Dalton Original Minds Residency, 2016-2018
See photos and videos from the residency on Flickr.
Dioramas
Futures of learning and food, built by Dalton educators and students.
Food Futures, eleventh-grade history
Kevin Slick’s Parkhurst Program course Nature/Technology/Power came to New Lab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Students collected signals from today’s food system and extrapolated futures for how food is produced, distributed, regulated and eaten. They then made the products those futures might put on the shelf, with packaging that tells the story of the system behind them.
Robots for the Future, eighth-grade computer science
In Sloan Warren’s CS0 class, students chose a news article about how the world is changing, imagined a robot that could exist because of it, worked out who would use it and why, and built a prototype. In Warren’s words, “once the physical prototyping began, even the most skeptical of students couldn’t resist seeing what they could create.”
Driverless Futures, high school theater
After an introductory session with us in Brooklyn, theater teacher Bob Sloan built a unit around “four people in a car,” a standard improv structure, set inside a self-driving car. Students improvised scenes about who controls the car, whether parents can lock its settings, what happens to the driver’s license as a coming-of-age moment, and whether people who never drive would still know their way home.
Global Migration, eleventh-grade history
Students in Jennifer Stolper Muenz’s world history class started from the migrants they had researched for their papers. In groups they traced the effects of current events with the futures wheel, then invented a New York City program for migrants in the future and announced it with a poster. Immigrad, for example, would let immigrants with degrees from abroad requalify in the United States quickly and affordably online.
UBI Futures, eleventh-grade economics
With Mila Tewell’s economics classes in 2017 and 2018, students drafted universal basic income laws for New York City, answering where the money comes from, who receives it, how often, and what happens if it runs out. They mapped how the city’s economy would change around it. In 2018 students also turned their policies into game boards and played UBI Life at full scale on the floor.
Connections, Summer 2018
Dalton’s magazine Connections covered the residency in its Summer 2018 issue, in a feature titled “Planning the Future,” with an introduction by Rob Meredith, “Original Minds Peering into New Futures: The Extrapolation Factory at Dalton,” our essay “Building Preferable Futures,” and pieces by Tyner Gordon, “The Future Pilgrim,” and Kevin Slick, “Food Futures.” Meredith wrote that the first workshop “made it more comfortable to approach uncertainty with enthusiasm.”
Building Preferable Futures
Chris Woebken and Elliott P. Montgomery, Connections, Summer 2018
Americans are notoriously bad at saving money for the future, and very few of us dedicate time to planning our own lives, much less to develop long-term visions for society. In a culture where foresight is so neglected, it may come as a surprise that several accredited universities in the nation offer graduate degrees in Futures Studies and Foresight Strategy.
This tension led to the inception of our practice, The Extrapolation Factory. We think everyone should have access to useful principles, methods and tools for thinking about futures in more imaginative and rigorous ways. As designers, we rely on creative approaches, hands-on activities, and immersive events to engage communities with futures studies. Since 2012, we’ve helped bring futures studies into municipal offices, museums, community organizations, non-profits, and corporations, and each time we aim to show how futures-studies can offer agency over external factors, and help to imagine preferable futures worth working toward. Specific visions are critical for goal setting and strategic planning. As non-futurists actively propose preferable future visions, we’ll identify directions that diverge from the stereotypical narratives provided for us.
In the same way that students study history as a default competency, we feel that schools should also teach futures-studies principles universally. We’ve been able to actualize this vision at Dalton through the Original Mind Program. Our partnership with The Dalton School has been an incredible opportunity to collaborate with teachers, staff, and students to explore a range of techniques for introducing futures studies across K-12 education. We’ve worked with students to imagine fictional city programs and create posters to announce them. We co-created board games to try living in a world with a Universal Basic Income. We’ve helped students envision new applications for robotics and tools for future pilgrims. We’ve worked with students to invent wild new food items that propose alternative production, manufacturing, and distribution methods. In each of these projects, we’ve had the opportunity to discuss the importance of futures as a powerful medium that each of us can – and should – be engaging with.
Exhibitions & related material
Articles, publications & talks
- Parsons – Extrapolation – Dalton – CollaborationThe Dalton School, 2018. Documentation of the Dalton–Parsons collaboration with Extrapolation Factory.
- Original Minds — History Students Predict Food FuturesThe Dalton School, 2017. Account of the food-futures workshop at New Lab.
- High School Students Predict Food Futures at the Extrapolation FactoryThe Dalton School, November 2017. Documentation of a further food-futures workshop.
- Taking a Peek Into the Future of EducationThe Dalton School, 2016. Account of the Original Minds workshop with educators.