Stuart Candy - The Scaffolding of Imagination

I read Heart of Darkness, an amazing book

and one passage in particular just lept out and smacked me between the eyes

and I can't remember it all by myself so I'll just read it to you

"It is impossible to convey the life sensation of any given epoch of one's existence.

That which makes its truth, its meaning, its subtle and penetrating essence.

It is impossible. We live as we dream: alone."

And that's haunted me since the age of 18.

I don't know what it was in my 18-year-old mind that resonated with that passage,

but I think you know perhaps it's just the resonance of any

strongly articulated existentialist loneliness.

But I wondered, you know, Can we really be that alone? All of us? Together?

It didn't make sense. We'll come back to that.

So, on the plane on the way here, I was listening to an audio book

of Arthur C. Clarke's: Childhoods' End.

It's the first Arthur C. Clarke's book I have actually read.

It's an amazing work, but of course I don't need to labour this point with this audience,

that there's nothing so characteristic of an age's thinking as its science fiction

and, I mean, of all the science fiction writers, Clarke is remarkable

for the extent to which his imagination was able to sort of achieve an escape velocity

from the culture of is time, to really think way ahead into different times and places

and to take us there.

But I it got me thinking about the fact of imagination

and that our brains are, our brains are not [temporaly bound?]

It's what we scaffold them with that limits us.

In other words, to the extent that we are able to imagine the present that we live in,

which Clarke and others of his age couldn't foresee,

we are capable of imagining entirely different worlds in the future

that we just don't at the moment.

And I find that an interesting contradiction.

So what's the relevance of all that for governance futures?

Well, the relevance is that basically I think this is a massively missing piece

from our public culture,

that there is essentially no public culture of imagination.

Yes, there's Dick Tracy, and there's Star Trek, and there's Arthur C. Clarke,

and there's plenty of stuff since all of that.

But our conversations about the future, and about the future of governance,

and about the worlds we could be choosing among,

we do not have a culture of imagining those in any concrete way

and then choosing among them wisely.

We agonize over procedural details like

deliberation (the weighing of alternatives)

and decision (which is the killing of alternatives)

when we make a choice.

But where in that, I mean, that essentially becomes meaningless

or close to meaningless, when the alternatives are underimagined

or drab or cliched or simply absent from the picture overall.

And so my friend Natalie German Janko, who is an engineer and an artist

has a wonderful phrase which I learned from her a couple of years ago:

"structures of participation".

[Her] art is about creating structures of participation for people.

And I love this frace because I think it summarizes to me

what good futures' work does: create structure of participation for co-imagining.

And so, as I see it, governance (at least the design side of it) is about

designing structures of participation for collectively shaping the common good.

And that can look like the design of an event like this one,

or the design of a system like the United States of America,

or the design of an intervention like the one that I'm about to describe.

Because my favorite experiential futures intervention is a perfect instance

of the kind of collective imagination that I'm describing,

and it comes from the Arab Spring.

So, in January 2011, Tunisia ousted its dictator

somebody [rather] Ben Ali.

And the economy started tanking.

The revolutionaries hadn't expected to succeed,

they didn't know what was gonna succeed [as in "go after"] the overthrow.

And what may ensued could have been actually much worse

than what had been there before.

You know in these kinds of political vacuums anything can happen.

But a month later, on the 16th of February 2011, for a day,

on newspapers, television and radio,

they reported from the 14th June 2014: 3 years and 3 months into the future.

By the end of the day that was the number one hashtag, [something in French]

in Twitter was beginning to trend in France,

and it began to change the public conversation to make a future for Tunisia imaginable,

which catalysed an actual change and a recovery in the wake of that revolution.

So, to bring it back to our starting point,

I'm I no longer believe that we are condemned to dream alone.

I think that we can dream together.

And to the extent the 21st century government succeeds

that's what we'll be doing on a regular basis.