Category: Futures Studies

‘Dark Clouds in the Crystal Ball’

How DEVO – like Cassandra – saw the future, tried to warn us, and was widely ignored

The title for this post comes from a song lyric by the avant-garde music group DEVO, namely, from the opening song ‘Time Out for Fun’ from their fifth studio album, Oh No! It’s DEVO. By the time that album was released in late 1982, DEVO as a band had spent the better part of a decade promoting the thesis of ‘de-evolution’ – the idea that humanity, rather than progressing, was actually regressing, and was in point of fact not evolving but really de-evolving (which was the origin of their name) to a more primitive state of mindlessly conformist automatons. Continue reading “‘Dark Clouds in the Crystal Ball’”

More Big History outputs

There have been two more formal publications on Big History recently: one a journal article – hinted at in the previous post – written in part to honour the memory of Erich Jantsch, the other a book chapter, as well as an informal podcast episode in the FuturePod series.

Continue reading “More Big History outputs”

And that’s a wrap! The End of the Swinburne MSF.

Today was the last class ever of the Swinburne MSF (2001 — 2018) — something that has been coming for a long time (announcement of closure was back in May 2016).

There is a KudoBoard where people have posted their memories of the MSF.

Q: What now?

A: Trust emergence…

Is ‘Hoag’s Object’ an ‘engineered’ galaxy?

The question asked in the title of this post is one I have been pondering for the most part of a decade now, ever since I saw the image, shown in Figure 1, of the galaxy PGC54559 (popularly known as Hoag’s Object) in 2010, following several months of thinking about what Kardashev Type III civilisations might look like.

hoag_hst_big_full
Figure 1. PGC54559 (‘Hoag’s Object’). Image credit: NASA & The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). Acknowledgement: Ray A. Lucas (STScI/AURA). Multiple formats and sizes are available from: http://hubblesite.org/image/1241/news_release/2002-21

Continue reading “Is ‘Hoag’s Object’ an ‘engineered’ galaxy?”

Big History and Futures Studies – what a cosmic perfect match!

I’ve had a new paper accepted for a special issue of the SAGE journal World Futures Review, on Foresight Education, edited by Peter Bishop. It is yet to be assigned to a volume/issue (UPDATE: it is most likely to be Vol.10, No. 4, Dec 2018), but has had a formal DOI assigned to it to allow for web linking prior to final publication, and is available through SAGE’s OnlineFirst system. I am also allowed to link a version from my University’s research repository, Swinburne ResearchBank. It is an accepted manuscript form, which SAGE allows to be placed in a university repository, rather than the final officially-published version, which they do not. Always look to the pagination of the final published version if you are going to be quoting things from it… Continue reading “Big History and Futures Studies – what a cosmic perfect match!”

The Futures Cone, use and history

From time to time people ask about the Futures Cone, and how it came about. Here is a brief history of how I came across it before adapting it to suit my use of the concept, and began using an early version of the Futures Cone diagram (i.e., with fewer categories) in 2000 when working as a foresight analyst for Swinburne University (before becoming an academic in the Master of Strategic Foresight).  The text in this post is excerpted from a chapter submitted to the Handbook of Anticipation, ed. Roberto Poli (Springer International). The “formal” citation for the chapter/book is:

Voros, J 2017, ‘Big History and anticipation: Using Big History as a framework for global foresight’, in R Poli (ed.) Handbook of anticipation: Theoretical and applied aspects of the use of future in decision making, Springer International, Cham. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-31737-3_95-1,

while the text in this post is from the section of that chapter entitled ‘Types of Alternative Futures’, pp. 10-13, and the “cone” diagram itself is: Fig. 4, p. 11.

Continue reading “The Futures Cone, use and history”

How Futurists Work/Think

Last year a colleague at the International Big History Association (www.ibhanet.org) asked me how futurists work/think. This was for a book she was writing for high school students on Big History. The final chapters of these types of books tend to focus on the future, hence the request for some ideas from someone who does this for a living. I tapped out a quick, off-the-top-of-my-head answer and sent it off. In thinking about how long since I’ve posted here, I thought I’d better get back into gear, especially as there are some ideas to share coming soon… Here is the essence of what I wrote: Continue reading “How Futurists Work/Think”

Q&A with a (Big History) Futurist

Here is a Q&A I did with Kathryn Ford, Project Coordinator at the Big History Institute at Macquarie University, for Issue 6 of the BHI newsletter, Threshold 9.

Interestingly, ‘Threshold 9’ (i.e., the ‘next’ Threshold in the 8-so-far main Thresholds of Big History) has been on my research agenda for quite a few years now, so it is a great pleasure to be able to talk more widely about the broader long-term future (as well as Threshold 9) in an issue of BHI’s Threshold 9 😉

I hope you enjoy it. Once the videos from the conference are uploaded, I’ll be writing about and linking to some of them in later posts.

Until then, remember: “keep looking to the future”. (I wonder what that would be in Latin 😉

Big History Institute newsletter Threshold 9 Issue 6: Q&A with a Futurist.

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