Engaging in tangled futures
Pressure to understand and respond to complex futures is building. In the context of climate change and increased global movement of people and commodities, our futures are systemically and creatively entwined. Making sense of immediate, near and far flung futures needs to tackle a growing and emerging entaglement of diverse interests and motivated social and politcal formations. Anticipatorially!
For many, these are futures that are difficult to fathom. We often struggle to engage productively in environments that are in flux, between human and non-human activities. Rapid changes in geo-politics and physical materialities occur as we attempt to process their ramifications. Adrift. Entangled. Uncertain. Immobilised. Are these conditions and states that we simply acknowledge are unchangeable?
The International Anticipation conferences speak differently. They articulate ways we may and must engage with the future. Productively, interpretatively, imaginatively, collectively and inspirationally. We seek and share knowledge and practices for shaping better futures as centred on and through anticipation.
Researchers, designers, policy makers, activists, educators and planners, come together in this conference. We assemble and debate a diversity of expertise and positions, views and creative experience. We do so to address what we need to know and do. We gather to imagine and to reveal possible, potential and projected futures. This is to work – and to work out how to- pre-figure and to perform anticipatorially.
The role of Design
This third conference is based at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). As a university that includes Urbansim, Landscape, Architecture and Design, we see Anticipation as central to our pedoagy, practice and inquiry, as well as how our work matters in the wider world. The event draws on a body of earlier futures oriented inquiry and practice. Design has been under-emphasised, yet present, in much futures work.
Design is a productive, critical and forward reaching domain of research and making. Crucially, Design looks beyond mere solutions to problems or surface aesthetics. Today, Design offers transdisciplinary means to facing futures. Often this harnesses a mix of expertise and dynamic processes of realisation and use, in materialising relations between products, interactions services and systems.
Invitation to participate
The Call for Participation is an open one: it is driven by key issues and questions that futures oriented research and practice communities need to examine and to debate. We welcome your participation and your interpretation of the Call. In response, academic excellence and pragmatic savviness are needed. They are ours to connect, to shape and to share.
A warm welcome to you all.
Prof Andrew Morrison
Director, Centre for Design Research, AHO