Plastic Century : interactive installation at California Academy of Sciences . Project by Stuart Candy , Jake Dunagan , Sarah Kornfeld and Wallace J Nichols , San Francisco 2010 . Photo by Mike Estee .
authors have worked on projects ranging from immersive experiential scenarios for a group of 550 people at a public policy-oriented sustainability event , to guerrilla street art campaigns , to national-level museums of future possibilities . Partnering organisations have included local , state , and federal governments , community groups , educational and cultural institutions , private enterprises , and nonprofits . We have also developed the practice through teaching in the world ’ s first two futures programs offered at design schools , at OCAD and CCA .
What then are some of the challenges for futurists making , or contemplating , an “ experiential turn ”? They include becoming transmedia producers as well as the transdisciplinary thinkers that we already try to be . This in turn entails not only participating in , but likely often facilitating , collaboration across even more diverse skillsets , and broaching new boundaries – such as those between the expressive / narrative arts and analytical scholarship – in addition to the disciplinary siloes which the field already habitually challenges . 2
Enabling group thought and creative processes has been an important part of the futures field for years ( Jungk and Mullert , 1987 ; Dator , 1993 ), and the stakes may be obvious to many already , but the affordances of group creativity and cognition using an experientially augmented toolset , and the details of what works best in what circumstances , are only now beginning to be worked out .
2 . See Ramos , 2006 , for an earlier articulation of this line of argument . A decade of experiential futures work can be regarded as a decisive turn in the field towards meeting this challenge .
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