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Designing Futures
Jim Dator, Professor and Director, Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, University of Hawaii
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| Jim Dator |
When most people think about the future, they assume that whatever they believe is happening now will continue. If times are good, they assume the sunrise of bright days forever. If times are bad, they assume the worst will persist. But in our rapidly changing society, that natural predisposition towards “continuation” is usually wrong, and often tragically so.
Given the rapidity of change, no one can predict the future, in the sense of accurately saying what “will” happen. The best one can do is to forecast alternative futures, and then to try to envision, design, and strive towards preferred futures.
In the past several thousand years of humanity’s existence on Earth, we have moved from hunting and gathering, to agricultural, to industrial, and now to information societies. What’s next? One alternative future is the emergence of a society of icons and aesthetic experience. Perhaps best foreseen in South Korea today, this is a view that understands “design” to be a key concept and activity of economic and social life in the future.
But at the same time, there are severe and long-neglected challenges ahead—the fundamental fragility of our debt-laden global economic system; the possible the end of oil before alternative energy systems come on line; global warming, climate change, and sea-level rise; water and food shortages, and more. Such a future urgently requires “design” as well, but perhaps of very different forms and substances from those appropriate for a dream society. And there are other alternative futures that you need to consider as you look ahead, personally and professionally.
The purpose of this talk, and the exercises accompanying it, is to enable you to surf the tsunamis of change that are rushing towards you from the future, and not to be brushed aside by the oncoming tide.
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