What problems do you want to solve? Whose? Where? Why? How can you design more equitable and just results?
What opportunities do you want to create? For whom? Where? Why? How can you design more equitable and just results?
How can competitors expand their own capacity?
How can competitors prove their methods, services, or products work? What are your clear criteria that serve people?
““Futures Literacy is a capability. It is the skill that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do. Being futures literate empowers the imagination, enhances our ability to prepare, recover and invent as changes occur.” ”
Together we explored Futures Literacy as core capability to expanding imagination, choice and agency for action. It blends an understanding of a systems lens on the future, while also accounting for our individual and collective biases and assumptions about the future. Ultimately, it requires a humility and expansive world view to recognize and understand that our images of the future may be at fundamental odds with others, and that our job is not to convince the other of being wrong, but rather to learn, explore experiment, and collectively expand from the differences.
Credits
Team Members
Ariel Raz
Lisa Kay Solomon
Valeria Wu