I recently had the pleasure of co-teaching a one week scenario planning course to a group of students at the University Scholars Programme (USP) of the National University of Singapore. I co-taught the course with three of my favourite friends and foresight practitioners; Aaron Maniam, Stuart Candy and Teddy Zmrhal. These are some of the most talented practitioners I [...]
Tag Archives: scenario planning
Crowdsourced Futures
September 10 12
I’m honored to have two chapters included in the recent new book, “The Future of Futures“, published by the Association of Professional Futurists. The book explores emerging issues in scenario planning and foresight. My first chapter, reproduced below, is about the effect of crowdsourcing, big data and the web on scenario planning and foresight. You [...]
From Design Fiction to Experiential Futures
September 10 12
This is the second chapter I wrote for the book, “The Future of Futures“. It explores the role design fiction, experiential futures and visual media in foresight work. It also includes several examples of good design fiction, which are formatted nicely in the original publication. Download this chapter as a formatted PDF, here. I have [...]
Three Good Examples of Design Fiction
February 5 12
My last post, “On Glass & Mud: A Critique of (Bad) Corporate Design Fiction“, generated a lot of discussion about commercial design futures. Mick Costigan suggested that I was being too “high-horse” in my criticism. He (and several others) suggested that we should focus on the positive aspects of doing futures work in a constrained [...]
On Glass & Mud: A Critique of (Bad) Corporate Design Fiction
February 2 12
Asperger’s Design Fiction I’m a fan of design-based futures work (a.k.a. “design fiction“). Videos, in particular, can be a very effective way of engaging people in complex, subtle and nuanced explorations of the future. I always applaud companies that give it a shot, especially when it represents a big step away from “business as usual” [...]
Back to the Futurist Interview
January 27 12
Alexander Phillips was kind enough to interview me for the very cool “Back to the Futurist” series over at URBNFUTR. The series highlights some interesting ideas on the future of cities and those who think about them. Many thanks to @MelissaSterry and the entire URBNFUTR team for the recommendation. PS – Their bio is a bit outdated [...]
Complete PhD Online
October 10 11
I finished my PhD at MIT this August, on “Large Scale Participatory Futures Systems: a Comparative Study of Online Scenario Planning Approaches”. I’ll write more soon, but here is the full PDF (11.4 megabytes) and the slides from my defense, below. From the abstract: This dissertation explores the role that participatory online collective intelligence systems [...]
The Future of Public Services; Innovations in Online Scenario Planning, Part 2
April 24 11
The following mini-scenarios were created using the SenseMaker Suite Scenarios approach developed for my PhD with Dave Snowden and Wendy Schultz. They were auto-aggregated using narrative fragments contributed by over 265 participants from around the world. In other words, participants submitted stories of the future, tagged them, and then the system clustered them based [...]
Update from the Oxford Futures Forum, 2011
April 21 11
This week (April 18th) I attended the third Oxford Futures Forum at the Said Business School of Oxford University. Among other things, the Forum aimed to: Forge and support an international community of future-minded practices aimed at actionable knowledge. It was a remarkable gathering of futures practitioners, young and old, with a partial list of [...]
Eight Ideas for 21st-Century Risk Managers
February 14 11
UPDATE (April, 2011): The full article (“Gifts of Sight“) is now online at Risk Professional magazine. It is behind a pay wall, but email me and I’ll send you a personal copy. I was recently asked to explain some of the concepts I use in my research to a journalist interested in new developments in [...]