I met Tessa Finlev in my capacity as consulting editor of JFS. She wrote an amazing article called “Future Peace: Breaking Cycles of Violence through Futures Thinking”, in which she argued that violence induced trauma in post-conflict situations can seriously impede suffers’ ability to imagine peaceful futures and enact new pathways. In what I would…
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The (evolving…) Futures of Power in the Network Era
As Edward Snowden spends yet another night in the limbo of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport (as I write this), one flight away from returning to his homeland to be drawn and quartered, one flight away from potential asylum with a country ready to risk the wrath of Imperium, and Julian Assange remains holed up in…
Rising to the challenge of the 21st century: the role of futures research and practice
This short essay is adapted from a short piece I wrote during my time as Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, for their publication Global-is-Asian. ================= More than ever, futures research is needed to support people’s critical understanding of the challenges we face…
Zhan Li: science fiction, design futures and foresight communication
I went to LA in June 2012, a lively trip where I did research on foresight communication, the sharing economy and gamification. I was told, in this context, by friend and colleague Stuart Candy that I had to talk to Zhan Li. So I caught up with him at his home in leafy South Pasadena….
The Inner Game of Futures
This past weekend I did a 3 day Vipassana meditation course in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin as taught by S.N. Goenka. Vipassana, according to Goenka, is a “nonsectarian” form of Buddhist meditation (I know that sounds somewhat contradictory), with strong similarities to the Theravada tradition in Buddhist practice. The majority of the…
Foresight, Innovation and Enterprise Modeling – A 10+ Year Journey
This draft paper, titled “Foresight, Innovation and Enterprise Modeling” (downloadable HERE), is the culmination of a decade long journey in attempting to link our evolving knowledge of emerging futures with present action, through a variety of means, innovation and enterprise development, design, activism, policy development, meditation (yes that is correct – doing absolutely nothing is…
Deep democracy, peer-to-peer production and our common futures / Syvädemokratia, vertaistuotanto ja yhteiset tulevaisuutemmemore
Earlier this year Dr. Vuokko Jarva, a futures scholar who works on consumer education to promote future consciousness and planetary responsibility and is developing new narrative approaches in futures studies, invited me to write an essay for the Finnish journal Futura (a publication of the Finnish Society for Futures Studies). The special edition of the journal…
Emerging Futures Emerging Futurists Symposium 2012
In late November (Nov 30 2012) I had the incredible pleasure of spending good time with the folks at the Manoa School of Futures Studies, who brought an eclectic and dynamic group of emerging practitioners together from around the world. I feel very grateful to the Manoa gang for their invitation to speak, and I…
What Lies Beyond Economic Globalization… Cosmo-Localization?
In late october I gave a public talk at the school I just finished teaching with, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. I wanted to bend some of my dissertation work toward a policy, or at least strategy, orientation. Often times, the policy implications for futures oriented knowledge, scenarios, emerging issues, and global…
Asia Deep Dive on the Commons and the Temporalities of the Commons
I was invited in mid Oct to participate in the Asia Deep Dive on the Commons, a process of the Heinrich Bo?ll Foundation‘s Commons Strategy Group, in large part due to Michel Bauwens’ influence and via our dialogues on alternative globalizations. The HB foundation is doing amazing pioneering work bringing together social innovators and thinkers…