The Future of Intimacy

The Future of Education

The Future of Spiritual Experience

The Future of South East Asian Cities

Although they had less than 48 hours to prepare their presentations, the students surprised us with their inventiveness and creativity. The Future of Spiritual Experience group, for example, created a scenario in which neurochemical technology could act as a plausible mimic for the spiritual experience, but where the  government outlawed such practices.  The result was a criminal underground of “Pilgrimage Pill” takers clustered around a spiritual leader / mob-boss responsible for the production and import of the pills. Instead of telling us about this in PowerPoint, the group presented their research in the form a courtroom trial.  We, the audience, were the jury and bore the responsibility of deciding the fate of the captured “Pope Father”; the leader of the criminal insurgency of chemical spiritualists. The group presented details of their scenario in the form of evidence against him.  It was fascinating and, just as we were about to cast our vote of guilty or not, his followers burst into the room to liberate him in a running gunfight.  It was a brilliant and thoroughly immersive. Other groups had equally compelling presentations, ranging from a visit to a new government-sponsored school, to a dialogue between the residents and staff of a gated community in the Philippines, and a visit to the Museum of Intimacy Past; which traced the evolution of intimacy in a highly regulated state environment. The course covered:

• Systemic change and the history of scenario planning
• The role of social and cognitive bias in decision-making
• Horizon scanning and trend analysis
• Interpretation and synthesis of emerging issues
• Basics of scenario creation and analysis
• Implications assessment and stakeholder analysis
• Experiential futures to communicate scenario products
• Introduction to service, product and policy design in a futures context

I thoroughly enjoyed teaching with Aaron, Stuart and Teddy.  I think we learned as much from each other as I hope the students did from us. Although we didn’t get the chance to cover some of the more advanced aspects I had hoped for (such as systems thinking, crowdsourcing and other things), we all look forward to teaching together again soon. Thank you to all the students and guests who helped to make this happen.]]>