Seeing and Shaping Our future: Becoming Better Agents of Change and Transformation
Several grad students and faculty from OCADU Strategic Foresight & Innovation engaged in this two-day workshop held at the Design Exchange, conducted by Ruben Nelson of Foresight Canada. The opportunity was extended by The British Council for us to participate, and we joined about 15 members of the amazing Transatlantic Network 2020.
My OCADU colleague Jeremy Bowes posted a great summary on this event on the sLab site. See the photo album from organizer Leah Snyder, and her picture below of one of the breakout groups.
The workshop sessions developed collective responses to envisioning an emerging future Canadian society, aligned with the vision for Civilization 2.0. This is the proposition that the next cultures of civilization are emerging now and are forming connections for future realization as mainstream society crosses over the bridges being built by this foresight.
The workshop was led with a series of methods from envisioning desired futures to identifying the bridging strategies to span the horizons to get there:
- Generation of initial desired future states, critical requirements of the future
- Three levels of generality, core patterns of life/community/civilization
- Generation of values, trends and strategic drivers in Canada
- Formulation of 3 horizons for near to long term bridging
- Creation of bridging strategies to envision the shift from Horizon 1 to Horizon 3.
We plan to explore these methods and ideas further in Design with Dialogue.
