About the project

Engaging in tangled futures Pressure to understand and respond to complex futures is building. In the context of climate change and increased global movement of people and commodities, our futures are systemically and creatively entwined. Making sense of immediate, near and far flung futures needs to tackle a growing and emerging entanglement of diverse interests and motivated social and political formations Anticipatorially!

For many, these are futures that are difficult to fathom. We often struggle to engage productively in environments that are in flux, between human and non-human activities. Rapid changes in geo-politics and physical materialities occur as we attempt to process their ramifications. Adrift. Entangled. Uncertain. Immobilised. Are these conditions and states that we simply acknowledge are unchangeable?

The role of Design
This third conference is based at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). As a university that includes Urbanism, Landscape, Architecture and Design, we see Anticipation as central to our pedagogy, practice and inquiry, as well as how our work matters in the wider world. The event draws on a body of earlier futures oriented inquiry and practice. Design has been under-emphasised, yet present, in much futures work.

Design is a productive, critical and forward reaching domain of research and making. Crucially, Design looks beyond mere solutions to problems or surface aesthetics. Today, Design offers transdisciplinary means to facing futures. Often this harnesses a mix of expertise and dynamic processes of realisation and use, in materialising relations between products, interactions services and systems.

The Conference
The International Anticipation conferences speak differently. They articulate ways we may and must engage with the future. Productively, interpretatively, imaginatively, collectively and inspirationally. We seek and share knowledge and practices for shaping better futures as centred on and through anticipation.

The Conference works as a venue for sharing and shaping Anticipation from a diversity of views: with and between disciplines, expertise and practices. We ask participants to engage through their own fields and to find and meet those of others.

Researchers, designers, policy makers, activists, educators and planners, come together in this conference. We assemble and debate a diversity of expertise and positions, views and creative experience. We do so to address what we need to know and do. We gather to imagine and to reveal possible, potential and projected futures. This is to work – and to work out how to- pre-figure and to perform anticipatorially. We invite you to propose a contribution to the conference that will speak to the following questions:

How to care for the  future?

• How is future in jeopardy and what acts of care might we make to anticipate it?
• What choices and contradictions might we need to face to develop cultures of anticipatory care?
• What radical changes and innovations are needed to embody and enact ‘care-full’ futures today?
• Where are the potentials and vulnerabilities in working with care and anticipation
• How can collaborative work for the future be realized in anticipatory actions in the present?
• Where do we need to place our design and analytical efforts to best ensure anticipatory care?

Design by anticipation?

• How are we to conceptualize and realize ‘design by anticipation’?
• Design as future making, design as shaping futures.
• ‘Design’ and the creative industries for sustainable commercial and communal futures.
• Lifting expertise and knowledge from design into Anticipation Studies?
• Relations between prospects, interventions, collaborations.
• Working with multiple stakeholders.
• Tackling shared, overlapping and competing needs.
• Making and critique through design.
• Systemic views and strategic futures.
• What are anticipatory takes on interaction, service and product design?
• Issues and experiences in moving from top down structures and planning to pluralist processes and reflexive, ‘progressive’ review?

Time in shaping anticipatory practices?

• What conceptions of working with time do we bring to Anticipation Studies?
• Reaching beyond limitations of today.
• Untangling the’ future present’.
• Non-linearity.
• Time-space relations.
• Are we prepared now to work with tomorrow’s needs and challenges?
• Tensions between short and long term approaches to the future?
• Where in time do we place our anticipatory practices?
• Working productively with the time we have to effect anticipatory tomorrows.
• What links are there between understandings of time and disciplinary approaches

The future as an anticipatory network

• How to conceptualize anticipation as a network?
• What world views, principles and practices are at hand and might be selectively recombined?
• Why an anticipatory approach to networking for futures matters.
• Working with different expertise to meet challenges of contingency and indeterminacy.
• What work is underway and what could be done to work with agile, flexible and adaptive approaches to anticipatory networking?
• How do risk and interdependencies influence one another?
• Which anticipatory networks make connections?
• Linking political economy, financial services, governance and distributed policy making.

Performative anticipation?

• What does it mean to enact anticipation?
• How may we understood deliberative and conjectural performative moves to make futures?
• Affect.
• Materialities.
• Plausible and projected?
• How does a performative anticipation helps us evade constraints of the given today?
• Stretching practices with co-creative enactments.
• Proposals, instances, rehearsals, cases and reviews in anticipatory projects and practices.
• How can we involve participation in making and shaping anticipation?
• Emergence in technical and interactional systems?
• Pushing forward active understanding of relationships between governance, service, participation and policy.

How does anticipatory learning happen?

• How are we to better learn today for sustainable tomorrows?
• What’s the civic when its connected to learning that’s future facing?
• Who is learning with and from whom?
• Whose learning and for whom?
• Aspirations and co-creation in anticipatory learning?
• What lessons should we not repeat and how so?
• Age in learning the future.
• Why connect designing, learning and experience in anticipatory learning?
• Learning with informal, provocative, hacking, and unexpected practices.
• There’s no future without futures literacies.
• How urgent is learning for futures in the context of climate change?

Feeling the future?

• What place is there for affect, persuasion and aesthetics?
• What is it to attune to anticipation?
• Senses of futures, sense and anticipation.
• What constitutes aesthetic anticipation?
• From prognosis to the experiential in anticipatory practices.
• How are we to make sense of utopian and dissonant sense of the future?
• Deliberation, divination, desire.
• What place for motivation?
• Facts and belonging in challenging scenarios of change.
• How may conceptualization and visions of the future speak to us creatively through narrative, ‘design’, craft and art?

Shaping critical cultures of anticipation?

• What more may be fashioned through our creative and critical ingenuity and innovation to meet current and future demands and needs?
• Thinking between making and analyzing in Anticipation Studies.
• Cultures, frames and concepts for critiquing anticipatory practices.
• Critique through making, critique on making futures.
• How and where does Anticipation Studies alter disciplinary content and approaches?
• The role of the  uncomfortable, ill-formed and experimental in building a critical culture of anticipation.
• What are acts of thinking through and thinking from practices of planning and decision making and imagined and far off futures?
• Culture, technology and non-determinism in a context of automation, digital fabrication and globalization?

Means and methods for making the future accessible?

• How may future oriented means and methods be taken up and reshaped, by in and through design, and engaged action?
• Making attractive, alluring and challenging futures.
• Using methods to support generative activity.
• Radical briefs, proposals and examples.
• Mash-ups and mixed methods for making prospective worlds.
• Persons, narrative, scenarios and subjunctive modes of shaping alternate futures.
• From law and policy to communities and corporations.
• Working with people to design and position accessible strategies and means for facing futures.
• What best case examples can we use to make anticipatory design, use and review more accessible?