2. Futures methods and heritage
Embedding the past, and what matters, in foresight methods and future narratives
How should you think about the past when looking at the future? How can you keep what matters in view? Is this easier with some foresight methods over others?
A piece of advice you’ll regularly hear from futures practitioners is “to look ahead you have to look back twice as far.” Various writers have recommended different approaches to including the past in foresight work, or noted the connections between historiographical thinking and thinking about the future.
Thinking about the past is a necessary part of thinking about the future. You have to understand the conditions that you’re starting with, the direction of the trends that are important to you, and the experience against which events are expected or surprising.
But do the methods used in foresight help us to do that? Are there particular methods that make it easier to keep what we value from the past in mind? This week I’m taking a quick look through some approaches to the future that I think have a particular place for heritage.
Hello! I'm Richard Sandford, programme lead for the MSc Heritage Evidence, Foresight and Policy, based in the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage at The Bartlett. This is newsletter 2 in a series of 8, giving a flavour of what the programme’s about. Questions? Feedback? Drop me a line.
On the programme, we spend some time learning about foresight practice and the kinds of approaches used by different organisations to think about the long term. Policy groups in particular have an interest in considering the impacts of their actions over time, and the future circumstances in which different policies will play out. The RSA make a strong case for doing this in their recent report, ‘A stitch in time’.
One of the most well-known approaches to doing this is scenario planning, a generic term for a range of techniques that generate narratives of possible futures from a consideration of key uncertainties, thinking about the forks in the road they represent. Scenarios are usually presented as a set, a collection of different futures that together illustrate the possibilities inherent in the present.
There are many approaches to developing scenarios—if you’re interested in digging a bit further, Dr Wendy Schulz has an excellent introduction on her website, while Andrew Curry has generously shared a brief historical overview on his wide-ranging and thought-provoking futures blog. (You should follow Wendy and Andrew on Twitter, if you’re interested in futures work: @wendyinfutures, @nextwavefutures). Alex Fergnani has a great introductory video outlining a range of different methods:
And there are some recent examples of scenarios online:
—from the Local Trust, considering impacts of the pandemic on communities.
—from the Centre for London, “five long-term illustrative scenarios for the city that could all be possible over the next 30 years."
—from ARUP, four scenarios intended to help planners incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals into urban development.
—and Historic England regularly make use of strategic foresight approaches, as in the report ‘Facing the future’ from 2015.
Watercolor by Eduard Pechuël-Loesche after Krakatoa, from Untersuchungen über Dämmerungserscheinungen : zur Erklärung der nach dem Krakatau-Ausbruch beobachteten atmosphärisch-optischen Störung von J. Kiessling
Good scenario planners are expert at integrating the past into their development process, and reflecting (and challenging) the values of the group they’re working with. But many of us aren’t good scenario planners, and like any widespread tool there are as many examples of mediocre scenarios as excellent ones. There’s no inherent reason why scenarios can’t reflect the past or what matters to us—but there’s no reason why they have to, either. The politics of foresight projects often make it far more appealing to think about the blank sheet of the future, rather than look back at a history that might reflect unfavourably on participants. And scenarios, despite being great tools for identifying external constraints, are often sold to participants as opportunities to think about limitless future possibilities. This notion can be reinforced by the ‘futures cone’, a diagram often used in foresight to represent the expansion of possibility over time (the present is usually at the left and the future at the right, situating it squarely in a Eurocentric tradition of representing time and progress).
Image search for ‘futures cone’: For more on the use of the futures cone, see Joseph Voros’ account.
It’s worth noting that the original, or at least the oldest I can find, was oriented vertically, and in one version gave as much room to the past as the future:
The Cone of Plausibility: Past and Future. Taylor, C. (1993) Alternative World Scenarios for a New Order of Nations, United States Army War College
(The figure before this in the report includes, marvellously, ‘aberrant’, ‘disruptive’, ’catastrophic’ and ‘anomalous’ wild card scenarios, which are squarely in line with the tendency in strategic thinking towards misery and threat: wouldn’t it be great if ‘miraculous’, ‘serendipitous’, ‘tranquil’ or ‘transcendent’ futures were as common?)
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If the past isn’t a necessary feature of scenario planning, are there alternatives that make it easier to think about it, or that make our values and worldview more central? I think there are (and if you think I’ve missed one, please email me!)
One is Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), a process developed by Sohail Inayatullah that walks participants through successive cultural layers underpinning a phenomenon, illustrating how deep-rooted perspectives shape our understanding of the world, and offering the chance to imagine how a different perspective can lead to a different understanding. Starting with the ‘litany’, or everyday characterisation of the thing in question, you can move on to thinking about the systems that underpin it, the worldview that sustains those systems, and the fundamental myths, archetypes and metaphors that worldviews are built on. Imagining different metaphors offers the chance to walk back up through the layers to an alternative understanding. CLA starts with our inherited ideas: it’s not moving through time but through culture, and in doing so asks us to pay attention to the stuff that surrounds us without our noticing.
Another approach, one that’s becoming increasingly mainstream, is the Three Horizons method, developed by Andrew Curry and Tony Hodgson. This one very much is about moving through time, starting from the uncontroversial position that as time passes, circumstances change, and ways of acting that made sense in one set of circumstances will be less helpful in another. The behaviours, systems and attitudes that are a good fit now are called ‘Horizon 1’. These become less useful as time goes on. At the further end of the scale, there are a different set of perspectives and capabilities that are appropriate for those changed times: these are ‘Horizon 3’. In the middle, where H1 thinking is no help and H3 thinking has not yet blossomed, a transitional mode is needed, one that can focus either on propping up the old model, or creating the necessary structures to usher in H3. This is ‘Horizon 2’.
The model is simple and powerful, and I don’t intend to explain it in any more detail here (Kate Raworth offers a good video introduction, below, and there’s a great example from Laura Dempsey, who used to structure her master’s thesis). It’s relevant for a number of reasons. It makes it hard to think in atemporal snapshots, since elements of each horizon are clearly placed in a trajectory of change, making it easier to see them as having a duration. The second horizon shows that active work is needed to get from one way of thinking and acting to another: this fits with the notions of maintenance and care that underpin heritage. The third horizon is a vision, an explicit account of what we value now, and perhaps don’t see very much, and hope to see more in the future. And even when our attention is at the far future end of the diagram, we’re asked to recall the first horizon and think about what will have been worth carrying with us, the values and practices that we don’t want to discard.
There are other examples (like the Verge framework), but I think these three illustrate the point I wanted to make: some futures techniques do have a central place for considering what we bring with us, and what we want to still matter in the future. I think these are useful for anyone trying to think about the future through heritage.
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How might you draw on heritage at a more fundamental level in futures work? One example comes from the Seeds of the Good Anthropocene project. It starts by rejecting any denialism about the trajectory of the world: things are changing radically, in ways that are making it impossible to live in the way that we have done so far. But rather than accepting the dystopian tales of catastrophe and disaster that surround us, and which risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, the project asks what it will take to make this new life a good one, in which we and the other inhabitants of the planet can flourish. They begin with ‘seeds’, existing activities that herald, in some form, the future we need to work towards. This video gives some more background:
From the Good Anthropocenes project
What’s important, to me, about the project, and what makes it a great example of the kind of heritage thinking our programme explores, are two features. First, it is explicitly normative, in that it begins with an evaluation of the kind of futures that we should desire and that we ought to work towards: the future sought is not couched in instrumental terms, something that can serve a particular group’s interests, but as a good in itself. And second, in articulating this good future it draws on our current heritage, the practices of care and maintenance in the present that demonstrate what something means to a community.
Billboard in Kansas City — Alisha B. Wormsley
There are other, long-established, currents of thinking about the future that start with heritage and identity. Afrofuturism, and the various ethnic and indigenous futurisms (such as Concordia’s Indigenous Futures network) that are emerging in its wake, affirm the right of different groups to be a feature of the future, challenging the historically dominant assumption that the future is whatever hasn’t happened to rich white people yet. (For an introduction to Afrofuturism, Florence Okoye has a great reading list: see the Black Quantum Futurism collective for one approach to what it means as a practice.) The Qatari artist and writer Sophia al-Maria identifies a ‘Gulf futurism’ , a characteristic regional modernism bringing the sleek, sci-fi futures of European and American imaginations into some kind of reality, one in which the extractive and exploitative nature of capitalism and a twentieth-century technological optimism are both turned up to eleven. Hassan Blassim’s 2016 collection of speculative stories imagining an Iraq of 2103, ‘Iraq+: stories from a century after the invasion’ reflects a global movement towards producing speculative fiction that better reflects the whole world.
SCOUT, 2012 — Sophia Al-Maria
Heritage and culture can support people’s claims to the right to futures in which they feature. So perhaps there’s a moral argument to make about the need to recognise the heritages that futures projects are connected to, rather than starting with a blank sheet.
But we’ve moved a long way from comparing futures methods. Next week we’ll go a little deeper on how the future is imagined, and just why it’s important to think about who gets to imagine the future.
Links
Bulldoze the high street and build a giant park: is Stockton the future of Britain?: noted here for the debate around retaining existing buildings, given the embodied carbon they contain, and for the blurring of past and future suggested by having “a few…ruins dotted around the site” ❡ Why GM’s Super Bowl Ad for Electric Cars Is So Important: electric vehicles are reaching a cultural tipping point, which is positive on the face of it, but (if ads like this are anything to go by) is also likely to entrench our attachment to ways of thinking that are a poisonous inheritance, around individual autonomy and a lack of obligation to minimise our impacts on others. Cars help us think of ourselves as private and unconnected to the world, which is part of the problem EVs are supposed to be solving ❡ The Unreasonable Ecological Cost of #CryptoArt: using blockchains to manage art is staggeringly damaging. An emerging form of cultural heritage accelerating the harm done to other forms of heritage. ❡ An archive of virtual worlds: “you can archive the offline software, but a dead world can only tell you so much. It’s just as important to document how people spent their time within it.” ❡ Scottish ministers consider stringent land ownership tests: a useful reminder that the mechanisms of inheritance are not fixed, and the ways resources are passed on can be changed. ❡ Stumbled across The Serendipity Society, a network of researchers “brought together by accidents and sagacity”
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