If you could create A Time Travel Agency how would you ensure that we build a future that we actually want.
Following the examples of inspiring Sci-Fi writers of the 1950’s, and those from hundreds of years prior, who helped write us to the moon how can we envision our future with enough “social agency” and “social reflexivity” in the creative narratives we write and produce (and consume) today, such that we create the best self-fulfilling prophecies?
”Where are our values?” asks Gary Comstock, a philosopher at Ohio State University. “Now that atrazine has turned up in the water wells, 2-4d has been linked with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in farmers, and Alachlor, the most heavily used herbicide on corn, is suspected to be a carcinogen, why are land-grant universities doing research to find crops that can be grown in the presence of stronger doses of these chemicals?”
If research is a form of social planning, as Chuck Hasselbrook of the Center For Rural Affairs says, what does this say about where we want to go as a society? Instead of pledging allegiance to a method of farming that we know destroys land and people, shouldn’t we be tackling the problems of getting crops to grow the way we want them to grow? in polyculture and rotations for instance. Shouldn’t we be taking natures advice and giving farmers the tools they need to farm sustainably, rather then giving chemical companies bigger needles to poison us with?” -From Biomimicry, Innovation Inspired By Nature by Janine M. Benyus
Through the lens of social innovation design and generative design thinking . __Is there a minor add-on or adjustment we can make to our current jobs, the products we are building today, the projects we are planning for next year, which would help to ensure some type of additional future agency? __
Can you go even further into the future and re-examine your projects as if they were ancient artifacts? What does this reveal?
Participants are invited to bring their projects to the workshop, and everyone will have time to give a brief presentation of their project, with the additional invitation to create an on-the-spot tie-in to some type of social innovation which could naturally develop from the project’s intended purpose.
For inspiration, check out Bucky Fuller’s "World Game"
“Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
We owe a great deal of thanks to creative forward dreaming futurists such as Ray Bradbury and Issac Asimov. The work of renaissance scientist/engineer/technologists such as Buckminster Fuller, and Carl Sagan provided the framework for seemingly impossible technology to leap forward from creative ideas into actual practice, as best demonstrated by the concentrated 10 year global efforts of the aerospace industry and several international space agencies as humanity converted the ideas of paperback sci-fi novels into actual journeys beyond our atmosphere and into the cosmos.
More recent creative exploration into possible future worlds has included the vivid and expansive philosophy of Ray Kurzweils 6 Epochs Of Human Evolution.
Lets get our far-fetched creative future-building muscles tuned up and ready to solve some future-world issues.
Use the comments section to begin building some of these stories, and we can spin off the best ideas.