futures

Walking backwards into the future

Marshall McLuhan once said that “We look at the present through a rear view mirror; we walk backwards into the future.” I was reminded of this quote as I was drafting a guest blog post for the Canada Council website. The post highlights a tension I felt at both Jacob Zimmer’s Unconference on Change and the Future(s) of Toronto Performance and the Canada Council’s Inter-Arts Office’s consultations I helped to frame  – a tension between an arts organization’s reliance on the past (i.e. an organization’s past practices and performance, so-called best practices based on other organizations’ past experiences, etc) and…

Future Londoners – Nesta

See on Scoop.it – Chaos and Uncertainty Zan Chandler‘s insight: Future Londoners is a series of imaginary London residents of the future that were created as a collaboration “between Arup, Social Life, Re.Work, Commonplace, Tim Maughan and Nesta.”  The series of future Londoners was created as a way of exploring and informing the design of a smarter London. While much popular futures exploration likes to focus on technologies of the future, this work looks at the lives of future Londoners. It’s a great way of understanding the implications of future developments. This work reminds me of a foresight project I…