Institute For The Future

Look Forward, and Carry a Big Stick

What is available to human experience is a result of the interaction between our brains, our biological bodies, and our environment (itself the result of social, historical, technological, and political processes). Our capacity to imagine 'what's possible' relies on neurological scaffolding that has been shaped by our current individual and collective knowledge and experience, often blinding us to a wide range of alternative futures.

On a social scale, this means the marginalization of “minor” voices, including not only the litany of marginalized human groups, but also other animate, inanimate, and not-yet animate entities. But things are changing.

Participatory media is increasing the number of voices in the public sphere, pluralizing and democratizing our collective conversation around alternative futures. Living things and inanimate artifacts are being technologically augmented in order to “tell their stories,” making evidence of the invisible impact of our actions (now and in the future) visible and sensible. Artists and designers are creating images and tangible objects from the future to challenge common assumptions about the direction of change and to move futures thinking from the abstract and into visceral-emotional registers.

In his studies of human development, Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky compared the differing cognitive mechanisms that apes and humans use to perceive and interact with the world around them. Both apes and humans can use a stick as a tool, but, Vygotsky argues, an ape must actually see the stick before he can think “stick.” A sufficiently developed and linguistically enabled human, however, must think “stick” in order to actually see the stick.

In terms of the way humans envision the future, humans are much closer to the ape in our thinking--our possibilities tend to be more confined to what we can already see (or have seen) than what we can freely imagine. To deal with the enormous global challenges we face and to create a more responsible and just society, we must learn to become more human in our relationship to the future.  According to recent findings, our brains see the future in terms of the past and present. Therefore, we must construct our media, our objects, and our built environment as an aide de futuribles to our brain’s capacity to imagine possible futures. If the future is a stick we have to see in order to think, then those concerned with creating better futures should start making their favorite sticks and start whacking others in the shins with them!