Day 02. Activating Civic Futures
Our Futures: A game about participation, design, and the future(s)
Tuesday June 23, 8:00am EDT
✍️ Workshop, 2.5 hour session
NESTA is an innovation foundation focusing on bringing bold ideas to life to change the world for the better. In 2019, NESTA commissioned the Action Foresight Global Swarm to scan for and document high-impact participatory futures projects that engaged the public / citizens in thinking and acting to shape the future. The primary output of our scan was a user’s guide for participatory futures aimed at commissioners and champions within government and public sector agencies. One of the key questions of the project was to ask: how can technologies combine with participatory futures approaches to tackle the wicked problems of the 21st Century? When we considered the complexity inherent in this question, we felt that practitioners were best placed to provide an answer.
"Our Futures" was designed to help us collectively explore answers to the above question and pose those we have not considered. The game features frameworks from our research into participatory futures and centers on designing engagements featuring a range of variables, elements, and aspects. It is our hope that this game helps to expand our horizons for how we conceive of participatory futures, and we believe that it can be used to design more inclusive and impactful participatory futures for us all. This workshop provides an overview of our research on participatory futures, including global cases, and, most importantly, offers a hands-on opportunity for participants to play, localize, and mutate Our Futures, which we would like to launch globally at the Primer 2020 conference.
José Ramos
Director, Action Foresight
José Maria Ramos is director of the boutique foresight consultancy Action Foresight, is Senior Consulting Editor for the Journal of Futures Studies, and is Senior Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast. He has taught and lectured on futures studies, public policy and social innovation at the National University of Singapore (Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy), Swinburne University of Technology (Australia), Leuphana University (Germany), the University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia) and Victoria University (Australia). He has over 50 publications in journals, magazines and books spanning economic, cultural and political change, futures studies, public policy and social innovation. He has also co-founded numerous civil society organizations, a social forum, a maker lab, an advocacy group for commons governance, and a peer to peer leadership development group for mutant futurists. He holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature, a Masters degree in Strategic Foresight, and a Ph.D. in critical globalisation studies. He has a passion for the coupling of foresight and action, which has included both theoretical work through published articles, consulting work for federal, state and municipal governments, as well as citizen experiments in methodological innovation.
He is originally from California of Mexican ancestry. Born in Oakland, he grew up in a very multi-cultural suburb of Los Angeles. After living in Japan and Taiwan, where he studied Japanese and Mandarin, he moved to Melbourne Australia to be with his wife, De Chantal. They have two children, son Ethan and daughter Rafaela. His other great passion is in considering who we are as planetary beings, which includes his ethnographic study of alternative globalizations, writings on planetary stigmergy, and research on cosmo-localization. This line of work connects him to the truth that we are all brothers and sisters inter-dependent with our planet and each other for our survival and wellbeing - our shared commons.
John Sweeney
Director, Qazaq Research Institute for Futures Studies
Dr. John A. Sweeney is an award-winning futurist, designer, and author. He consults widely and has delivered keynote presentations, seminars, and training courses in over 45 countries. As a futurist, he focuses on the impact of new technologies, organizational strategies for surviving and thriving in an increasingly complex world, and transforming policy, planning, and strategy development processes by “using the future” as a resource. John has led, organized, and facilitated strategic planning and foresight projects for a range of clients, including numerous humanitarian and development agencies, government innovation units, and Fortune 500 companies. At present, John serves as an Assistant Professor of Futures and Foresight at Narxoz University where he is also the Director at the Qazaq Research Institute for Futures Studies. He also currently serves as the Foresight Advisor for INTERPOL and as co- Editor of World Futures Review: A Journal of Strategic Foresight. Having received his training at the "Mānoa School" of Futures Studies, John spent time working as a Graduate Researcher under the direction of Jim Dator at the Hawai`i Research Center for Futures Studies. John tweets on trends, emerging issues, and all things postnormal at @aloha_futures.
Kathy Peach
Head of Centre of Collective Intelligence, Nesta
Kathy is the Head of the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design at Nesta, which explores how human and machine intelligence can be combined to develop innovative solutions to social challenges. Kathy leads the Centre's collective intelligence experiments grant making and ‘participatory futures’ programmes. She also leads the Centre's partnership with UNDP's global accelerator lab network - helping to support them to use collective intelligence design to make faster progress on the sustainable development goals. Previously, Kathy was Head of Innovation & Foresight at Bond - the global network for international development organisations. She has also held leadership roles at a range of non-profits, including disability charity Scope, international development agency VSO, and the public body Healthwatch England. She is currently a co-lead of the World Economic Forum's working group on the Future of Civil Society in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Laurie Smith
Principal Researcher, Nesta
Laurie's policy experience spans a wide range of topics from climate change to global health. At the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science, he led on emerging technologies and futures, and before that managed a team focused on science and innovation policy. Previously he worked at the Academy of Medical Sciences on medical science and international health policy. During that time he undertook secondments at the Department for International Development and Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.
He studied an interdisciplinary degree that combined the biomedical and social sciences at University College London, for which he received first-class honours, and he undertook an interdisciplinary masters in science at the Open University while working full time for which he received a distinction.