By Dr. Adam Cowart
What is the value of bringing futures to life? There are many answers, but let’s start with how encounters with futures can help us move beyond the faux comfort and certainty of the present.
John Watson, an early influence in cognitive psychology, wrote a book in 1896 (that’s right, not a typo) called The Mind of the Master, a religious text. In the book, there is a chapter titled “The Foresight of Faith” in which Watson seeks to unpack the tensions between living in the present versus living with the future in mind. Watson explores, in spiritual terms, to what extent the latent possibilities in our future informs the way we live in the present.
“…the foresight which prepares one for the future life is a certain attitude of the soul. No person, it may be assumed, would refuse the reversion of a blessed future, with its high hopes and the freedom of holiness and unfettered service of the Divine Will, but many persons are not minded to subordinate its unseen excellence to the solid possession of the present.”
Watson’s point on subordinating the future for the “solid possession of the present” remains a challenge today. We need look no further than the myriad of wicked problems around us. Increasingly, the future is being subordinated to the present, a phenomenon design scholar Tony Fry refers to as “defuturing.” Bringing futures to life tries to shake us out of this subordination, making the design of encounters with futures an act of resistance against the more solid and tangible titillations of the present.
Bringing Futures to Life Through Design is a highly interactive, hands-on bootcamp designed to accelerate participants’ ability to engage with and prototype the future, moving well beyond traditional strategic foresight and planning. Running from Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon, the experience centers on bridging the gap between abstract foresight and tangible, embodied action and how to move from macro-level change to messy moments in everyday life. The initial modules on Friday establish the theoretical foundation, challenging assumptions about change, and moving quickly into designing experiences by engaging radical subjectivity and translating abstract ideas into tangible representations of alternative futures.
The core of the weekend, spanning Saturday, is dedicated to the practical craft of future-making. Participants learn how to craft compelling narratives and then immediately embody those stories using techniques drawn from theatre and performance studies to make the future a visceral modality. This intensive work culminates on Sunday morning, where teams stage their own immersive encounters with the future – the final deliverable of the bootcamp. The weekend concludes with a comprehensive harvesting and debrief module, ensuring the emergent insights generated during the encounters are captured and translated into actionable collective intelligence, framing the entire process as an activist and utilitarian practice for prototyping meaningful change.
Possible futures, made real.
