Celebrating the Master of Strategic Foresight

 

Last year I noted that the Master of Strategic Foresight (MSF) — with which I’ve been involved since its inception at Swinburne in 2001 and into which I’ve taught for almost as long (through guest lectures firstly, then as a formal member of teaching staff from 2003) — was being shut down, and was to be taught out over the next year or so. My fellow foresight conspirator for much of that time, Peter Hayward (aka “Captain Foresight”), retired at the end of last year, but not before we were able to celebrate the fact that the MSF had existed at all. That was what we chose to call the “MSF Wake”. Continue reading “Celebrating the Master of Strategic Foresight”

The Futures Cone, use and history

From time to time people ask me about the Futures Cone, and how it came about. Let me give a brief history of how I came across it before adapting it to suit my use of the concept. I first began using the Futures Cone diagram 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 I recently submitted to the upcoming Handbook of Anticipation, ed. Roberto Poli (Springer International). Fingers crossed for an easy road to publication.

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

JV_talk_BHI_Dec2015

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.

 

Image credit: Carmen Lee, Big History Anthropocene conference 2015.

The “e-maelstrom” of holiday email

keep-calm-and-delete-emails-1I’ve returned from the Christmas (and, here in the Southern Hemisphere, summer) holidays and, after settling back in to my office, I began the daunting task of dealing with the torrent of emails that came in over the 3 or so weeks I was away (hence a need to let off some nervous energy in a blog post… 😉

You know what I mean – a veritable maelstrom of email arrives during a break from work when you’re not looking. Hmm, a maelstrom of email: an “e-maelstrom”, if you will. 🙂 Continue reading “The “e-maelstrom” of holiday email”

Welcome to The Voroscope

On December 21, 2015, a group of graduating students in the Master of Strategic Foresight program that I teach into at Swinburne University presented my colleague Dr Peter Hayward and I with caricatures of our likenesses – Peter is Captain Foresight, and I am The Voroscope. (The image is from a tweet by Rob (@Like_Rob) taken at the time.

CF&TVS

The latter is, of course, a most utterly perfect name for a blog that might seek to examine the whole of the Universe as well as the future, hence the coming-into-being of this blog.

So, welcome to The Voroscope – “an instrument of science and the future,” for examining everything that may exist in the totality of space and time, everywhere and everywhen, from the Hot Big Bang to the Big Chilly Rip, and for examining all manner of potential futures, from the Projected to the Preposterous! – and beyond…