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Short abstract:

This paper uses affect theory (Ahmed, 2007) and queer theories of time (Freeman, 2011; Munoz, 2009) to think with a research project focused on speculative fictions about the future, authored by youth (aged 13-15) in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Long abstract:

Background and Method:

Speculative fiction authors (Butler, 1984; Delany, 2009), pedagogues (Truman, 2019), and scholars (Keeling, 2019; Lothian, 2018) argue that the imaginary worlds of speculative fiction offer opportunities to reflect on, critique, and offer solutions to social and technological problems in our present moment, highlighting the potential of fiction as a pedagogical and social tool for predicting and building different futures. Based on this premise, the project Speculative Futures (2023-2024) asked teenagers from three continents to write situated (Haraway, 1991) speculative fictions about the future on the themes of technology, sustainability, or social justice, based in their own geographies as 'research-creation' (Truman, 2022). Un-prompted, most of the students to date have written dystopias about the future of their town, emerging technologies, social (in)justices, and their own lives.

Analysis:

The field of education, and educational research pivots on a rhetoric of utopic futurities: educate for the future, grow better citizens; embrace sciences of learning and technologies of reproduction (of the same). In our current moment of global crises, children are often either not given a voice about their future, or conversely turned into problem solvers and icons who will fix the future they’ve been handed (eg. Thunberg). This paper thinks with the secondary students’ speculative fiction narratives as ‘data,’ in combination with theories of speculative thought, affect (Ahmed, 2007), and queer temporalities (Freeman, 2011; Munoz, 2009), to trouble reproductive narratives of educational futures, and explore the promise of speculative fiction as a method of critique of the future-past (present).

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Short abstract:

This contribution explores the critical and liberatory potential of predictions. It discusses diverse forms of performing predictions based on an STS book project. "Just write predictions" is a daunting yet surprisingly fun and liberating task that helped us form an engaged community of authors.

Long abstract:

This contribution discusses predictions and explores the practical potential of engaging with predictions for STS researchers. It is based on a book project in preparation at Mattering Press, edited by Mél Hogan, Edward Ongweso Jr and Stefan Laser. Predictions are claims about the future that are meant to come true. Even when predictions don’t come true, which is more often than not, they allow for action in the time in between. They do work. With this volume (and a small series we are initiating), we draw on the rich critique that STS researchers, sociologists, anthropologists and media scholars have formulated of the modern fetishism of prediction which includes the violence of policing. Current developments around generative AI and technological hypes of a similar colour strengthen these critiques. Still, we do not want to leave the performative and poetic power of predictions to the lead actors of digital capitalism and their rigid ideals. We have invited STS scholars and allied thinkers to just start predicting. It turned out to be a daunting yet surprisingly fun and liberating task that helped us form an engaged community of authors. Predictions reflect our worries and aspirations back to us. In this panel, we reflect on the experience, egange with critique, and show different modes of prediction, from scientific and quantitative ones to alternative frames. Thinkers engage in plenty of speculative endeavours, reinterpret ongoing research, and present pointed arguments that work beyond academia. Remembering, inventing, surprising do political work, just as does forgetting.

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Short abstract:

This case study delves into strategies for fostering Futures Literacies at Futurium, aimed at empowering visitors in shaping futures. Through Mobil Futurium and Futures Boxes, we uncover the synergy of futures thinking and STS in education.

Long abstract:

Established in September 2019 in Berlin, Germany, Futurium, the House of Futures, is an institution committed to the exploration of possible futures. Its guiding question for all approaches to future topics is: How do we want to live? The promotion of future competencies has emerged as a pivotal endeavour of Futurium. This case study delves into a practical approach to cultivating futures literacies, a significant component of the broader exploration of futures within Science and Technology Studies (STS). Informed by practical experiences, expert discussions, and literature reviews, Futurium's approach to Futures Literacies emphasizes the multiplicity and diversity inherent in potential future outcomes and scenarios. It acknowledges the absence of a universal set of future-oriented skills and knowledge, recognizing that cultural subtleties influence the understanding of the future.

This case study categorizes five domains that contribute to Futures Literacies at Futurium, with a particular focus on understanding and navigating futures. These domains encompass thinking of futures, shaping futures, resilience, creative mindset, and scientific thinking. Through these domains, Futurium aims to equip individuals with the skills and knowledge necessary to navigate the complexities of diverse futures, promoting adaptability, critical thinking, and creativity.

The case study further illustrates this approach by using the example of Mobil Futurium and Futures Boxes, showcasing how Futurium actively promotes Futures Literacies within the framework of the five domains. By examining these cases, we shed light on the intersection of futures thinking and STS, highlighting the practical implications of fostering futures literacies in educational settings.

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Short abstract:

AI heralds a future requiring risk governance, and technological safety hinges on choices shaped by economic incentives. While the impact of AI on the economy has been highlighted, little is said about the impact of the economy on AI development and its economisation.

Long abstract:

The capabilities and affordances of ‘frontier’ Artificial Intelligences (AIs) are growing at a rate that would scarcely have been credible five years ago. These advances undoubtedly herald a transformative future, but the exact nature of that future remains an open question wherein great promises are intermingled with equally great perils. Navigating this future successfully, therefore, will require that states grapple seriously with the governance of AI risks.

Current approaches to AI risk governance focus on explicit standards and compliance mechanisms. As STS scholars have long maintained, however, such mechanisms are never sufficient. Extreme risks in complex systems can never be wholly captured by formal processes or governed by third parties. Technological safety in these circumstances hinges on complex, interpretive choices concerning everything from designs to deployment, and those choices are shaped more by economic incentives than by legislative oversight. Simply put, technological safety flourishes when it pays and struggles when it doesn’t.

While the impact of AIs on the economy has become a major focus for social scientists, however, little is said about the impact of the economy on AI development. We address this imbalance and argue that the risks of frontier AIs need to be understood in relation to their economisation. For all their novelty, AIs are built to be monetised, by organisations that exist to maximise capital; and attempts to understand, predict or steer their futures need to explore the incentive structures that arise from this.

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Short abstract:

This paper details experiments in utopian futuring with aerosol scientists in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The methodology, Narrative Futuring, uses the best possible worlds as jumping-off points for critical reflection on contemporary scientific practice and its possible futures.

Long abstract:

The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council AREA framework for RRI embeds anticipation as one of three core “processes” (alongside reflection and engagement) for researchers to engender responsible research practice. Their 2019 mandate requiring RRI training for PhD students has provided fertile ground for a new body of sociotechnological imaginaries and images of the future to emerge, offering rich material for STS scholars.

Beginning this work in the context of a global pandemic, teaching RRI across 8 diverse disciplines, has exposed critical limitations in existing futures methodologies. In response, I collaborated with an artist to develop the Narrative Futuring methodology, supporting participants to imagine and critically engage with utopian futures as a means of reflecting on contemporary practice. Inspired by Ruth Levitas’ Utopia as Method, and Tschalling Swiestra’s call for RRI to move beyond preventing harms towards eudaimonia, Narrative Futuring employs utopia, after Levitas, first as architecture, then as archaeology, exploring the ways in which we imagine the best possible worlds and what this tells us about where we are headed.

This paper reflects on experiments in Narrative Futuring with researchers in aerosol science, their successes and failures, and the challenges inherent in capturing the impact and meaning of the participants’ experiences. I explore how images of utopian futures shape the work of science in the present; the trans-disciplinary inspirations for our methodology; and how an approach forged in the emotional darkness of the Covid-19 pandemic offers new and urgent paths away from other dark pasts, presents and futures.

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Short abstract:

We explore innovation practices, focusing on the role of a wide array of community tech in co-creation methods. Our case studies are projects led by KWMC where local issues are creatively engaged with and alternative futures of living in and with local spaces, species and atmospheres are imagined.

Long abstract:

Co-creation methods that include different publics are often seen to make innovation more democratic. They are also increasingly deployed in justice-led approaches to imagining and making different futures. In this paper, we locate innovation practices in local communities and as happening through a wide variety of community technologies, broadly defined as ‘hardware or software that delivers benefit to a community group, and which that community group has the authority to influence or control’ (Promising Trouble 2022). Our case study is Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC), an arts centre and charity located in a post-war council estate, south Bristol, that works collaboratively with people from different backgrounds to develop new and creative models for achieving positive social change in their lives and communities. We discuss a few examples of recent projects and programmes in which community tech has been central to the ways in which local issues are creatively engaged with and through which alternative ways of living in and with local spaces, species and atmospheres are imagined. We examine the wide array of community tech that are involved in these co-creation methods, from sensors to written diaries to digital photographs to WhatsApp groups. While such a range of community tech may be dizzying, it also generates a capacious understanding of what innovation may be and how it may be developed and shaped by different people. We argue this is important if we want to intervene in highly normative trajectories and instead value and make plural and better futures.

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Short abstract:

The anticipations of the digital futures of ageing populations are often based on ageist assumptions. Based on speculative design and futures workshops in Germany, Austria and the UK, we explore how we might open up futures making to different people and what we might learn from their responses.

Long abstract:

Who or what is able to claim the future is an exercise of power and a matter of social justice (Urry 2016). The future is not simply happening but is made now – through regimes of anticipation that shape our expectations, imaginaries, visions and hypes, and define what is thinkable and desirable (Poli 2017, Markham 2021). Current anticipations circulating about a datafied future are often determined by powerful social actors such as states or technology companies. The anticipations for datafied futures of ageing populations are—in addition—often based on ageist assumptions about the lives of older people. In this presentation, we explore how we might open up futures making to different people and what we might learn from their responses for the design of digital technologies, but also for our own research practice. Based on a series of speculative design and futures workshops with older adults, civil society organisations and civil servants in Germany, Austria and the UK, our analysis draws out how concepts of care and connectivity are imagined, what kinds of assumptions around older adults and technologies are being claimed and who or what stands to gain power and influence. We explore critical questions including tensions related to surveillance, autonomy, privacy, data ownership and inequalities.

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Short abstract:

This paper explores the idea of science-based speculative futures through a reflection on the AmazonFACE experiment, currently being developed in Brazil. The experiment makes use of Free Air CO2 Enrichment as a proxy for climate futures wherein climate change has run its course.

Long abstract:

This paper explores the idea of science-based speculative futures through a reflection on the AmazonFACE experiment, currently being developed in Brazil. The experiment makes use of Free Air CO2 Enrichment as a proxy for climate futures wherein climate change has run its course. Through large-scale infrastructures, the experiment helps coordinate and coproduce (Jasanoff, 2004) international ‘big science,’ international scientific and climate cooperation, and global horizon work (Petryna, 2018; Petryna, 2022) in and about the Amazon. I will explore the first perceptions of my ongoing engagement with the project, as both a direct participant and a would-be ethnographer of the experiment. I explore the idea of science-based speculation as ways of theorizing how this experimental system helps to produce and materialize climate futures, as well as present (and future) climate governance for Brazil and beyond. I want to explore how science-based speculation is a futuring practice being leveraged for the ongoing labor of making the experiment viable and making it relevant for science and for policy. I also sketch some of the challenges of doing ethnographic work in large-scale experimental systems as part of the work of engaging with the project.

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Short abstract:

In this paper we outline a disobedient action research approach in which we as 'The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest' (TITiPI) work on ways to collectively articulate community concerns on anticipatory infra-solutionism for the digital and green transition.

Long abstract:

In this paper we discuss a disobedient action research approach to collectively articulate community concerns on anticipatory infra-solutionism for the digital and green transition within the context of the recovery policies of the EU and UK. This contribution tells the story of a 'bugreport' that was written as a community collective action against Frontier Climate. The report was filed by 'The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest' (TITiPI) and written in collaboration with a group of researchers, activists, artists, technologists concerned with business-as-usual attitudes towards climate change as infra solutionism. It reports on an ongoing attempt to collectively articulate and contest a practice put in place by Frontier Climate, a powerful consortium between Big Tech companies and global consultancy firm McKinsey. In direct response to the future business opportunities created by UK and EU governments and in the context of climate urgencies, Frontier Climate offers a computational-cloud-based-infrastructure for both creating a market and an opportunity for accumulation through what they call “advance market commitments”.

We discuss how Frontier Climate attempts to capture other sociotechnical futures by the imaginative monopoly of carbon removal. However as we show communities are responding to, taking up and remaking infrastructural shifts in creative and quotidian ways and in this paper we specifically seek to understand how “The Frontier Climate Bugreport” generates new creative practices for the future workings of prefigurative politics, and infrastructural narratives––suggesting both resistances to transitions and imagining the closures of computational infrastructures and fossil fuel extraction.

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Short abstract:

This papers aim to contribute to methodological discussion within STS, in particular connected to work that investigates digital futures and emerging technologies. Two methods - photo-elicitation using AI generated photos and role-playing to test potential future scenarios are discussed.

Long abstract:

Rather than viewing the future as a distant and abstract vision, previous research in STS has approached futures as something enacted in situ; a practical and tangible phenomena bound to certain locations and times, shaped in entanglement with the wider socio-cultural, historical and political circumstances (Suchman et al 2008, Brown & Michael 2003; see also Haraway 1991). This way of approaching futures carries methodological implications, as it enables situated empirical studies of future-making practices (Brown, Rappert, and Webster 2000, Felt 2015). Recent work within this tradition have encouraged scholars to reflect more on their own practices and position; even suggesting that we ought to engage more explicitly in the future-making practices that we investigate (Lanzeni et al 2022).

In the practice-based, fieldwork(-like) approach described above there is a kind of fluid temporality - where past, present and future are investigated together – and where the focus is on what their interplay creates. In my doctoral thesis, I ask in what way Swedish eldercare might be affected by the introduction of data-driven services; a potential future that is very much in the making through policy interventions and scientific endeavors. What alternative methods could be adopted for investigating these ‘might be’s’ and the ‘potential futures’? In this talk I will present and discuss two attempts which seek to experiment with methods for investigating futures; focus-group interviewing with photo-elicitation of AI generated pictures of data-driven eldercare and role-playing of future data-driven scenarios in the context of eldercare.

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Short abstract:

I develop an explicitly semiotic account of future-making as a process of distributed, enacted sense-making. Countering the widespread analytic ‘semanticization’ of futurity, I examine how futures are enacted and acquire performative agency in socially organized contexts of action.

Long abstract:

The question of how social actors imagine, construct and coordinate futures has attracted more and more empirical and theoretical attention in recent years. As future-making has developed into an object of inquiry in its own right, futurity has increasingly been problematized in epistemological terms. In this paper, I aim to develop an analytic vocabulary for conceptually re-embedding future-making in collectively organized contexts of action and a more relational analysis of social agency. To counter the slippage into an analytic ‘semanticization’ of futurity, I draw on insights and concepts from semiotics, linguistic anthropology, ethnomethodology and cognitive science to develop an explicitly semiotic account of future-making as a process of distributed, enacted sense-making. I theorize futures as 'complex objects' (Suchman) that acquire practical objectivity and performative agency within enunciative networks of social relations. I develop an analytic framework for understanding how the enunciation of futures is shaped by the social and narrative grammars of interaction available within 'organized social contexts' (Emirbayer/Mische). whose architecture of social relations defines a narrative grammar of future-making. In doing so, I seek to not only contribute to the literature on future-making, but to link this conversation back to the underlying analytic problems of theorizing how culture and meaning shape social agency and processes of social coordination. Specifically, I seek to shed light on the question of how the imaginary and creative dimensions of future-making are coordinated with the need to re-embed futures into the practical structure of action available for eancting them.

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Short abstract:

This project studies the sociotechnical imaginary of the Dutch New Economy prevailing in the late 1990s. Positioning the construction of time in public discourse as future essentialism, discursive strategies of boundless optimism and urgency are identified highlighting national hype and hegemony.

Long abstract:

The slogan ‘new times, new opportunities’ exemplified the ethos of the Dutch internet business Newconomy, reflecting a dominant sentiment in the late 1990s in the Netherlands. This period is characterized by economic prosperity and the emergence of a digital order fueled by the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web. Coupled with the rise of neoliberal ideology, the development of the Dutch web was influenced by free market principles, deregulation, and profit motive. The amalgamation of these phenomena formed the foundation of a new, dominant imaginary; the new economy - a novel way of ‘doing internet business’ laying the groundwork for the upcoming digital era.

By constructing time through the lens of future essentialism, the project identifies discursive strategies of boundless optimism and urgency; individuals seized the perceived, unique opportunity of partaking in the inevitable new economy. Consequently, many invested in internet start-ups only to suffer losses after the dot-com crash. The subsequent shift towards a more restrained approach to developing the Dutch Web post-2000 underscores the mediating role of imaginary futures in shaping technology’s materiality, meaning, and hegemony. Even though a profitable, online business model did not exist yet, a dominant entrepreneurial class emerged spearheaded by internetgurus and various startups like Zonnet and World Online. The research demonstrates an analysis of ‘futuring’ can be leveraged to critically examine historical phenomena. Additionally, it contributes to the historiography of the Dutch web enabling a comparative analysis between under-studied narratives against the backdrop of dominant interpretations in the field of Internet History.

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Short abstract:

This paper offers an insight into the different research perspectives on Technofutures. It's a contribution to the methodological reflection to study Technofutures and offers a structured guidance through an otherwise often rather erratic research field.

Long abstract:

Emerging technologies come with the promise of disrupting the world as we know it, while at the same time lacking proof of their actual impact. Except for a few prototypes in R&D departments or research institutes, these technologies exist primarily in shared expectations and the way we talk about their potential applications. These expectations are called Technofutures. Technofutures communicate the technology towards a diverse group of stakeholders, attribute meaning to the technology, and create expectations long before it can be said that these expectations will actually hold.

While Technofutures deal with potential future scenarios, they are created at a time when there is limited or no existing knowledge regarding the likely trajectory of the respective technology. That being said, Technofutures often follow a purely hypothetical and thus also speculative manner, while at the same time shaping the way we think and discuss emerging technologies.

Facing the situation that Technofutures, despite their fictional character, have an actual impact on the development of the technology, scholars from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and TA have turned towards Technofutures as objects of interest. The shared characteristic of these approaches is that they view Technofutures not as predictions but as reflections of the current state of affairs.

This paper offers an insight into the different perspectives on Technofutures and presents a framework for a structured assessment. Building upon hermeneutic TA and Ricoeur's narrative hermeneutics, the framework will take into consideration different forms of figurations that become relevant when understanding the social construction of Technofutures.

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Short abstract:

I explore historic clothing patents as sites of past, present and future imaginaries. Using ‘speculative sewing’ I show and tell multi-dimensional stories about inventors who defied and resisted socio-political norms and restrictions in their attempts to change the world stitch by stitch.

Long abstract:

To be awarded a patent, inventors reflect on the past to make claims in the present and, in the process, imagine alternate futures. Historic patents are valuable time-traveling devices because they hold insights into inventor’s motivations, materials and methods, problems and solutions, intended wearers, and imagined sites of use. Read in the context of related socio-political happenings, they provide unique glimpses into lives long past, enabling researchers to trace how different ideas map across time, place and bodies. In this paper, I explore what kinds of STS ‘futuring’ emerge in the analysis of past inventive practices. In other words, how do patents make visible histories of the future? My case study is the Politics of Patents research project which examines 200 years of clothing inventions in global archives from 1820-2020. I focus on lesser-known inventors who used new forms of clothing to work around barriers to their freedom of movement. I reflect on steganography – the act of hiding in plain sight – as many inventions by and for women feature convertible, multiple, reversible and hidden elements. I discuss using ‘speculative sewing’, where my team of sewing social scientists and I stitch theory, data and fabric into inventions described in patents and analyse them as three-dimensional arguments. In the spirit of ‘making and doing’, I will show & tell material examples of our research, reconstructions and re-imaginings.

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Short abstract:

In this study, we systematically explore and compare the underpinnings of the Sociology of Expectations and Sociotechnical Imaginaries. We enhance the STS understanding of futures’ performativity and dissemination by synthesizing our review findings from a social theory perspective.

Long abstract:

Sociotechnical futures are far from ‘innocent’ descriptions of what might happen in the future. Instead, they are collectively shared images that are performative, influencing how society, policymakers, scientists, and engineers make sense of the future and compelling them to act in the present.

STS scholars have long delved into the roles of sociotechnical futures and the ways in which they disseminate, exploring why some futures become widely shared and socially binding and others fade. The Sociology of Expectations and literature on Sociotechnical Imaginaries are two main strands of research that originate from these efforts. While both strands deal with the nature and social impact of futures in the STS context, they are grounded in distinct ontologies, theoretical and methodological approaches, and areas of interest. They also differ in terms of how futures are conceptualized (e.g., regarding the degrees of stability and implicitness) as well as in inquiry into the dissemination of futures and their social impact.

In our study, we systematically compare both research strands in order to contribute to conceptual clarity in the STS research on futures. Furthermore, we lay the foundation for an integrative theoretical framework of sociotechnical futures by synthesizing our review findings from a social theory perspective. In this way, our paper enhances the STS understanding of futures’ performativity and dissemination and not only delineates ways of shaping futures but also elucidates how established future accounts may be redefined and transformed.