We are excited to announce our latest project, The Futures Bazaar: A Public Imagination Toolkit, written by design futurists Filippo Cuttica and Stuart Candy, and co-published by Situation Lab and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Picture a wild and wonderful place where all alternative future possibilities co-exist at once, and can be physically encountered in real life; a kind of multi-dimensional exchange, [...]
Augmenting Cities image via. Niantic CEO John Hanke opens the event | Photo: Niantic / Knight Foundation We were excited to take part in an invitational symposium a few weeks ago, Augmenting Cities, that brought together under one roof 150 game designers, artists and urbanists from a number of countries "to reflect on how people, cities, and technology will evolve [...]
Since The Thing From The Future was first published in 2014, it has been used by thousands of players at many dozens of events around the world. Over that time, we've discovered a range of alternative ways to use the cards. Some methods make it possible to play with larger groups, such as lecture audiences, while others adjust the pace of play, or [...]
A surprising guerrilla futures intervention speaks to the current political moment. For many progressives in the United States, Canada conjures a wistful ideal of multicultural harmony and civility. After three years in Toronto, followed by six months of electoral madness back in the U.S., I can understand the romanticisation of our neighbour to the north. Indeed, the fact that the [...]
A grassroots campaign is currently afoot to get citizens engaged in collective future visioning. It's called #DareToImagine, an initiative of USDAC, the United States Department of Arts and Culture, with which Situation Lab has been collaborating for some time (I serve as USDAC's futures advisor). So we at Sitlab recently issued a special customised edition of The Thing From The [...]
Want to play The Thing From The Future but don't have your deck of game cards? Hanging out on the space station or at Amundsen-Scott and eager to imagine some future things with your fellow astronauts / scientists / adventurers, but frustrated by the slow pace or total absence of postal delivery service? Just plain broke? Look no further -- [...]
The Situation Lab invites you to take part in two upcoming events with award-winning New York City-based design collective, The Extrapolation Factory. Founded by designers Elliott P. Montgomery and Chris Woebken, the Extrapolation Factory sets out to "explore the value of rapidly imagined, prototyped, deployed and evaluated visions of possible futures on an extended time scale." In 2013, they won the Core77 award [...]
FutureCoast is an ambitious, just-launched collaborative cli-fi (climate fiction) storytelling game, created by the PoLAR Partnership at Columbia University and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). A central interest of ours here at the Situation Lab has to do with the design of participatory frameworks for storytelling at scale - also a central challenge for this project. So [...]
