Power takes many forms and is expressed through a diversity of structures and processes. Images of the future play a powerful role in orienting our attention and comprehension. This project will take a creative and open approach to imagining the futures of the forms, structures, and processes of power in human communities in order to expand sensing and sense-making in the present.
Being futures (il)literate: implications for democracy
For a long time and in many different parts of the world, the power to create, claim, control and allocate resources has been organized along hierarchical lines. Pinnacle power has taken many forms, from imperial and absolute to deliberative and distributed, but the modalities remained vested in navigational or executive authority over the resource – be it time, money, food, or ‘credibility/legitimacy’. Human agency and the world around us are confined to reductionist and totalising schematics that deny difference, novelty, and the indeterminacy of a creative universe.
What futures literacy, as a competency related to understanding the role imagining the future plays in our perception of the present, can bring to the conversation about democracy is twofold. On the one hand, FL contributes to a more balanced appreciation of the modest role of humans when it comes to controlling or determining the future. We are not gods and this universe is vast and open, indeterminate and bursting with the continual pop of difference. On the other hand, by encouraging openness and humility, futures literacy points towards the possibility of attenuating the species’ obsessions with continuity and preservation, repetition and eternity. This could reduce the pressure to succumb to the illusion that hierarchy can deliver the future and that power can be absolute.
All of which opens up prospects to discuss governance, power, and organisational schemes beyond those of the past, encouraging reflections on changes in the conditions of change that might enable entirely different ways of allocating and wielding power.
The Futures Literacy Framework
Images of the future play a powerful role in shaping people’s perceptions and choices. Which is why it is important to understand the sources and uses of the futures people imagine. Doing so can be significantly enhanced by taking into account recent developments in the field of Futures Studies (FS) that focus on gaining a better grasp of why and how people anticipate. Originating from the theories and observations of anticipation in biology that give credence to the proposition that time has been integrated into living organisms through the emergence of anticipatory systems and processes, the Futures Literacy Framework (FLF, Miller, 2018) sets out criteria for describing distinct kinds of imagined futures and the methods that generate such images/scenarios.
Efforts that use the FLF to design processes for exploring the role of imagined futures can be effective. First by enriching current perceptions of the diversity of forms, structures, and processes whereby humans define and wield agency and power. And second, by pointing to new opportunities, including those that might emerge from changes in the conditions of change. The FLF enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of efforts to understand the sources and impacts of imagined futures by helping designers, facilitators, and analysts to cultivate and harvest the richness and diversity of anticipatory systems and processes that play such a major role in what people see and do.
Laboratories as a microscope: accessing anticipated futures
The Futures Literacy Laboratory is a practical method designed to detect people’s anticipatory assumptions by experimenting with different methods for anticipating the future through group exercises. When the participants imagine different kinds of futures through the Laboratory exercises, for instance by imagining how climate change might affect democracy in 2065, their own assumptions about the future are identified in the imagined future and can be discussed in the group with the help of the Laboratory facilitator. The Futures Literacy Laboratory thereby exposes what the participants know and can come to know about how to ‘use-the-future’ for different purposes, which in turn reshapes the way they view the present and current challenges. Futures Literacy may be of particular use to innovation workers and researchers, as the ability to invent and detect new possibilities within and outside of existing systems is quintessential to creating and finding solutions to global challenges.
Conclusion: imagining the future(s) of democracy
In the current context, where old institutions are either crumbling or in disrepute, the challenge of imagining the futures of democracy must extend beyond the improvement or extrapolation of the past. But in order to do so it is necessary to find ways to encourage the capacity to imagine outside of yesterday’s boxes. This project will take a practical, learning-by-doing approach to using-the-future to question and invent the potential of the present, including the fundamental organizational premises that have shaped thinking about the forms, structures, and processes of power in human communities.
Miller, R. (Ed.). (2018). Transforming the future: Anticipation in the 21st century. UNESCO Publishing.