Update on scenario building

I recently read a few archive articles on Wired.com including one called How to Build Scenarios written by Lawrence Wilkinson who happens to be co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network(see my post scenario building) he is also chief architect of Wired Ventures Ltd. which publishes Wired magazine.

He discusses the methods he uses at GBN and how they could be used not just in industry but for the individual’s key concern about their quality of life in 15 to 20 years time and the personal investments that will be needed in preparation for the future. They first attempt to identify the primary “driving forces” ( social dynamics, political, economic and technological issues) in order “to look past the everyday crises that typically occupy our minds and to examine the long-term forces that ordinarily work well outside our concerns.” He goes on to describe 4 ” futurist” caricatured worlds that he and the Wired team have synthesised and points out that these are not distopian or utopian and are not distinctly the real futurist worlds but but that it will contain elements of all of our scenarios. The four worlds they create are entitled “Consumerland”, “I Will”, “Ecotopia” and “New Civics”. If this really is for the individual then there is not tangibilty and no real expression of how all these world might affect each one of us and our everyday crises that typically occupy our minds.

Its these everyday crises that interest me the most and are what will make these scenario building methods more tangible and perhaps that is my design brief, to reveal, demystify, and communicate the drivers and the scenario worlds that could are attributed to an individual.

Other interesting articles in Wired from 2003 : Futurism is Dead