Our new webinar season launched December 1st, 2017 with Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan of Guerrilla Futures. They use future studies to understand how we can all use visionary thinking to imagine and create better tomorrows.

While many futurists engage in thinking about the future theoretically, these guys actually experiment. Their Experiential Futures work using installation, mail art, advertisements, immersive theatre, guerrilla intervention, digital simulation, and games means that they have very specific and fascinating insights into how to create change. They say: “Overall, perhaps the central emerging challenge for foresight practitioners has less to do with generating and broadcasting ideas about the future than with designing circumstances or situations in which the collective intelligence and imagination of a community can come forth.”  Check out more about them and their work at the Association of Professional Futurists.

Stuart and Jake train people to be practitioning futurists, and they’ve laid out what it takes to be a good one. In their words, you should:

  • Become a student of the history, culture, and present situation of the places and people with whom you are co-creating – in order to empathise with and build upon their knowledge and experience.
  • Become a perceptive mindreader – in order to understand the mental models of participants or audiences, and then decide how to expand or challenge those models.
  • Become a flexible thinker with the habit of long-zooming and scale-toggling – in order to venture, with your transdisciplinary readiness to roam, wherever the inquiry may need to go.
  • Become a master of situations – in order to facilitate the co-creative processes of groups, which includes recognising what to nail down, what to leave open, and when and how to improvise changes in response to the needs of the moment.
  • Become an engineer of experiences, bridging the gap between the ground of present sensation and islands of abstract possibility – in order to be prepared to use whatever it takes to catalyse heightened creativity, thoughtfulness, engagement, and action, in yourself and others.
  • Become a fastidious documentarian – in order to capture the materials, feedback, and insights created during what is a singular, often ephemeral, experience.
  • Become a willing collaborator with others you meet along the way – in order to be poised to join forces with those who have skills that you don’t, since no social foresight can be accomplished alone.

Feel free to share this webinar recording with your friends, and please join us for our next one on December 29th, Intelligent Mischief: Creating a Culture of Black Liberation.