Abstract
Articles in the World Futures Review are expected to focus on some aspect of futures studies—history, current status, and/or futures of the field, theories, methods, examples of applied futures research, culture, language, time and the futures, and the like.
This issue contains articles exhibiting a bit of each of those aspects.
The first article describes the history, current status, governing theories, and frequently used methods of one of the oldest, respected, and robust futures research communities in the world—that which grew out of futures work centered around the primus inter pares of futures studies at the University of Turku in Finland, Pentti Malaska. It is an impressive story, and I was fortunate enough to have learned about—and learned from—the work in Finland rather early on in its history.
For a decade in the late 1970s to late 1980s, the World Futures Studies Federation held short courses every spring at the InterUniversity Centre for Post-Graduate Studies in Dubrovnik of what was then called Yugoslavia. The disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the bombing of Dubrovnik in 1991, ended those courses. However, one of the early lecturers was Dr. Malaska. I was extremely impressed by both the brilliant content and the vivacious delivery of his lectures—not at all in the substance and style of most Finnish professors of the time in my experience. Dr. Malaska was also accompanied by one or two young students from Turku. I especially remember Anita Rubin who went on to become a founding pillar of futures studies in Finland in her own right, until her early death from cancer a few years ago.
The essay that opens this issue of World Futures Review tells the story well, and in detail, and is written by Petri Tapio and Sirkka Heinonen, both professors in the Finland Futures Research Centre of the University of Turku, and frequent contributors to articles in WFR and elsewhere.
The next two articles reinforce the notion that the U.S. Forest Service is one of the—if not the—most futures-oriented agencies in the U.S. Government. They each describe work done by different teams for and within the Service.
Andy Hines and colleagues, in “Setting Up a Horizon Scanning System: A U.S. Federal Agency Example,” describe the process by which researchers from the futures program of the University of Houston helped researchers in the U.S. Forest Service set up a central element of any futures capability—an environmental scanning process. This article might be read as a companion piece with an essay published in an earlier issue of WFR describing a collaborative process that helped the Forest Service understand the futures methods of the Manoa School of the University of Hawaii (Bengston et al. 2016).
Both of these lead to the article written by David Bengston of the Forest Service and colleagues, “North American Forest Futures 2018–2090: Scenarios for Building a More Resilient Forest Sector” in this issue that reports on a project that applies concepts and methods from futures research to enhance the foresight capabilities of the member agencies of the North American Forest Commission, composed of the national forestry agencies of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, one of six regional forestry commissions of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.
Together, they are splendid examples of how best-practices in futures research acquired by a governmental organization in one part of the world can spread to agencies in other parts of the world.
The final essay in this issue is something quite different. “Integrating the Characteristics of the New Coming Technological Age by a Meta-Study,” by Amin Torkaman, examines in some detail the idea that humanity is moving from an Information Age into a Conceptual Age. This term comes from Daniel Pink, but the basic idea is similar to Ernest Sternberg, “Economy of Icons”; Rolf Jensen, “Dream Society”; and Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, “Experience Economy.”
I was particularly intrigued by this essay because it relates to work done by Yongseok Seo and myself a number of years ago suggesting that South Korea is the first nation to base its economy in part on the idea that dreams, ideas, experiences, concepts, and icons are increasingly more important economically than are either products or information (Dator and Seo 2005).