Future Thinking
Credit: YuriArcursPeopleimages | envato
Futures thinking and design fiction are not about solving problems; rather, they're about finding and identifying them. Essentially, this process involves speculation and the creation of speculative futures to help us navigate the present.
They serve to stimulate thinking, initiating a dialogue and discussion about a realistic future that guides us forward.
What unites these objects is their ability to "act" as if they were real—they are genuinely feasible and usable.
It utilizes objects from a potential future, which can manifest in various forms such as fictional catalogs, films, advertisements, apps, websites, exhibition items, job postings, or research papers.
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Why we have to think about the future
The future is a space to develop imagination and to create, either individually or collectively, to try to listen without judgement and to set or dream new goals, projects, or ideas.
The future brings together participants who often have completely different opinions and may refer to the past. We give them the chance to think about the future together, not about yesterday and today when everything is confused and difficult, but about tomorrow. The challenge, of course, is to lead them in this creative process, to guide them, to take them by the hand without completely ignoring the facts.
We do this because we don't want to engage in dialogue for dialogue's sake. We want to multiply and amplify ideas and solutions that people in (post) conflict zones create in our dialogues as our contribution to de-escalation in crisis and conflict regions.
Here, we see enormous potential for journalism: if involved in the development of these future images and scenarios, journalists gain new perspectives from the ideas, scenarios, or even artifacts that are created to initiate a constructive, fruitful discussion.
This melds into a wide variety of ideas for the future, being developed and explored more deeply in the form of journalistic outcomes. That’s why we see future thinking and design fiction as tools that shape new solutions, published through constructive, conflict-sensitive journalism.