The Experiential Turn

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FEATURE ARTICLE

The Experiential * Turn by Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan *This is an edited excerpt of a full-length article and case study of an experiential futures project undertaken by the authors at Arizona State University’s inaugural Emerge festival (Candy and Dunagan, 2016). The original piece appeared in a special issue of the journal Futures on “Experiencing Futures”, guest edited by Cornelia Daheim and Kerstin Cuhls.

For futures studies to impact mainstream culture and contribute to civilisation-scale “social foresight” it must be capable of bridging the “experiential gulf” between abstract

Plastic Century: interactive installation at California Academy of Sciences. Project by Stuart Candy, Jake Dunagan, Sarah Kornfeld and Wallace J Nichols, San Francisco 2010. Photo by Mike Estee.

apprehended in the embodied present.

in foresight work, an idiom given to abstraction because it is about things

motivation and rationale of which is to

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reasons for what we would say has rience as the palette of engagement. mainstream thinking about the future over the past half-century. By contrast, the grounding of forethought in both material and emotional reality very much increases its potential impact on thought

catalyse insight and change” (Candy, 2015), has a deliberately wide compass, editions of conventional design outputs (print material, concept images, proto-

types, physical artifacts, etc), but also installation, mail art, advertisements, immersive theatre, guerrilla intervention, digital simulation (VR/MR/AR), and games. Tangible, immersive, interactive, live, and playable modes are all in scope.1

futures are described in detail elsewhere (Candy, 2010), but to provide a sense of how far and how fast this area has developed over the past decade, and with growing numbers of other practitioners

authors have worked on projects ranging for a group of 550 people at a public policy-oriented sustainability event, to guerrilla street art campaigns, to national-level museums of future possibilities. Partnering organisations have included local, state, and federal governments, community groups, educational and cultural institutions, private enterprises, the practice through teaching in the at design schools, at OCAD and CCA.

What then are some of the challenges for futurists making, or contem-

Enabling group thought and creative processes has been an important part

They include becoming transmedia producers as well as the transdisciplinary thinkers that we already try to be. This in turn entails not only participating in, but likely often facilitating, collaboration across even more diverse skillsets, and broaching new boundaries – such as tive arts and analytical scholarship – in addition to the disciplinary siloes which

Mullert, 1987; Dator, 1993), and the stakes may be obvious to many already,

augmented toolset, and the details of what works best in what circumstances, are only now beginning to be worked out.

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1. The original article (Candy and Dunagan, 2016) deals in detail with the blossoming romance between futures and design, including parallel areas of practice towards meeting this challenge. 26

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“ The outcome of all this is not simply to create interesting experiences; it is to make experiences that lead to the creation of better futures.”

gap between the ground of present sensation and islands of abstract possibility.”



Futurematic Vending Machine: design jam at future artifacts created by participants. Project by Situation Lab and , Toronto 2014. Photo by Stuart Candy.

for core skills and sensibilities that need to be developed further; among them certain competencies already widely accepted and understood, alongside others that may be less familiar. riential futurist, you should:3 • Become a student of the history, culture, and present situation of the places and people with whom you are co-creating – in order to empathise with and build • Become a perceptive mindreader – in order to understand the mental models of participants or audiencor challenge those models.

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habit of long-zooming and scale-toggling – in order to venture, with your transdisciplinary readiness to roam, wherever the inquiry may need to go. • Become a master of situations – in order to facilitate the co-creative processes of groups, which includes recognising what to nail down, what to leave open, and when and how to improvise changes in response to the needs of the moment. • bridging the gap between the ground of present sensation and islands of abstract possibility – in order to be prepared to use whatever it takes to catalyse heightened creativity, thoughtfulness, engagement, and action, in yourself and others. • Become a fastidious documentarian – in order to capture the materials, feedback, and insights created during what is a singular,

the future(s) is one class of activity. To attend to the design of processes whereby scalable structures of participation, is

: Most traditional futures practice and scholarship operates at a high level of abstraction, while manifestations of futures –– possible, probable and preferable.

unending quest toward “a truly ‘integral’ approach to inquiry” (Voros, 2008). Finally, we emphasise that the outcome of all this is not simply to create

better futures. To catalyse better futures is “the work” we futurists are called to

References • Candy, S. (2010). The Futures of Everyday Life. University of Hawaii at Manoa. • Candy, S. (2015). The Thing from the Future. In: Curry (Ed.). The APF Methods Anthology. APF. • Candy, S. and Dunagan, J. (2016). DePeople Who Vanished. Futures. • Dator, J. (1993). From Future Workshops to Envisioning Alternative Futures. Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies. • Dator, J. (1996). Futures Studies as Applied Knowledge. In Slaughter (Ed.). New Thinking for a New Millennium. Routledge. • Jungk, R. and Mullert, N. (1987) Future Workshops. Institute for Social Inventions. • Ramos, J. (2006). Consciousness, culture and the communication of foresight. Futures. • Slaughter, R. A. (1996). Futures Studies: From Individual to Social Capacity. Futures. • Voros, J. (2008). Integral Futures: An approach to futures inquiry. Futures. Stuart Candy combines futures with design, media and performance as a writer, producer, speaker, educator, and consultant to diverse organisations. He is Mitchell Visiting Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Fellow of the Museum of Tomorrow, Rio de Janeiro, and advisor to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Geneva.

• Become a willing collaborator with others you meet along the way – in order to be poised to join forces with those who have skills that you don’t, since no social foresight can be accomplished alone. Overall, perhaps the central emerging challenge for foresight practitioners has less to do with generating and broadcasting ideas about the future than with designing circumstances or situations in which the collective intelligence and imagination of a community can come

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and aspire to help our clients, audiences, students, and other constituencies to do––is a critical part of that duty.

do, and being willing to recognise the tions, as these become apparent, and to evolve towards new horizons in how we operate and cooperate––just as we urge

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Jake Dunagan is an experiential futurist, governance designer, and teacher. He is Director of Design Futures at verynice.co, and adjunct professor in the Design Strategy MBA program at the California College of Arts (CCA). Jake’s work has been centered around social invention, and creating novel methods to help individuals and institutions design better futures.

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