Futures Gazing, 2023
Futures Gazing brings Deep Science Ventures’ (DSV) scoping process into conversation with futures prototyping. Developed in 2023 for scientists in its Venture Science Doctorate program, the tools offer six processes for explorative and rigorous visioning, supporting participants in examining possible futures from different perspectives.
Scoping begins with an ambitious real-world outcome and works backward to identify the critical challenges, possible approaches and opportunities for new ventures to make a difference. It gives scientists a way to connect their expertise to a wider societal purpose and to consider what would need to change for that outcome to become possible.
Futures prototyping brings the implications of these outcomes into view and opens their underlying assumptions to discussion. The tools invite participants to question who might benefit or be affected, revise their proposed approaches, and explore a distinctive position for a new company and its investment rationale. The aim is to connect venture formation to the conditions needed to nurture the envisioned outcome. What can participants question or revise when they learn to work backward from a desired societal outcome?
Climate Futures, 2021
A participatory futures program in which young people in Bronzeville and Rockford imagined neighborhood responses to climate change, with selected ideas developed into full-scale objects by Extrapolation Factory.
“What kinds of climate action do the next generation envision?”This is the question that led the CLIMATE FUTURES project. A group of roughly 30 youth from Bronzeville and Rockford were invited to take part in a future-visioning program, inspired by techniques used by professional futurists. Through the project, they dreamed up social and technological inventions that respond to climate change in ingenious and resourceful ways.
Each student group was first introduced to fundamentals of climate science, and then heard from experts in climate justice and energy technology. Following that, students looked for signals of change, mapped out consequences of those signals, and depicted their imagined futures as quotidian streetscapes in their neighborhoods.
The Extrapolation Factory translated the student visions into the life-size objects. The project aims to increase awareness about the consequences of climate change, empower youth to express their hopes and dreams for the future of their community, and engage the community in a new conversation about climate change and energy transitions.
See more documentation from Bronzeville and Rockford on Flickr.
Exhibition walkthrough, 2021
After Markets Market, 2021
After Markets Market was a one-day online workshop and storefront for goods from a post-capitalist future. Participants mapped out alternatives to private ownership and market pricing—such as worker-run firms, public resource councils, and labor-time accounting—and built prototypes from those scenarios. The day ended with the launch of aftermarkets.market (now closed), where makers listed their items and discussed what their objects revealed about life beyond capitalism.
The entrance to the After Markets Market, the online shop at aftermarkets.market where each product was listed during the final review.
Communal Delivery Drone Charging Station
Selina Nie
The trigger was the single ship stuck in the Suez Canal in March 2021 and the disruption it caused to the global economy. What if shipping broke down into individual delivery systems, with goods arriving by drone? The station is the infrastructure that would make this plausible: a solar-powered charging point on rooftops, where the solar panels already are, for passing delivery drones to park and recharge. Nie presented it as a miniature model. In the review, Montgomery pointed out that capitalism depends on scarcity, and that a solar economy could turn energy into a communal resource, free to anyone because there is no scarcity left to price.
Selina Nie
The trigger was the single ship stuck in the Suez Canal in March 2021 and the disruption it caused to the global economy. What if shipping broke down into individual delivery systems, with goods arriving by drone? The station is the infrastructure that would make this plausible: a solar-powered charging point on rooftops, where the solar panels already are, for passing delivery drones to park and recharge. Nie presented it as a miniature model. In the review, Montgomery pointed out that capitalism depends on scarcity, and that a solar economy could turn energy into a communal resource, free to anyone because there is no scarcity left to price.
Home Grown Medicines
Claudio Angrigiani
A girl in Argentina needed a $2 million medicine to survive, and an influencer spent two weeks fundraising to pay for it. Angrigiani asked why people without the means are left to luck. His device lets a household make its own medicine on demand: engineered plants act as small production plants, signals from a computer drive the reactions, and the plant drips the needed drug into drinking water. Patents and profits stop being the incentive for drug development. Instead the WHO and similar bodies issue a cryptocurrency, the Health Token, to countries and labs according to their contribution to public health. In the review, the discussion turned to how medicine made at home could loosen the tie between health care and employment, and to neighbors trading medicines, or fermenting vaccines locally almost like kombucha.
Claudio Angrigiani
A girl in Argentina needed a $2 million medicine to survive, and an influencer spent two weeks fundraising to pay for it. Angrigiani asked why people without the means are left to luck. His device lets a household make its own medicine on demand: engineered plants act as small production plants, signals from a computer drive the reactions, and the plant drips the needed drug into drinking water. Patents and profits stop being the incentive for drug development. Instead the WHO and similar bodies issue a cryptocurrency, the Health Token, to countries and labs according to their contribution to public health. In the review, the discussion turned to how medicine made at home could loosen the tie between health care and employment, and to neighbors trading medicines, or fermenting vaccines locally almost like kombucha.
Work/Life Alerter
Faith Mamaradlo
With remote work, commuting and clocking out disappear, and with them the standard shift. Notifications never stop and it gets hard to know when to quit. The alerter tells its user when the workday is over with a flashing light and a sound, played through the cup-shaped speaker. A button gives a receipt, a log of the hours worked.
Faith Mamaradlo
With remote work, commuting and clocking out disappear, and with them the standard shift. Notifications never stop and it gets hard to know when to quit. The alerter tells its user when the workday is over with a flashing light and a sound, played through the cup-shaped speaker. A button gives a receipt, a log of the hours worked.
Automatic Task Dispatcher
Echo Wan
Listed in the market at $19.99 a month per employee. Working remotely, Wan argues, people lose their work-life balance because they are assigned the wrong amount of work. The dispatcher tracks how each worker has completed daily tasks in the past, projects how much they can finish without stress, and hands out that amount each day. Workers plug it into their desktop: the green button lowers the load, the joystick adds tasks, and both teach the device to do better. It allows for different preferences, from people who like a flexible remote schedule to those who do not want to be disturbed outside nine to five. In the review, Montgomery suggested that neuroscience may be a key part of any shift away from capitalism.
Echo Wan
Listed in the market at $19.99 a month per employee. Working remotely, Wan argues, people lose their work-life balance because they are assigned the wrong amount of work. The dispatcher tracks how each worker has completed daily tasks in the past, projects how much they can finish without stress, and hands out that amount each day. Workers plug it into their desktop: the green button lowers the load, the joystick adds tasks, and both teach the device to do better. It allows for different preferences, from people who like a flexible remote schedule to those who do not want to be disturbed outside nine to five. In the review, Montgomery suggested that neuroscience may be a key part of any shift away from capitalism.
Serval State
Rachel Cole
Taking NASA’s $2.9 billion lunar lander contract with SpaceX as its signal, this future pulls government work back from private contractors and makes public service a duty. At 16, each resident receives a state-issued AI dashboard that reads their decisions and movements and recommends the department they should serve in.
Rachel Cole
Taking NASA’s $2.9 billion lunar lander contract with SpaceX as its signal, this future pulls government work back from private contractors and makes public service a duty. At 16, each resident receives a state-issued AI dashboard that reads their decisions and movements and recommends the department they should serve in.
Chimp Enclosure
Jonathan Zur
In a world where implants like Neuralink can train animals to do work that normally takes a person, companies hire chimpanzees for basic jobs because they can be paid in peanuts. This enclosure houses a chimp employee for far less than an employee’s rent or relocation: a small room with a bed, a sapling and green fake fur, the bare minimum for survival, and a console where the chimp receives exercises and assessments to sharpen its working skills. Zur aimed the piece at managers who take pride in keeping spending to a minimum, rather than in paying people enough to live well. In the review, the group asked whether peanuts as wages are a step back toward barter, and whether work done by a chimp still counts as exploitation.
Jonathan Zur
In a world where implants like Neuralink can train animals to do work that normally takes a person, companies hire chimpanzees for basic jobs because they can be paid in peanuts. This enclosure houses a chimp employee for far less than an employee’s rent or relocation: a small room with a bed, a sapling and green fake fur, the bare minimum for survival, and a console where the chimp receives exercises and assessments to sharpen its working skills. Zur aimed the piece at managers who take pride in keeping spending to a minimum, rather than in paying people enough to live well. In the review, the group asked whether peanuts as wages are a step back toward barter, and whether work done by a chimp still counts as exploitation.
Treat Dispenser
Sean Barrett
With autonomous robot police dogs patrolling neighborhoods, hackers build stealthy digital treat dispensers to distract or bribe them.
Sean Barrett
With autonomous robot police dogs patrolling neighborhoods, hackers build stealthy digital treat dispensers to distract or bribe them.
What if Columbus, 2019
What if Columbus brought an invitation to imagine the city’s future onto a downtown sidewalk. Commissioned for Exhibit Columbus in 2019, the installation stood at the corner of Washington and Second Streets, across from City Hall. Its position placed a public exercise in speculation beside the institutions involved in shaping the city.
Using a digital interface housed in a concrete kiosk, residents and visitors could combine prompts and images to propose future infrastructure for Columbus. Each vision took the form of a short sentence and image. This compact format gave an imagined possibility a form that could be recorded and shared, with members of the public credited as the authors of the future visions.
The project was designed to collect these submissions and share them digitally with the mayor’s office, offering decision-makers insight into the futures people wanted to see. That intended connection between public imagination and civic institutions was central to the work.
What if Columbus approached infrastructure as a subject for collective imagination. Encountered in the course of everyday movement through the city, the kiosk invited people to consider what they might change, what they valued and how those expectations could enter a wider conversation about the city’s future.
See more documentation on Flickr.
Exhibitions & related material
Exhibitions & public programs
- Exhibit Columbus — Washington Street Civic ProjectsWashington and Second Streets, Columbus, Indiana. Curated by Anne Surak.
Articles, publications & talks
- How to Edit a Building: Fieldnotes from the North American BrasiliaTravis Warren Cooper, vol. 9, no. 2, November 2019, pp. 52–65. Discusses What If Columbus on p. 60.
- What If Columbus kiosk9 August 2019. Original report referenced by Kiosk Marketplace.
- 2019 Exhibition: Good Design and the Community — ARCHITECTARCHITECT, 2019. Exhibit Columbus gallery listing naming Extrapolation Factory among the Washington Street Civic Project Leaders.
Special Programs Think Tank Tallinn, 2019
The Extrapolation Factory ran this five-day workshop at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn from July 29 to August 2, 2019, as part of the EKA Summer Academy. Participants formed small experimental think tanks to test what a think tank run by the public, rather than by experts alone, might produce. Members of the Estonian Foresight Centre joined us for the launch and introduced their methods. Starting from the centre’s research on the future of work, each think tank developed four alternate scenarios for 2035, set in a specific place, and made them tangible as images, objects and printed matter for a final presentation.
See more documentation of the workshop on Flickr.
See more documentation of the workshop on Flickr.
What if Think Tanks Were Operated by the Public?
Essay by Elliott P. Montgomery & Chris Woebken
Essay by Elliott P. Montgomery & Chris Woebken
The Extrapolation Factory is the studio we formed in 2012, with an interest in developing a participatory practice that uses design to facilitate debate about current issues. We launched our first project in the format of a publicly organized workshop to envision future scenarios embodied as provocative objects for sale in a discount store in Brooklyn, New York.
From there, we’ve evolved to tell stories of possible versions of futures in many ways, leveraging design as a visual language that people are accustomed to experiencing in their daily life. We’ve adapted future narratives as stores, signs, consumer products, advertisements, businesses, junk mail, flyers and more.
This practice stems from a rich history in future studies. Some of the most inspiring and formative work emerged in the 1950s, led by the RAND Corporation and their explorations around game theory and systems theory, driven in part by Herman Kahn. The RAND Corporation was looking at ways to envision multiple scenarios and then make plans of action to be deployed if any of these possibilities became reality.
There were several research groups that emerged over the following decades which evolved these ideas, translating system scenarios into experiential futures. The Manoa School of Futures Studies at the University of Hawaii is one of the programs that spearheaded this exploration, with heavy influence from the former program director, Jim Dator. Dator’s work and that at the University of Houston pioneered some of the early approaches to teaching futures.
In the commercial and policy sectors, Royal Dutch Shell and numerous political think tanks began to explore potential impacts of futures studies, and to communicate scientific research from modeling to social impact and recommendations for policy making. These practices have become deeply ingrained in industry and common practice around the world.
We're particularly interested in developing methods to create and express futures in participatory and accessible ways. This approach is preceded by numerous others such as Robert Jungk, who developed futures workshops as early as the 1970s.
Fundamental to our view of future studies is the premise that we can not predict the future in social contexts. Any effort to predict social futures is probably somewhat misguided unless it’s centered in statistical terms. Most futures studies practitioners and researchers focus instead on envisioning hypotheticals. We also believe that without having specific visual narratives, it's nearly impossible to make plans to work toward those visions, to build consensus or to discuss or debate those visions. The work of futurists in the present really hinges on the scrutiny of events that are taking place in the recent past, offering a sense of what might be possible. Futurists assemble those events, also called signals, into visions that help us see possible versions of futures that we have not seen. Additionally, we operate under the principle that there is no singular future - that futures always come in multiples. Following, we use the plural version of the word ‘future’. Every individual sees futures differently based on their own perspectives and biases. Each person has numerous versions of futures that they can envision. We believe this multiplicity of future narratives should be introduced to conversations on planning as a constructive and necessary step, affording a representative look at societal desires. From here, we can compare, contrast and juxtapose the different ways our world could transform over time.
The Extrapolation Factory has run hundreds of futures workshops at this point, and we’ve noticed that people find relief in thinking of numerous futures, though difficult at first. This approach allows for negotiation between many voices, inspiring conversation and expression. Workshop participants often have empowering realizations as they go through these experiences. Many participants leave feeling an increased sense of agency over their relationship to possible futures, and that the methods and principles that we experiment with in the workshops are potentially useful in their home and work contexts.
Our practice comes from an overlapping between this field of future studies and the work that's often done in think tanks focusing on foresight and the connection to design. In 2006, Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby launched a program at the Royal College of Art, which proposed that design might serve purposes beyond problem solving and consumer good creation. They proposed that design be used to ask critical questions of the systems around us. They initially called this approach critical design. Subsequently, they explored framings such as speculative design and discursive design. Each of these orientations of design moved away from creating solutions, and opened up the realm of possibility for what design might be capable of.
As the speculative design community starts to find linkages between their own work and the work of foresight strategists and futures researchers, a new field seems to be emerging, which we call ‘design futures’. Design futures is essentially the integration of this visual approach to envisioning alternate possibilities through the creation of immersive visual media, objects, artifacts, images, film and video.
Through The Extrapolation Factory, we see the opportunity to broaden the spectrum of people who do design futures and to make these approaches accessible to diverse communities. Through workshops that break down futures approaches into clear steps we experiment with ways to make these ideas more accessible.
For our latest workshop at the Estonian Academy of Arts, we introduced a challenge to question the operation and procedures being used by present-day think tanks. Many think tanks in the modern era have shifted away from their initial premise, which was to serve as non-partisan, expert groups who research and then propose strategic pathways that could lead to policy advancement with the objective of bettering society. In recent decades though, many think tanks have shifted to serving specific interests put forth by influential individuals and special interest groups with very large amounts of money. The result is an ecosystem of think tanks that are much more partisan, and therefore, don’t serve the role of helping diverse groups come to agreements.
In this project, we set up an experiment in which we questioned the exclusive expert staffing of think tanks. Although experts have deep knowledge, they don't necessarily represent the perspectives of the broader public. We were interested to see if a publicly operated think tank might democratize the narrative outcomes that influence policy. We asked the participants to form small experimental think tanks and to run a project based on some prior work by the Estonian Foresight Centre. We were privileged to have members of the centre join us for the launch of the project and introduce us to their processes and methods.
We set the participants off with a portfolio of methods, tools and approaches to investigate a topic originally researched by the Estonian Foresight Centre. The goal was to imagine scenarios for futures of work in 2035. The projects that you see in this publication are the outcomes of this experimental effort. Each one is comprised of four alternate scenarios, developed through research around the issues that may transform work in specific geographic locations. The students adapted the information they found through their research to help them visualize ways that people may support themselves in some version of 2035.
From there, we’ve evolved to tell stories of possible versions of futures in many ways, leveraging design as a visual language that people are accustomed to experiencing in their daily life. We’ve adapted future narratives as stores, signs, consumer products, advertisements, businesses, junk mail, flyers and more.
This practice stems from a rich history in future studies. Some of the most inspiring and formative work emerged in the 1950s, led by the RAND Corporation and their explorations around game theory and systems theory, driven in part by Herman Kahn. The RAND Corporation was looking at ways to envision multiple scenarios and then make plans of action to be deployed if any of these possibilities became reality.
There were several research groups that emerged over the following decades which evolved these ideas, translating system scenarios into experiential futures. The Manoa School of Futures Studies at the University of Hawaii is one of the programs that spearheaded this exploration, with heavy influence from the former program director, Jim Dator. Dator’s work and that at the University of Houston pioneered some of the early approaches to teaching futures.
In the commercial and policy sectors, Royal Dutch Shell and numerous political think tanks began to explore potential impacts of futures studies, and to communicate scientific research from modeling to social impact and recommendations for policy making. These practices have become deeply ingrained in industry and common practice around the world.
We're particularly interested in developing methods to create and express futures in participatory and accessible ways. This approach is preceded by numerous others such as Robert Jungk, who developed futures workshops as early as the 1970s.
Fundamental to our view of future studies is the premise that we can not predict the future in social contexts. Any effort to predict social futures is probably somewhat misguided unless it’s centered in statistical terms. Most futures studies practitioners and researchers focus instead on envisioning hypotheticals. We also believe that without having specific visual narratives, it's nearly impossible to make plans to work toward those visions, to build consensus or to discuss or debate those visions. The work of futurists in the present really hinges on the scrutiny of events that are taking place in the recent past, offering a sense of what might be possible. Futurists assemble those events, also called signals, into visions that help us see possible versions of futures that we have not seen. Additionally, we operate under the principle that there is no singular future - that futures always come in multiples. Following, we use the plural version of the word ‘future’. Every individual sees futures differently based on their own perspectives and biases. Each person has numerous versions of futures that they can envision. We believe this multiplicity of future narratives should be introduced to conversations on planning as a constructive and necessary step, affording a representative look at societal desires. From here, we can compare, contrast and juxtapose the different ways our world could transform over time.
The Extrapolation Factory has run hundreds of futures workshops at this point, and we’ve noticed that people find relief in thinking of numerous futures, though difficult at first. This approach allows for negotiation between many voices, inspiring conversation and expression. Workshop participants often have empowering realizations as they go through these experiences. Many participants leave feeling an increased sense of agency over their relationship to possible futures, and that the methods and principles that we experiment with in the workshops are potentially useful in their home and work contexts.
Our practice comes from an overlapping between this field of future studies and the work that's often done in think tanks focusing on foresight and the connection to design. In 2006, Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby launched a program at the Royal College of Art, which proposed that design might serve purposes beyond problem solving and consumer good creation. They proposed that design be used to ask critical questions of the systems around us. They initially called this approach critical design. Subsequently, they explored framings such as speculative design and discursive design. Each of these orientations of design moved away from creating solutions, and opened up the realm of possibility for what design might be capable of.
As the speculative design community starts to find linkages between their own work and the work of foresight strategists and futures researchers, a new field seems to be emerging, which we call ‘design futures’. Design futures is essentially the integration of this visual approach to envisioning alternate possibilities through the creation of immersive visual media, objects, artifacts, images, film and video.
Through The Extrapolation Factory, we see the opportunity to broaden the spectrum of people who do design futures and to make these approaches accessible to diverse communities. Through workshops that break down futures approaches into clear steps we experiment with ways to make these ideas more accessible.
For our latest workshop at the Estonian Academy of Arts, we introduced a challenge to question the operation and procedures being used by present-day think tanks. Many think tanks in the modern era have shifted away from their initial premise, which was to serve as non-partisan, expert groups who research and then propose strategic pathways that could lead to policy advancement with the objective of bettering society. In recent decades though, many think tanks have shifted to serving specific interests put forth by influential individuals and special interest groups with very large amounts of money. The result is an ecosystem of think tanks that are much more partisan, and therefore, don’t serve the role of helping diverse groups come to agreements.
In this project, we set up an experiment in which we questioned the exclusive expert staffing of think tanks. Although experts have deep knowledge, they don't necessarily represent the perspectives of the broader public. We were interested to see if a publicly operated think tank might democratize the narrative outcomes that influence policy. We asked the participants to form small experimental think tanks and to run a project based on some prior work by the Estonian Foresight Centre. We were privileged to have members of the centre join us for the launch of the project and introduce us to their processes and methods.
We set the participants off with a portfolio of methods, tools and approaches to investigate a topic originally researched by the Estonian Foresight Centre. The goal was to imagine scenarios for futures of work in 2035. The projects that you see in this publication are the outcomes of this experimental effort. Each one is comprised of four alternate scenarios, developed through research around the issues that may transform work in specific geographic locations. The students adapted the information they found through their research to help them visualize ways that people may support themselves in some version of 2035.
Workshop scenarios
The following fictional scenarios for work in 2035 were created by the participating think tanks.
Exhibitions & related material
Articles, publications & talks
- What if Think Tanks Were Operated by the Public? — Estonian Academy of ArtsAnna-Liisa Laarits, Estonian Academy of Arts, 2019. Interview about the Tallinn workshop and public think tanks.