Abstract
All the four essays in this issue fit absolutely squarely into the focus of World Future Review (WFR). They each describe what the main features of futures studies are from their perspective, how they acquired that perspective, and how they use it practically in their daily work.
Jelena Bodinet provides a detailed and inspiring example of how to start a futures course and indeed entire program at the community college level, and what the main sources and activities of such a program might be. She also ties peace studies and futures studies together, a union that in fact has been there from the beginning, as she notes, citing Johan Galtung and Elise Boulding, pioneers in both peace studies and futures studies. Very importantly, she makes clear the role of futures visioning workshops in empowering people to understand that they can envision and create better futures, following the examples of both Robert Jungk and Elise Boulding.
Similarly, Andrew Hines shows the links that exist, and ought to exist more tightly, between futures studies and design. Futures studies began as, and still is in many ways, an adjunct to planning: an activity that came before planning, providing planners the broader and deeper vistas within which then to build their more short-run plans—which would then guide day-to-day decision making by administrators.
This link is by no means passé, but recently, as Hines notes, others, such as Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan, have seen futures to be more akin to envisioning and designing in contrast with the comparative rigidity of planning. For myself, my interest in futures in part arose from my association with designers and architects at Virginia Tech, and especially the visiting architects from the visionary British firm, Archigram, long, long ago.
Christian Crews makes his position clear from the outset: “Foresight at its best is a verb, not a noun. It is an action, not a description,” he writes. He then also depicts his own journey from shortsightedness to foresight, via the University of Houston Program on the Future. Whereas Bodinet focuses on future visioning workshops, Crews emphasizes scenarios as a key element in his work as a professional consulting futurist. And that is one of the key values of his essay: it describes first of all his intellectual journey in acquiring the skills and insights to be a futurist and then shows how he has successfully applied them in his work as a professional futurist. However, both he and Bodinet stress the importance of enabling students and/or clients to participate in creating their own preferred futures; that while they cannot do everything, the things they can do to shape a better world for ourselves and others are very significant. He also sees this as an action in design rather than just planning. Buckminster Fuller said, “I seem to be a verb.” Continual foresight is one evidence of a human becoming.
Finally, I shamelessly present work that Aubrey Yee and myself carried out with David Bengston and Michael Dockry of the U.S. forest service on futures of nanoforestry. They instigated the project not only because of the importance of nanotechnology for the futures of forestry—and the world—and the problematic nature of nanotechnology in many ways but also as a vehicle by which they could learn what the “Manoa School” of futures studies is, and how to do a futures project using it, since they were already aware of and using many other futures methods. The four generic images of the futures—grow, collapse/new beginnings, discipline, and transform—provide a framework that has not only some features of typical scenarios, but also some that are not, in both design and application.
I hasten to point out that to be sure the process of peer review was fairly followed here, neither Aubrey nor I had any role in the review process. Instead, Sage chose someone to serve as the editor of our manuscript, and that person sent it out to blind reviewers of his or her choosing. We responded to suggestions by reviewers and the editor like any other author would.