Digital Learning, Asia 2020 Autumn Workshop: Future Casting

Learn how to map out the possible futures of technology! Foresee how technology will shape the world around us. Gain practical skills in strategic future-casting, while learning how to communicate and think critically about technology and our future together.

Workshop Dates: November 9–13, 2020 (10 am–6 pm Japan Standard Time)

Faculty: TBA

What is this workshop?

We live in dramatic times. In our lifetimes alone we’ve seen the mass adoption of the internet and smartphones changing our societies forever. Today we stand at the cusp of even more radical technologies; from robotics to gene editing to advanced artificial intelligence, bringing with them what will surely be another revolution in society. A revolution that will shape our politics, our societies, our environments—maybe even our physical selves!?

In this workshop, we will explore and question cutting-edge breakthroughs on our technological event horizon. Will these technologies succeed or fail? What kind of impact they will have? How will they develop? And how will they develop us?

Through the course, we will help you make sense of technologies and their impact over time. We will give you practical skills to appropriately consider our future world and help you separate signal from noise in the headline hungry technology press. We will help you look closely at user needs now in order to extrapolate the likely future and together we will look to the past to understand what makes a run-away success and what makes a technology fizzle. Finally, we will help you communicate and story-tell your findings to create immersive worlds that your colleagues, bosses, or audiences can experience, so as to trigger debate and high-quality conversations.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay

What will you learn?

• How to assess and critique design work that covers abstract concepts

• How to evaluate technology and engage in future casting

• Practical idea generation and critical thinking methods

• To understand the role of context and other factors as it pertains to developing design solutions

• An approach to presenting complicated ideas succinctly through story-telling.

How will you learn it?

A series of mini exercises will introduce students to future-casting and idea generation methods. We will then apply user-centric methods to help us evaluate ideas and understand how underlying human needs can help us predict the future. You will concept plausible futures, down-select, and then bring your future to life through a series of artifacts which could come from the future.

Through the creation of these artifacts, you will learn to express intangible concepts in an easily digestible way while considering the articulation of user-experience, society, and technology.

Artifact examples include, but are not limited to: Magazine advertisements, posters, product packaging, shop receipts, photographs, etc. Your imagination is really the only barrier here.

Is this for you?

Yes, if you are in any way involved in bringing products and services to users, if you speculate about the future, if you create policy or if you use technology as part of artistic practice—this course is for anyone who is curious about the future. It will help you taking leaps that are both bolder and more sustainable.

No specific skills are required for this course, although surface knowledge of photoshop is useful.

What do I need to bring to the workshop?

• A computer

Enroll now: There is a maximum number of 20 places available for each workshop, first come first served. Enrollment will be closed when the workshops are full.