In a recent article appearing in Journal of Futures Studies on “transmedia storytelling”, Peter von Stackelberg and Ruth Eira Jones write: The development of useful scenarios, accurate forecasts, and compelling visions of the future is challenging in itself. Having them applied in a meaningful way can be even more difficult. It is not uncommon for …
Month: July 2014
Why futures inquiry and sustainability often don’t mix
In theory futures inquiry and sustainability are the perfect bedfellows. For starters they’re both fundamentally about the future. Additionally, areas of practice like strategic foresight and adaptation science both aim to build capacity to cope with uncertainty in decision processes, and researchers in both domains tend towards highly interdisciplinary and even trans-disciplinary research. So what’s …
On the need for a genuinely sociological view of low-carbon transitions (and further moves in this direction by transition theorists)
Many sustainability activists frequently quote R. Buckminster Fuller, especially his well-known assertion that: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Frank Geels’ latest paper on low carbon transitions argues that Fuller is wrong and suggests an important change in direction …