3. WORKSHOPPING

Octopa debating

Through her Toolkit, get familiar with Octopa’s many arms abilities to tackle complexity and uncertainty.

I’ve seen how you humans have responded to my ingenuity, flexibility and adaptability. There’s a way to go to join up our aspirations, actions, expectations and assessments of meaningful long-term change.

So, I’ve come up with some strategies and tactics to help us move forward. I’ve done this to stress this is about things that emerge, come into being and offer and invite us to be agents of informed and situated change.

This is all about engaging with matters of climate, environment, scenarios and sustainability and propel ourselves into more connected, principled, positioned and purposive action. Ready, steady go!

The workshops are arranged as follows:

1. Imagining

Here — Where are you at today?
Focus — Shaping, Thinking

The first workshopping activity centers on critically, imaginatively and collectively thinking ahead and acting now for tomorrow.

We’ll approach this by going into how we might and have been shaping our futures through scenarios and engaging in given and merging conditions and contexts.

Also, we’ll look into ways we think and might rethink relationships between types, forms and domains of thinking to develop further how to shape shared futures.

→ FOCUS: SHAPING

EXPLORING SCENARIOS

· What do you know about scenarios in shaping futures and how have you used them?
· What do you think an anticipatory scenario might aim to do and to achieve?
· How might irony, pastiche and play work to shape expectations of events?

CONDITIONS AND CONTEXTS

· What core conditions impact on your domain area worldview on climate?
· Which contexts do you work within and how do they shape your activities?
· What specific factors contribute to shaping the complexity of your futures views?

→ FOCUS: THINKING

THINKING ABDUCTIVELY

· Which knowledge domain areas and connections are important in your work?
· What challenges to focusing issues arise in thinking between and across disciplines?
· How are relations between past, present and futures forms of emergent knowing?

CONCEPTUALISING FUTURES

· What genres of futures are you most familiar with in your work and daily life?
· How can mediated futures help us reimagine complex current predicaments?
· Which mix and intersections of methods and are key to shaping ideas of futures?

2. Positioning

There — Where did you ‘go’ in the process?
Focus — Anticipating, Locating

This workshop is concerned with taking ideas, concepts and thinking about world views and methods onwards and positioning them in futures inquiries and actions.

Our focus here is on approaches design and futures intersections as in need of care responsible and situated positioning to suit local contexts and wider systems view.

Developing anticipatory care demands flexible, fluent shaping of prospective co-designs and critiques as we locate, negotiate and navigate processes of becoming.

→ FOCUS: ANTICIPATING

FUTURES AND CARE

· What is your understanding of anticipation as taking care ahead of time?
· How might you alter your current ways of facing and tackling emerging futures?
· What are central topics and needs in developing near, mid- and long-term futures?

CONFIGURING ANTICIPATION

· How might you put together a mix of methods to configure sustainable futures?
· What human/non-human participants would you include in negotiating prospects?
· Which processes of co-creation and critique need care-ful nurturing and stewardship?

→ FOCUS: LOCATING

POSITIONING FUTURES CARE

· Which changes might be central in rethinking the dynamics of past-present-futures?
· Where could critical futures design activities be situated, critiqued and developed?
· How might you use anticipatory scenarios to situate given and emerging needs?

RE-ARTICULATING FUTURES TODAY

· Where in the future would you position your work with what implications in the present?
· What current conditions need rethinking to effectively convey futures in the present?
· How can critical of acts of futuring alter current contexts for long-term change?

3. Transforming

Where — What are your responses now?
Focus — Practicing, Sharing

This workshop centres on what we might go about transforming our current practices of thinking and working with futures into ones for sustainable futures.

It’s one thing to think about and design futures activities to act on the present and develop long-term change strategies, another to support and assess them in motion.

Here you’ll need to engage in perhaps difficult and partly unknown processes of identifying and making changes to act on and ensure shared futures in the present.

→ FOCUS: PRACTICING

ENACTING

· What properties of materials you used now impact on positioning optional presents?
· How have enacted methods exposed/expanded a re-shaping of current practices?
· Which pedagogical practices have been heightened as means to immediate action?

STRATEGISING

· Which strategic topics are most translatable into flows and changes in everyday life?
· What policy needs and directions are now critical to develop further, and for whom?
· How can speculation inform and alter assumed policy practices for strategic change?

→ FOCUS: SHARING

ACTION, AGENCY AND TRANSFORMATION

· What processes of action-reflection can be shared between what-if and here-now?
· How can prospective experience be connected to collective contemporary agency?
· What assessment needs arise in shifting from future scenarios to shared presents?

MEDIATING TOGETHER

· What communicative challenges surface in conveying current change via futuring?
· How might collaborative futures mediation inform collective expressions today?
· Which modes of shared prospective experience might influence articulations now?

4. Reporting

About — Which experiences have you had?
Focus — Reflecting, Commenting

Sharing your use of these items in my Den can help us all to better connect our thinking, experiences and reflections in shaping shared futures. Do feel free to share your views.