Futures Thinking

While we are acutely aware we live in a time of unequally cascading crises, our imaginative, intellectual and practical preparations for the future are less acute. We know that our units for thinking and acting in politics, innovation, economics and business are driven by short-termism, yet we know less about how to shift them to the long-term. We realise too, that material artefacts, epistemologies and technologies conspire to keep our desires and demands in the immediate, but we are limited in our capacities to articulate how they could be different. Many of us experience an uncanny feeling of temporal disjuncture: the urgent is driving out the important, the frog is boiling, and we need to constrain our future selves.