What futurists actually do

When I tell people I'm a researcher at Institute for the Future, they usually follow up the inevitable flying car or Michael J. Fox joke with: You're a futurist? What kinda job is that? Over at GOOD, my colleagues Jake Dunagan and Mathias Crawford launched a new series of essays where they'll talk about "what we do at IFTF, what it is like to think like a futurist, and, more importantly, how to act like you care about what happens." The illustration above is by Claire Thompson, a hypertalented intern at IFTF who is researching co-creation and developing a toolkit for collaborative design. From GOOD:

The future is not an end state. Tomorrow will someday be today, which will fade into yesterday. As our world moves through this unyielding passage of time, how people act in our world will determine just which of many possible futures we end up with.

When we transform our notion of "the future" into visions of alternative futures, we transform our relationship to the very idea of change. We move from thinking we are heading toward an inevitable destination to seeing the world as a dependent, contingent, and therefore actionable, possibility space for us to design. Pluralizing "the future" makes us both more empowered and more responsible for our ultimate outcomes. It may seem like a semantic triviality, but it represents an important shift in thinking.

Even though we can't predict exactly what will happen, we can make reasonable assumptions about what potential futures might look like, and in doing so we can begin to make choices today that can help us bring about the changes we hope to realize in the world.

"What Futurists Actually Do"

• [Anonymous]

  What is futurism?
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism

• [Art]

  To quote Michael J. Fox in ‘Back to the Future #2′:

  “What happens in the future, Doc? Do we all become assholes?”

• [Camp Freddie]

  I’m still not sure what futurists actually do.

  I assume the answer is, “Think about the future then write it up in an mixture of po-mo language and middle-management twat-speak”.

  For example, the quote from the article just says, “The future hasn’t happened yet, so it isn’t fixed. When we think about the future, we are thinking about different possible events. Some of those future events depend upon our own future actions. While we can’t know the future, we can guess.”

  Seriously, that quote is a terrible three paragraphs of tautologies and stating the bloody obvious.

  As a future project, I suggest an evaluation of “Can I haz cheezburger?” as a series of potential contingencies dependent upon the actionable events that may occur in Ronald McDonalds future design-space.

  • [Notary Sojac]

    Freddie, brilliantly put, my prediction for the future is that you will be deemed the winner of this thread.

• [Anonymous]

  “What do Futurists Actually Do”?
  They think about the future like everyone else does, except they do so for money and with a inflated sense of importance.

  From the article,

  “Moreover, the future is not an end state. Tomorrow will someday be today, which will fade into yesterday.”

  Whoa. That Futurist just blew my mind.

  Also from the site,
  Currently the most discussed article is “The 10 Best Foods for Your Looks”, which is an interesting bit of Futurism, but I’m pretty sure I read it first in either Modern Housekeeping or O (also great Futurist rags).

• [Xenu]

  “What Futurists Actually Do”

  Make shit up?

• [Scrotch]

  David, the only question I have after learning you are a futurist is:

  How do I get a job like that?

• [Notary Sojac]

  The “Institute for the Future” per its website has been in existence since 1968.

  I think it would be very interesting to read some of your work product from forty years ago, and compare it with the current reality.

  • [David Pescovitz]

    Yes, we do that frequently. For example, we had some of the earliest forecasts around the social impact of the Internet, did very early work on climate change, and looked at microscale sensors ahead of the game. We totally missed SUVs though, forecasting in the 1970s that big cars were on the way out.

• [Notary Sojac]

  And, with respect, the sentence below could be serious Buzzword Bingo fodder….

  “We move from thinking we are heading toward an inevitable destination to seeing the world as a dependent, contingent, and therefore actionable, possibility space for us to design. “

• [Thaumatropia]

  I take it you’re not a Futurist in the fine art sense of the term?

• [ultranaut]

  I always imagined sitting around getting high on obscure new drugs and going, “dude, what if…?”
  I heard that’s how Gibson and Sterling do things anyway; I figure why not learn from the masters…?

• [Anonymous]

  Didja catch Diffie-Hellman key exchange? I caught that one and have been living off the profits ever since. SSH and privately controlled keyspace is vastly better than SSL with 3rd party asshats controlling the keyspace, too – that’s another one with money in it.

  I pegged jabber too, which was a good thing since I totally fscked up on enterprise backup strategy… wish I could go back in time and smack myself 15 years ago!

  (posting anon from the private sector)