Super Seminar 001 - IMAGINATION FUTURES

90 Minutes over Zoom. Link to Follow!

How can creative practices, imagination, day-dreaming, speculation, and wondering enhance the kinds of sense-making that can open up new opportunities, inspire and foster innovation?

Join me for Super Seminar 001, where we will see how creative practices can ignite the imagination and inspire an expansive view into possible future worlds. We’re very fortunate to have presentations by five Friends of Near Future Laboratory:

Tim Parsons & Jessica Charlesworth (a/k/a Parsons & Charlesworth)

Dr. Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Ph.D. of the Royal College of Art (8AM ONLY)

Sara Codarin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Architecture at Lawrence Technical University (4PM ONLY).

90 Minutes starting at 8AM PDT (UTC-7) Parsons + Charlesworth and Delfina Fantini van Ditmar

90 Minutes starting at 4PM PDT (UTC-7) Parsons + Charlesworth and Sara Codarin

(Bonus! Listen to Episode N°019 of The Near Future Laboratory Podcast with Parsons and Charlesworth, and Episode N°069 with Dr. Delfina Fantini van Ditmar)

Creative practices hold immense value beyond mere entertainment and play a crucial role in envisioning alternative and possible futures. While some of us may prioritize rational and instrumentalized processes, like statistics and financial forecasts, these methods often lack the vital elements of emotion and feeling that strongly influence decision-making, inspire thinking that can lead to unexpected new opportunities, and help keep creative teams motivated and engaged.

Incorporating creative thinkers and makers into the process of imagining future scenarios can enrich the overly ordered representations found in spreadsheets and graphs. Design Fiction and Speculative Design artifacts, like futuristic magazines or speculative design products, offer a unique perspective on future marketplaces and potential contingencies during chaotic times that cannot be easily conveyed through conventional data formats. By infusing imagination into futures forecasting and strategic decision-making, creative practices complement and enhance the ways in which we make sense of complex situations and guide us towards more informed and innovative choices.

Join me for Super Seminar 001 as we explore how fiction, design fiction artifacts, and other creative methods can add a new dimension to your strategic decision-making. Instead of replacing your established approaches, we aim to complement them with a touch of imagination to supercharge your forecasting capabilities.