Over the weekend of Nov 3-5, BBC Radio 3 organized the first Festival of Free Thinking, presumably meant to be a regular gig and with an inaugural theme this year of the future. Lectures and panels were held around Liverpool exploring what's next for technology and society, religion, urban planing, biotechnology, the UK, and others, and featuring a mix of academics, entrepreneurs, advocates and cultural observers. Sessions were recorded for live and archived broadcast on the radio and web.
Festival events weren't confined to lecture halls and talking heads, however; the organizers aimed to get a lot of people chewing on new topics, not just those who would attend a lecture on Saturday afternoon. One of these alternate forums was a series pub debates on some fairly concrete future topics, while another was even more public.
In city squares around the UK the BBC has been setting up very large screens (think Jumbotrons) that play a mix of BBC news, music, sports, and lately interactive games and custom modules. There's one of these screens in Clayton Square in Liverpool, and to engage passers-by in a bit of futures thinking I created a series of artifacts-from-the-future (mini visual scenarios) that embody some of the big topics raised elsewhere during the Festival, ranging from the implications of cloning and techno-augmentation of the body to the future of surveillance in the most surveilled country in the world.
I figured I'd be able to crank out this content, but I was quickly proven wrong; this project ranks up there as one of the most challenging experiments I've faced in the new discipline of futures design....
These visuals needed to be instantly captivating and quickly understood, but I wouldn't sacrifice the importance of the trends and implications embodied--simultaneously fun and meaningful. Designing for this combination is actually my goal for all of IFTF's futures-design work, but our content usually has the inherent advantage of a primed and interested audience. We can plop the viewer into the middle of a fictional situation, or use a decently sized chunk of text to drive home an important implication, or trust that they'll engage with an illustration long enough to grasp the interplay of several important trends.
I didn't have these luxuries with my Liverpudlian audience. The pedestrians in Clayton Square were encountering the big screen without any context, and the artifacts-from-the-future I created for it had only a brief opportunity to impress, inform, and provoke before viewers walked on.
Recently my colleague Alex Pang coined the term futures petting zoo to describe what-if imagery that relies on cliched symbols of the future rather than visions grounded in real trends. The term perfectly captures the end of the spectrum I was trying to avoid for these visuals, but, as Alex points out, many of these symbols are so universally representative of The Future that they instantly broadcast a timeframe and narrative goal even if they are light on likely implications worth exploring.
Looking at the collection of visuals I created for the big screen, I'm happy to give them a 70/30 ratio of meaty issues to petting zoo symbols--just enough robots to make thinking about the societal effects of augmented humans palatable on a Saturday afternoon. I do think this ratio can be improved, and that images, movies, games and experiences intended to provoke thought about future possibilities don't need to be dumbed down. They need to entertain and engage, but oversimplification doesn't have to be the inevitable result. I'm hoping to work more with the great people behind the Liverpool big screen on future futures experiences and test some of these theories.
Some of the artifacts-from-the-future I created for the festival:
Excellent !
What a petty ! You should flickerise your great work Jason. That would be more practical for refer it.
Posted by: Hubert Guillaud | December 14, 2006 at 01:55 AM