THE FUTURES OF EVERYDAY LIFE: POLITICS AND THE DESIGN OF EXPERIENTIAL SCENARIOS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE AUGUST 2010 By Stuart Candy Dissertation Committee: Jim Dator, Chairperson Michael J. Shapiro Debora Halbert Stephen Duncombe Markus Wessendorf The Futures of Everyday Life: Politics and the Design of Experiential Scenarios Copyright © 2010, Some Rights Reserved Stuart Candy This work is licensed by the author under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. www.creativecommons.org ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To produce a doctoral dissertation is a famously solitary journey, but one accumulates a substantial karmic debt along the way. Many people deserve recognition for their contribution to this work. Not least, I was blessed with a committee that proved responsive and encouraging throughout. My gratitude is due to the East-West Center, Honolulu, for exceptional support in the form of two Graduate Degree Fellowships which enabled me to undertake a Master’s, and then this Ph.D., in alternative futures at the Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa; a unique program in the United States. Thanks to Dr Melissa Finucane of the East-West Center for providing early assistance in the navigation of psychological research which eventually found its way into Chapter 2, and to Robert S. Baron, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Iowa, for helpful comments on a draft of that section. I also want to recognise the invaluable support of Alexander Rose and the Board and Staff of the Long Now Foundation, where I have been Research Fellow since 02006. The Long Now is an extraordinary collection of people. Tony Hansmann and Camron Assadi are among those whose moral support and friendship, while I was getting acquainted with the San Francisco Bay Area, were irreplaceable. To my colleagues in futures, art or design with whom conversations along the way made all the difference: thank you. There are far more than I can name here, but among the most formative have been Julian Bleecker, Bryan Boyer, Jamais Cascio, Jess Charlesworth, Chris Downs, Steve Duncombe, Erika Gregory, Scott Groeniger, Steve Lambert, Dan Lockton, Peter Morville, Jerry Paffendorf, Noah Raford, Jose Ramos, Paolo Salvagione, Wendy Schultz, Cynthia Selin, Bruce Sterling, Jason Tester, and Maya van Leemput. The skills of my design collaborators, especially Matthew Jensen and Yumi Vong, have been responsible in large part for ‘experiential scenarios’ worth writing about. During this process, I was honoured to guest lecture in design programs run by Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby at the Royal College of Art, Nathan Shedroff at California College of the Arts, and Scott Klinker at Cranbrook Academy of Art. They and their students helped whip my flabby thoughts into shape with ruthless efficiency. On a more personal note, the love and support of my parents, Philip and Mary- Anne Candy, and my partner Laura Baron, have been incalculable. And finally, this dissertation, as well as a good deal of the research it describes, would not exist without the outstanding collaboration and comradeship of Jake Dunagan, and the mentorship of Jim Dator, Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies and founder of the incomparable ‘Manoa School’ of futures. This document is dedicated to the two of them. iii ABSTRACT The great existential challenges facing the human species can be traced, in part, to the fact that we have underdeveloped discursive practices for thinking possible worlds ‘out loud’, performatively and materially, in the register of experience. That needs to change. In this dissertation, a methodology for ‘experiential scenarios’, covering a range of interventions and media from immersive performance to stand-alone ‘artifacts from the future’, is offered as a partial corrective. The beginnings of aesthetic, political and ethical frameworks for ‘experiential futures’ are proposed, drawing on alternative futures methodology, the emerging anti- mediumist practice of ‘experience design’, and the theoretical perspective of a Rancièrian ‘politics of aesthetics’. The relationships between these three domains -- futures, design, and politics -- are explored to show how and why they are coming together, and what each has to offer the others. The upshot is that our apparent binary choice between unthinkable dystopia and unimaginable utopia is a false dilemma, because in fact, we can and should imagine ‘possibility space’ hyperdimensionally, and seek to flesh out worlds hitherto supposed unimaginable or unthinkable on a daily basis. Developed from early deployments across a range of settings in everyday life, from urban guerrilla-style activism to corporate consulting, experiential scenarios do not offer definitive answers as to how the future will look, or even how it should look, but they can contribute to a mental ecology within which these questions may be posed and discussed more effectively than ever before. iv CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................................iii ABSTRACT........................................................................................................... iv LIST OF FIGURES..............................................................................................viii INTRODUCTION. THE UNTHINKABLE AND THE UNIMAGINABLE...................1 CHAPTER 1. BEYOND UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA..............................................22 Three easy pieces.......................................................................................25 1. Alternative futures...........................................................................25 2. Images of the future........................................................................28 3. The trio of possible, probable and preferable futures .....................31 Mapping possibility space............................................................................33 A note about theory......................................................................................40 Generating scenarios..................................................................................44 The four generic futures...............................................................................47 Four corners of possibility space.................................................................54 Conclusion...................................................................................................59 CHAPTER 2. FROM EXPERIENTIAL GULF TO EXPERIENTIAL SCENARIO...61 A tale of two cities........................................................................................62 1. New Orleans: Blindsided by Katrina................................................62 2. Detroit: The future that couldn’t last................................................66 Lessons from New Orleans and Detroit.......................................................68 Another hurricane, and the experiential gulf................................................71 Reuniting brain and body.............................................................................77 Mind the gap................................................................................................80 For a mundane turn in futures.....................................................................89 Experiential scenarios: a case study............................................................95 Experience design.....................................................................................107 Conclusion.................................................................................................115 CHAPTER 3. THE POLITICS OF FUTURES AND DESIGN.............................118 Scoping the political...................................................................................118 Futures and design, considered politically.................................................130 1. Critical, political futures.................................................................130 2. The politics of design.....................................................................148 A. Take One: Design as a signal of human intention................148 B. Take Two: Design as reshaping the material world..............153 Conclusion.................................................................................................163 v CHAPTER 4. WHY FUTURES AND DESIGN ARE GETTING MARRIED......165 A good fit.................................................................................................166 Deepening discourse by design..............................................................173 1. Discursive, critical and interrogative design..................................174 2. Design fiction.................................................................................178 The dance depends on who leads..........................................................187 Three principles for designing experiential scenarios.............................189 1. Don’t break the universe...............................................................190 2. The tip of the iceberg.....................................................................195 3. The art of the double take.............................................................202 Conclusion..............................................................................................207