Short Abstract

Xtopias train futuring skills beyond utopias and dystopias, actively embracing ambivalence and ambiguity. They combine analytical, intuitive, discursive and speculative methods with fundamental questions of humanity. The session invites you to experience and discuss three different Xtopias.

Description

The future is often negotiated in expert circles. However, pluralistic futures require new skills for participatory futuring, and for evaluating them from multiple perspectives. Many participatory and transdisciplinary methods develop visions of a more sustainable future. Sometimes, such utopian futures are contrasted with dystopian counterparts, outlining a future completely missing sustainability targets, based current trends. Such a stereotypical approach about futures being unambiguously positive or negative misses one core aspect of futures that we can be relatively certain about: they will be ambivalent, full of goal conflicts and ambiguities, quite like the present.

Therefore, we have developed the concept of Xtopias, as tools for honing futuring skills. Xtopias facilitate people's mental and emotional access to different futures by combining different futuring approaches, integrating systemic thinking, political negotiation, ethical reasoning and creative imagination. Xtopias also link ambivalent content and participatory methodology very closely. Fundamental questions of our society such as “How do we relate to nature?” “How do we deal with death?” “How can we re-think work?” or “What will love and community mean in the future?” were the starting points of our methodological development. Xtopias move far beyond the extrapolation of current trends or alternative agendas, opening up spaces for futuring not hampered by thinking based on the present, and not limited to specific professional actor groups. The project “Urban Xtopias” has resulted in a toolbox of eight thoroughly tested futuring methods to address ambivalent futures.

The workshop will briefly present the concept of Xtopias, offer an opportunity to test three of the tools, and discuss the potential of this approach in a closing plenum. We hope to enrich the STS discouse in this conference both through the discussion of different modes of thinking, interweaving scientific and non-scientific approaches, as well as with a practical approach to opening futures.