UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering, and Technology

Futures research consists of five core activities:

• Notice change: identify emerging change as it erupts.
• Explore the impacts of change: ask yourself who will benefit the most from this change? who will suffer its worst impacts? who is empowered by it -- and who is marginalised? where do the costs and benefits land, and what trade-offs will we have to make? Exploring the impacts is enable us to be accountable and responsible for change.
• Imagine alternative outcomes: all those changes and their impacts create stories -- alternative stories of possible futures: scenarios. Scenarios aren't predictions -- they areprovocations, challenging us to think differently about the future, to question our assumptions and critically assess what we take for granted. Scenarios are thought experiments, that let us step briefly into imaginary possible future worlds and explore what we'd need to thrive in new circumstances.
• Envision preferred futures: this is the "daydream effectively" bit -- what do you want? can you describe, in vivid detail, what your preferred future for 2030, or 2050, or 2100, would look like? Now that you know what changes are popping up all around us, and what impacts they might have, what new and better future would you create with all those emerging opportunities?
• Plan and create change: you've described your preferred future -- now build it! create strategies to take advantage of emerging change and its opportunities (and to deflect threats), gather allies, and build the future you want. It's all just science fiction and ineffective daydreaming unless you act.

Where can you study it? You can earn graduate degrees in futures studies at CNAM/LIPS in Paris; at the Turku School of Economics' Finland Futures Research Centre; at PREST at the University of Manchester; at the Institute for Futures Research at the University of Stellenbosch; at the University of Houston (and it's all online!); at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (see their Hawai'i Research Centre for Futures Studies); at Tamkang University in Taiwan; and elsewhere around the world. Each school has its own particular philosophy and methodological approach to futures studies: like any other discipline, there are competing and overlapping paradigms and schools of thought. You can get a sense of the range of the intellectual endeavours and their accompanying debates by thumbing through the scholarly journals: Futures, Foresight, the Journal of Futures Studies (many issues online), and World Future Review(formerly Futures Research Quarterly and Future Survey, now combined). Or join one of the professional associations as a student: the Association of Professional Futurists (more consultants), or the World Futures Studies Federation (more academics than consultants), or the World Futures Society (less professional, more populist). If you want some idea how it all started, take a look at Jim Dator's bibliography of classic futures texts, or Sohail Inayatullah's annotated bibliography of key works in futures studies.

Who does it commercially? The UK boasts a vibrant community of futures teachers, practitioners, and consultants, within the wider global futures community. Within industry, Royal Dutch Shell can boast perhaps the longest running scenarios-based futures thinking in its Strategic Planning office. A typical example is their study offering energy scenarios to 2050. PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the James Martin Institute at Oxford used surveys and scenarios to explore the future of work in 2020 in "Managing tomorrow's people." Working with the consultancy Henley Centre Headlight Vision (now The Futures Company), the Orange Future Enterprise Coalition explored "space, place, and technology in 2016" in four scenarios that looked at future workplaces. I led a team of colleagues at SAMI Consulting to create scenarios for the future of work and workplaces for the Health and Safety Executive's Horizon Scanning team. A consortium of consultancies, including The Futures Company, ShiftN, and Waverley Management Consultants, worked on the UK Foresight Programme's excellent Intelligent Infrastructure Futures, which examined what life would be like in the UK if we embedded microprocessors in every part of our built environment and created immersive, networked, intelligent infrastructure.

What does a futures study look like? Futures studies come in all sizes and formats. The simplest form of futures study is a single-issue "what if?" exploration of a change, or of a range of changes around a single issue. My website includes a number of short essays I wrote as part of TechTV's Catalog of Tomorrow (2002; becoming outdated by subsequent innovations - futures research has a short shelf life!): one on undersea exploration, one on space exploration, and one on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The scenarios-based studies I've cited above are another approach to strategic futures thinking. But the first step is always noticing change -- identifying emerging issues of change -- and so most organisations begin with horizon scanning. The UK government has an extensive track record of investing in horizon scanning:

• The Health and Safety Executive's horizon scanning team has a running "hotlist" of innovations and issues they have identified and track, including human performance enhancement; nanotechnology and new materials science; and carbon sequestration strategies, among others;
• The Environmental Research Funders' Forum (facilitated by Waverley Management Consultants) used a focus-group approach to identify critical emerging uncertainties in the natural and built environment, including water supply sustainability; soil fertility and the soil as a carbon store; and future movements of populations, among others; and of course
• The UK Foresight Programme's Horizon Scanning Centre has on-line scanning databases available for research that look at social, economic, political, environmental, and technological changes coming our way, and a foresight toolkit to assist in futures thinking.

Few "soup-to-nuts" formal futures studies are completed, that encompass in one project horizon scanning, impact assessment, scenario exploration, vision articulation, and strategy formulation and implementation. The pieces are more often performed separately. One example of a full futures study is the recently completed vision (not yet available publicly) for the future of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (a project on which I was privileged to work with The Futures Company). Another is Natural England's project to create "A Vision for the Natural Environment," currently in progress (on which I am working with SAMI Consulting). 

Now you have my joy: a free license to indulge my curiosity on any topic, for every culture, in any timeframe from the deep past to our far futures, and to peer over the shoulders of our most creative minds and most energetic entrepreneurs and to ask them, "what's new? what's next?" and imagine what might be.