Responsible Futuring

Responsible Futuring

COMING TOGETHER TO CO-SHAPE THE FUTURE WE WANT TO LIVE IN

by Julieta Matos-Castaño and Cristina Zaga Faculty Innovation Fellows candidates DesignLab, University of Twente

“The future is not something waiting for us, hiding behind the door.” In her book Uncharted: How Uncertainty Can Power Change, Margaret Heffernan urges us to be in charge of our futures. She is not alone. In the last decades, futurists, speculative designers and strategists have promoted an active mindset and attitude to be in charge of our futures. We are living interesting and, sometimes, intimidating times that present pressing societal challenges. From tackling climate change to promoting the responsible development and use of technology, we are in charge of our futures. This might sound like a daunting task. However, it is the foundation for wonderful changes. How we address our societal challenges offers great opportunities for innovation and creativity. Having this in mind, Responsible Futuring, the DesignLab’s approach was born. Our premise is that, if we want to make a difference in the world and innovate, we need one another. We cannot do it alone. We need to leave behind silos and disciplines; we need to open up spaces for collaboration. We must imagine futures ahead of us and reflect on the consequences of our actions. We have to embrace and realize the value of transdisciplinary crossovers. We need to look beyond technical challenges and reflect on and debate the societal and ethical consequences of our work. This can be challenging. Often, we do not know how to get started: How do I bring together others to collaborate? What is, actually, a societal impact? What do you mean by “plural” futures? To answer these questions and adopt a learning-by-doing approach, we are creating a community around Responsible Futuring on our campus and beyond. We want to equip and activate students, faculty members, and other external organizations to adopt a “we can shape our futures” mindset. We are also exploring ways to embed Responsible Futuring as part of the life-long learning programs of the University of Twente so practitioners can learn from the approach and apply it at work. To achieve our goal, our FIF project aims at connecting research and practice, experimenting with different methods and audiences to keep co-shaping the approach while we all co-shape futures. As part of our project, we are providing educational opportunities for students and practitioners, and creating places for experimentation to bring together communities, and to explore methods and tools to co-shape futures responsibly. In May 2022, we launched a pilot masterclass with enthusiastic practitioners to test our methods and tools and learn together from their experiences. We are sharing our lessons learned with the Faculty Innovation Fellows, and learning from their experiences to understand where the opportunities and challenges of making an impact lie. We build our community with three main foundational elements in mind.

First, transdisciplinarity is key. When we want to make a difference and innovate, we need one another. Coming together, we can turn challenges into opportunities because collaborating makes us more creative, helps us to see things we didn’t perceive before, and allows us to be more critical. However, collaboration can be bumpy. Sometimes, we might not understand each other’s perspectives or we might be familiar with the type of language we are using. That is why we experiment with transdisciplinary ways of working: to explore methods and tools that facilitate knowledge and perspective exchange in transdisciplinarity teams.

To achieve this, we are mobilizing our network of research fellows at the Designlab; researchers with diverse backgrounds that work on disciplines that range from robotics to policy studies that come together to address societal challenges. We are in a first stage of awareness creation within the network so we can connect research fellows to the Responsible Futuring community of practice. Second, we need to foster ethical reflection. At times, we are so enthused by solving technological challenges that we forget to take a step back and reflect on what our actions might entail. Although it is not possible to anticipate all the effects that our developments will have, we can explore with others what controversial aspects might be part of them, and use those controversies to fuel innovation and creativity. The University of Twente, having a large community of students and alumni working on the development of technology, has great potential to offer life-long learning programs to stimulate a reflective mindset for those working on the development of technology. At the moment, we are exploring ways to embed Responsible Futuring in their curricula so, together, we can explore the impact of transdisciplinary collaboration and ethical reflection on co-shaping responsible futures. Third, we embrace designerly ways of working. Making futures tangible and thinking with our hands immensely support not only coming up with new ideas but also sharing them with others. We familiarize our community with speculative design practices, to create prototypes that bring futures to the present. For example, we tend to create smart cities that focus on efficiency but, what would happen if we put a different value, like serendipity, at the core? How would our urban experience change? The power of bringing these futures to the now is vast and fosters a type of discussion that cannot be achieved by looking at PowerPoint or PDFs. For example, in some of our current educational efforts with practitioners, we are co-creating “provotypes” with experts to speculate around fraudless futures to reflect on the impact of governing values on various stakeholders ranging from tax inspectors to elder citizens. Tangibilizing futures helps to stimulate ethical reflection and identify those actions that we can bring back to the present to adapt our practices. Equipping communities to collaborate and co-shape futures is extremely powerful since it fuels responsible innovation. The task is to engage with communities to make this happen so they can discover the opportunities on their own. That is precisely what FIF is about: it offers an open and supportive platform to learn from each other and develop an experimental, reflective and innovative mindset. We are excited to be an active part of this community and look forward to co-shaping responsible futures together.