Duanduan Hsieh Contributors, Futurist, Transform

Jacques Barcia

Futurist
Dream Machine Futures Studio; Porto Digital

Paper | SF as a tool in futures
Case study | Porto Digital’s Mind the future, Brasil

Jacques Barcia is a futurist, speculative fiction writer and award-winning journalist from Recife, Brazil. He’s one of the crazy minds behind Dream Machine Futures Studio,  a consultancy that blends foresight, design and science fiction to disrupt the future. He is also responsible for the Mind the Future program at Brazilian non-profit tech park Porto Digital. His stories were published in the US, UK, Romania and Brazil. Jacques holds a bachelor degree in Journalism and is a MA candidate in Design. He’s also a visiting teacher at Faculdade Cesar.

This paper will discuss how cognitive estrangement, as well as sublime and grotesque SF narratives play a fundamental role in turning plain information about the future into meaning, pathos and, ultimately, a call to action and transformation.

The mission of Mind the Future, the technology observation and futures research program of Brazilian science and technology park Porto Digital, is to help companies become more futures-proof and help startups disrupt.

Duanduan Hsieh Contributors, Develop, Futurist

Peter Bishop

Founder and Executive Director
Teach the Future

Presentation | The Futures Playbook

Dr. Bishop is the Founder and Executive Director of Teach the Future, an organization whose mission is to encourage and support educators who want to include futures thinking in their classes and schools at all levels.  In 2013, Dr. Bishop retired as an Associate Professor of Strategic Foresight and Director of the graduate program in Foresight at the University of Houston. He has published two books on Strategic Foresight: Thinking about the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight (2007) and Teaching about the Future: The Basics of Foresight Education (2012), both with co-author Andy Hines. He delivers keynote addresses and conducts seminars on the future for business, government and not-for-profit organizations.  He also facilitates groups in developing scenarios, visions and strategic plans for the future.  Dr. Bishop’s clients include IBM, the NASA Johnson Space Center, Nestle USA, Tetra Pak, the Shell Pipeline Corporation, the Defense and Central Intelligence Agencies, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Texas Department of Transportation, the California Environmental Protection Agency, and the Center for Houston’s Future.  Dr. Bishop is a founding Board member of the Association of Professional Futurists and President of his own firm, Strategic Foresight and Development, which offers training and facilitation to businesses and government agencies. Dr. Bishop came to the University of Houston in 2005, having taught futures studies at the Clear Lake campus since 1982.  Dr. Bishop started teaching at Georgia Southern College in 1973 where he specialized in social problems and political sociology.  He received his doctoral degree in sociology from Michigan State University in 1974.  Dr. Bishop received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from St. Louis University where he also studied mathematics and physics.  He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri where he was a member of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) for seven years.  Dr. Bishop is married with two children and two grandchildren.

Duanduan Hsieh Contributors, Futurist, Organiser

Erica Bol

Future and Innovation Designer
Conscious Futures; Teach The Future

Gathering | Teach the Future

Erica Bol is an entrepreneurial future designer who brings together strategy and creativity for sustainable future innovation. At the Dutch futures consulting firm, Conscious Futures, she works as Future and Innovation Designer for international clients in business, governments and Ngo’s. For the foundation, Teach the Future, an international initiative working to integrate future thinking in classrooms, she has the role of ‘Change Maker’ and is responsible for the European section. She has set up the Dutch Node of the Millennium Project and is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists (APF) and the Dutch Future Society (DFS). Erica is a creative partner in reWrap, an independent brand that designs and produces accessory products inspired by the Cradle to Cradle principle.

Duanduan Hsieh Contributors, Futurist

Marta Botta

Researcher
Sustainability Research Centre, University of the Sunshine Coast

Open Space | Making of a Revolution 

Ms. Botta is a renaissance personality with a heterogeneous knowledge base. She is devoted to lifelong learning and a practice of both arts and social science. She is keen to find out “how things work” both on the micro (body, mind) and macro (society, cultures) levels. Her multilingual language base offers her a wide scope for research. She is a native speaker of Hungarian and Slovak, and also speaks Czech, Swedish, English (fluently). In addition, she can speak some German, Spanish, Polish, and Russian. Marta gained her PhD in Futures Studies at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia in 2017. Currently, she is working as a researcher at the Sustainability Research Centre, affiliated with the above university. Her research focus is social foresight, transpersonal and heritage futures. Ms Botta’s additional qualifications are a Graduate Certificate in Futures Studies (University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia), BScPsychology (Central Queensland University, Australia) and DipMediaStud (Massey University, New Zealand). She believes in “practice grounded research” and is a board member of the Sippy Downs and District Community Association, Sunshine Coast, and the Taskforce for Light Rail/Public Transport, Sunshine Coast Regional Council. Membership affiliations include the World Futures Studies Federation, Association of Professional Futurists, and the European Foresight Platform.

Duanduan Hsieh Contributors, Exhibitor, Futurist

Stuart Candy

Professor of Foresight and Design
OCAD University

Presentation | Ethnographic Experiential Futures: Combining ethnographic and experiential approaches to foresight

Dr Stuart Candy (@futuryst) is an experiential futurist, design professor and strategic facilitator who has brought futures to life in museums, festivals, conferences, classrooms and city streets worldwide. Involved in the foresight field since the 1990s, for over a decade Stuart has focused on bringing futures and design together. He has created transmedia interventions, immersive encounters, tangible artifacts, and compelling images for settings including the California Academy of Sciences, South by Southwest, and Wired magazine.

Grounded in practice, Stuart has made key contributions to the exchange between design and futures in education, having served on the faculty of the world’s first two foresight programs in design institutions; at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.

Duanduan Hsieh Contributors, Develop, Futurist

Shermon Ortega Cruz

Futurist/Researcher
Center for Engaged Foresight

Shermon Cruz is a professional futurist, a climate reality leader, a certified business continuity professional and founder of the Center for Engaged Foresight. He is an active member of the World Futures Studies Federation, the Asia Pacific Futures Network and the Association of Professional Futurist. Shermon specializes on futures education and research, strategic foresight facilitation, planning, governance, city resilience, crisis management and policy management. He was formerly a director of the Philippine Center for Foresight Education and Innovation Research (PhilForesight) at Northwestern University in the Philippines. Shermon combines and integrates culture-based narrative and metaphoric thinking to question and explore alternate futures and to help people create a deeper, more authentic and action-oriented transformation.

Duanduan Hsieh Contributors, Design, Futurist, Organiser

Cornelia Daheim

Foresight Consultant
Future Impacts Consulting

Game session | Foresight game centred on “Future Disruptions”

Cornelia Daheim is a foresight expert and consultant, founder and principal of Future Impacts. Since 2000, she has been leading corporate foresight projects for corporate customers such as Alstom, Evonik, SKT or BASF, up to CEO level, and public sector projects, e.g. within the framework of international as well as European research networks, with customers such as the Korean innovation institute STEPI or the European Commission. Recently, her topic focus was on the future of work, societal change, and the future of energy and mobility. Recent published projects include scenarios on precision agriculture for the European Parliament, the study “Jobs and Skills – Work 2030” for UKCES, or a study on the “Future of Work 2050” by the Millennium Project published with Bertelsmann Foundation. Ms. Daheim has experience in foresight assignments in Europe, the US and Asia, and has spoken on foresight and future trends on all continents. In 2003, she founded and has since acted as head of the Millennium Project’s German Node – the MP is the world’s largest continuous foresight NGO working on future global change. She is also the President of the Foresight Europe Network, aiming to advance foresight in Europe.

The session introduces a game focused on possible disruptions, and participants will experience the game by playing it themselves. Set up as a board game, it uses gaming techniques such as randomisation and competition, and players can “score” by identifying credible and plausible future disruptions.

Duanduan Hsieh Contributors, Futurist

Jim Dator

Former Director
Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies

Keynote | Four Generic Images of the Future of the Manoa School

Jim Dator is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, Department of Political Science. He served as Secretary General and then President of the World Futures Studies Federation for a decade, produced numerous publications on futures studies and emergent issues, and has consulted with governmental, educational, religious, public-interest, military, and business organisations in over 40 countries. Jim Dator is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists.

Many people consider “the future” to be a time and place lying somewhere “ahead” of us towards which we are tending.  Some people even seem to assume that “the future” somehow pre-exists, and that we are able, or should be able, to “predict” what it will be like.  Our long experience in the futures field has convinced us that it is not possible to predict the future. Rather, it is possible, and necessary, to “forecast” and “experience” logical, theory-based, images of “alternative futures”, and to use our analysis of them to envision, invent, and move towards the creation of  “preferred futures”, continually re-examining our preferences on the basis of experiences with new and old images of alternative futures.

Many years ago, we concluded that all of the millions, indeed billions, of images of the futures that are in people’s minds and actions are specific versions of four generic images of the futures. We eventually labeled them Grow, Collapse/New Beginnings, Discipline and Transform.

It is very important to understand that the generic four alternative images of the futures of the Manoa School are not “made up”. Rather, each of them is built on a very firm empirical base. That is to say, there are many groups and individuals around the world who hold some version of one of them as an accurate image of The Future—while also usually proclaiming that the other three are wrong. I believe there are strong arguments supporting each of the four generic images, and that it is not possible for me, as a futurist, to say that any one is wrong or right. Rather, it is my duty to present specific versions of each of the four to you as appealingly and accurately as possible so that you may decide how best to envision and create your preferred futures in response to all four of the alternative futures images.

Download Jim Dator’s bibliography on the four generic images of the futures of the Maona School

 

Duanduan Hsieh Contributors, Design, Futurist, Organiser

Kim De Vidts

Futures Researcher
Open Time, Erasmus University College Brussels

Presentation | Creating artifacts from four futures of Brussels 2060.

Kim De Vidts is a structural futures researcher at the centre of expertise “Applied Futures Research – Open Time”, at the Erasmus University College in Brussels. While instructing political science at Hawaii Pacific University and working for the American Intelligence community, she equally completed her PhD. This under the direct mentorship of Jim Dator at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where her interest in two of her passions thrived: the application of the Manoa approach, and the in-depth study of contemporary and futures notions of nationalism and the concept of identity within a European context. Kim’s past professional experiences in both change management and futures studies allow her to manage expectations within both domains, while facilitating a convergence between both if so desired. 

This presentation revisits notions of civic versus ethnic nationalism to envision what the future of identity may develop into by 2060 applying the Manoa School of Futures Studies’ four generic futures methodology, bringing in an ID card as an artifact from the future.

Duanduan Hsieh Contributors, Develop, Futurist

Mikko Dufva

Research Scientist
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd

Game introduction | FOSTER-ERM

Mikko Dufva is a research scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd working in the field of foresight. He has done projects related to the futures of work, synthetic biology, platform economy, forestry, mining and use of renewable energy. He is a Doctor of Science in Technology and his dissertation was about knowledge creation in foresight from a systems perspective. He has broad methodological expertise ranging from systems thinking, decision analysis and optimization to interactive planning, scenario analysis and participatory methods. His current research interests include experiential foresight and post-normal times.

A key challenge in foresight is maintaining a balance between long-term visions and present-day relevance. Images of futures have to be demystified and interpreted in the present context.  This presentation reflects upon the challenges faced when creating an educational board game focused on business model development in the context of raw materials and circular economy. The presentation closes with a game session for between 8 and 16 people.