Human Futures No. 1 December 2016 | Page 50

FEATURE ARTICLE

The

Experiential

Turn *

by Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan
* This is an edited excerpt of a full-length article and case study of an experiential futures project undertaken by the authors at Arizona State University ’ s inaugural Emerge festival ( Candy and Dunagan , 2016 ). The original piece appeared in a special issue of the journal Futures on “ Experiencing Futures ”, guest edited by Cornelia Daheim and Kerstin Cuhls .
For futures studies to impact mainstream culture and contribute to civilisation-scale “ social foresight ” it must be capable of bridging the “ experiential gulf ” between abstract possible futures , and life as it is directly apprehended in the embodied present .
The persistence of an experiential gulf in foresight work , an idiom given to abstraction because it is about things that do not exist , is one of the main reasons for what we would say has been the field ’ s insufficient impact on mainstream thinking about the future over the past half-century . By contrast , the grounding of forethought in both material and emotional reality very much increases its potential impact on thought and behaviour . ( Candy , 2010 , pp . 61ff .)
Enter experiential futures , the key motivation and rationale of which is to enable more effective foresight work , exploring and shaping change , by using the whole continuum of human experience as the palette of engagement .
Experiential futures , “ the design of situations and stuff from the future to catalyse insight and change ” ( Candy , 2015 ), has a deliberately wide compass , including not only futures-inflected editions of conventional design outputs ( print material , concept images , prototypes , physical artifacts , etc ), but also installation , mail art , advertisements , immersive theatre , guerrilla intervention , digital simulation ( VR / MR / AR ), and games . Tangible , immersive , interactive , live , and playable modes are all in scope . 1
The origins and early cases of experiential futures are described in detail elsewhere ( Candy , 2010 ), but to provide a sense of how far and how fast this area has developed over the past decade , and with growing numbers of other practitioners experimenting in these modes , the
1 . The original article ( Candy and Dunagan , 2016 ) deals in detail with the blossoming romance between futures and design , including parallel areas of practice such as design fiction and speculative design .
26 DECEMBER 2016