Current events

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Current events

The Current events portal presents worldwide events in the field of Future Studies & Foresight. In particular, all the Mutual Learning Workshops organised during the Quality and Leadership for Romanian Higher Education project, implementing the concept of Bucharest Dialogues, are presented in this section of the Foresight Wiki.
Members of the FORwiki Community are invited to state their willingness to participate in these events and cooperate for their organizing. If you have an idea for an event that you feel it would be of interest for the Foresight Community of Practice, create a FORwiki page, list it under On the community's agenda, and try to create an alliance with other members of the FORwiki Community around it.

Past events

Vision Building

A vision describes an idealised desirable future of a specific system that is substantially different from the status quo. A vision is relevant to the actors concerned and thereby motivates, inspires and directs action towards the vision. In contrast, scenarios describe different plausible futures that usually contain desirable and non-desirable elements. In business, policy circles and civil society communities, shared visions are increasingly recognised as highly relevant for initiating transition processes and achieving goals. Powerful, inspiring visions cannot be generated in a top-down manner. They need to be co-created in a participatory process. Accordingly, interactive visioning processes are an important element in the Foresight toolbox. However, in comparison to other approaches such as scenario building, Delphi surveys and roadmapping there is only little theoretical work on visioning. While in principle visions can be “tacit”, Foresight aims at expressing visions in an ex-plicit manner through images, metaphors and texts to communicate and share the “idealised” future. Even though different practitioners use different visioning approaches they share certain elements such as exploration of individual and personal visions, investigation of shared values, assessing the legacy of the past and exploring dreams for the future. Very often visioning involves visual and other creative elements as a catalyst of expressing wishes and values. Scenario analysis can be used as a first step in visioning process in particular to deal with the external environment of the area that is tackled. (more...)


In preparation

On the community's agenda

Crazy Foresight

‘Any useful idea about the future', says Jim Dator – considered by many to be grandfather of the field – 'should appear to be ridiculous'. Why? Because much of the future is going to be totally novel and has not been currently or previously experienced. Thus, anything useful that one can say about the future would appear to most people as quite crazy. Dator goes on to state, in his Seventh Law of Futures, that 'if futurists expect to be useful, they should expect to be ridiculed and for their ideas initially to be rejected'. In a slightly different vein, Sardar's First Law of Futures Studies states that 'futures studies are wicked'. They are wicked because they deal with 'wicked problems' which are by nature complex, chaotic, interconnected with in-built contradictions and uncertainty. But futures studies are also 'wicked in the sense that they are playfully open ended (like a 'scientific' discipline they do not offer a single solution but only possibilities). Their boundaries, such as they are, are totally porous and they are quite happy to borrow ideas and tools, whatever is needed, from any and all disciplines and discourses' (more...)



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