Discipline Or Practice: Futures and Foresight

This resource is a modular set of tools (10 methods in 3 phases) that can be run in various ways, from a general tool to discover and ideate futures into a premeditated, repeated and ever-focusing exercise to build a vision on one or more lines of work. The resource can also be used to bring transparency and alignment to any organization through repeated exercises. It consists of three types of tools: Worldbuilding, Predictive Analysis and the Optimal Futures. The authors also suggest a process…

Features: Guiding framework, Tips&Tricks

This resource is an imagination game that challenges players to collaboratively and competitively describe objects from a range of alternative futures. The object of the game is to come up with the most entertaining and thought-provoking descriptions of hypothetical objects from different near-, medium-, and long-term futures. The card deck can be downloaded and printed and contains cards, instructions, playsheets, and blank cards that you can customize with your own content. The website also…

This canvas is a strategic design tool for developing descriptive models of transformative futures. It asks users to name the logics stabilizing the dominant regime — and then imagine how such logics might stabilize an alternative in terms of narratives, goals, core values, governance & practices, and physical inputs. Requires email address in exchange for download.

The resource contains tools for visualizing and anticipating future risk of technology products, acknowledging that once technology is released and reaches scale it may be used for purposes beyond the original intention. The toolkit contains foresight methods, including 14 scenarios, for kicking off important conversations with product teams--including examples of current signals of future trends. It also contains a Risk Mitigation Manual with 8 risk zones where hard-to anticipate and unwelcome…

Features: Checklist, Examples or Cases

This toolkit was developed to help us cope with the rapidly changing world, such as global networks and autonomous drone fleets—that have never existed before. The publishers suggest that we need new stories and new mythologies to tell us how these things fit into our lives and make sense of these transformations. The toolkit contains a card deck exploring different colored "archetypes" or ways of making meaning and each includes different ways of understanding Interactions, Environments,…

Features: Guiding framework

This manual introduces strategic foresight as a practice in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It was created with consideration for the resource constraints in developing country contexts, so proposes light-touch and low-cost methods. However, it could easily be applied elsewhere. The manual features a selection of methods and techniques suited for framing development or policy discussions, but there are many methods and techniques available that are considered part of…

Features: Examples or Cases, Glossary, Guiding framework

Over a dozen years of use to date, the game represents an accessible approach to introducing "images of the future" as a basic property of both cultures and individuals, and can be used as an introduction for more advanced futures and foresight tools and frameworks. It provides a structure for facilitating conversation among groups of participants and intended for groups. Duration is flexible, but typically runs 30-60 minutes. The resource provides step-by-step guidance for how to run the game…

Features: Facilitators guide

IMPACT: A Foresight Game is a serious board game that teaches you to think critically and imaginatively about emerging technology and the future of society. It's goals for players: / Learn the basics of futures thinking including some of the key terminology / Learn about the latest advances in science and technology (neurotech, nanotech, artificial intelligence, IoT, biotech, robotics) / Practice thinking about how these emerging technologies could evolve and the various ways they could…

Features: Interactive diagnostic

The Scenario Exploration System (SES) is a serious game for future simulation (2035 and 2050). It involves participants exploring their long-term objectives in contrasting scenario-related contexts while interacting with other stakeholders. By creating a realistic journey towards the future, the SES generates a safe space to simulate possible responses connected to any issue of interest to the participants. There are two editions: "Sustainable Transitions" and "Food Safety and Nutrition…

Features: Interactive diagnostic, Video guidance

The Game of Life 2050 draws on scenarios for a sustainable European society in 2050. It is an interactive board game in which players consider four scenarios that describe the radical changes needed to be living within key environmental boundaries by 2050. The game takes a minimum of 2 hours to run (ideally 4 hours) and involves 5-7 actors (each played by one person or in pairs) and one Games Master. Play consists of three ‘rounds’ in which actors are given a set of circumstances that have…

Features: Facilitators guide, Interactive diagnostic