How can ethnographers, who are so deeply embedded in the present, have a role to play in futures thinking and...
Tag: future
Come to Your Senses: Ethnography of the Everyday Futuring
Our practices of research, design, and strategy create landscapes of possibility. Anticipation, an approach that has informed much of the recent ethnographic work on the future, is shaped by how these symbolic and material landscapes, and the forms of agency they make possible, are distributed....
Sustainability: Addressing Global Issues At A Human Scale
Our tiny provocation is that the word “sustainability” is not sustainable. Just using it is sabotaging our efforts to build a better future for the planet. Despite decades of global sustainability discourse, the world is still going to hell. What's gone wrong? Our paper is about willful ignorance...
Speculative Futures inside Corporate Realities
The auto insurance industry is being disrupted by insurtechs that are leveraging data and technology to solve pain points in parts of the customer journey, while emerging technology in adjacent industries threatens insurance as it currently exists. As a result, insurance companies are imagining...
Speculating about Autonomous Futures: Is This Ethnographic?
As researchers working on automated vehicles, we are grappling with fundamental questions about how to do research and design for the future. Or, to be more precise, how can we tap into and participate in futures that are in the process of being made, that may both reproduce and rearrange...
Tutorial: Speculative Design – Futures Prototyping for Research and Strategy
Tutorial Instructors: SUMMARY In our world where emerging technologies are increasingly a source of significant disruption in people’s lives, methods from Speculative & Critical Design (SCD) practice are...
We Have Always Dreamed of (Afro)futures: Notes beyond the Dark Fantastic
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is Associate Professor in Educational Studies at the University of Michigan. She studies how people of color are portrayed, or not portrayed, in children’s and young adult literature, and how those portrayals shape our culture. As children’s and young adult literary empires...
Tutorial: Designing Ethnofutures Research Projects
Learn how to design ethnofutures research projects and expand the time horizons of your work. Overview This tutorial was conducted at EPIC2021. Exercises and discussions have been omitted to protect the privacy...
Corporate Care Reimagined: Farms to Firms to Families
In 2012, the Google Innovation Lab for Food Experiences convened a multi-year conversation between corporate food stakeholders, farmers, chefs, food experts, social scientists and business consultants to reimagine the impact of companies on their employees and the food system. Corporate care...
Building Target Worlds: Connecting Research, Futures Exploration and Worldbuilding
“The future” cannot be “predicted,” but “preferred futures” can and should be envisioned, invented, implemented, continuously evaluated, revised, and re-envisioned. —Jim Dator, Hawaii, 1995 This paper introduces a framework called Target Worlds, with which I hope to offer an alternative to putting...