The generation of scientific knowledge in futures studies and foresight

Toward a new stage for the epistemology of futures studies: Exploring social epistemology

Futures studies in the 21st Century: a reality-based view

Futurist networks: cases of epistemic community?

This article presents the almost century-long history of the development of futures studies in a comprehensive review. Futures studies, rooted in sociology and policy sciences, had become an academic discipline by the 1960s. One of the major global communities representing the discipline, the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF), celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2023. In the 1970s, the focus was placed on discourses on global problems and preferred futures. Futures studies then developed a global institutional community and become a mature discipline by the 1980s and 1990s. Futurists by then had already mutually shared theoretical perspectives, objectives, ethics, and methods, and had produced empirical results. A wide range of comprehensive publications at that time synthesized the foundations and preceding results of futures studies. From the turn of the millennium, active discourse took place on the forthcoming role of futures studies. By that time, the theoretical, methodological, and practical knowledge foundations of the discipline had also appeared in internationally well-documented curricula. Since around 2010, the discipline has been characterized by the development of practical foresight projects. Based on notable trends and identified research gaps, this article formulates up-to-date expectations and research directions within which futures studies might develop in the future.

Epistemic communities, domain analysis, and Kuhn: dialogs and intersections in Knowledge Organization

Debates about the future are an essential medium of modern societies’ self-understanding and governance. In this context, future studies and reflections are frequently advising decision-making processes. But the considerable diversity of statements about the future and the divergence which often becomes apparent regarding the prospects of the future threaten the possibility of delivering the desired orientation. The more divergent the envisioned futures, the more providing reliable orientation might be without any chance of success. Against this background the aim of this paper is to distinguish three different modes of orientation which can be delivered by future studies and reflections. The mode 1 orientation corresponds to the decision-theoretical model: Statements about the future are interpreted as a reliable framework into which decisions and actions have to fit as good as possible. If future studies result in strongly diverse statements (e.g. in the field of energy scenarios), orientation is only possible in a mode 2 understanding: the futures form a set of diverse possibilities within which some “robust” strategies for action might be identified. But what is beyond this distinction? If futures would completely diverge between, so to speak, paradise and apocalypse, even the mode 2 approach would no longer work (this case applies to some recent debates on new and emerging sciences and technologies). For this case I would like to suggest a ‘mode 3’ type orientation: even diverging future studies’ results can be made subject to a ‘hermeneutics’ of the present, where we can learn about ourselves from the diversity, variety and divergence of statements about the future. What we can learn from this consideration that there are extremely different ways to benefit from reflections on the future. Their feasibility depends on an epistemological issue: do images of the future in a certain context converge as soon as more reliable knowledge is fed in, or is diversity or divergence persistent?

Does the principle of informed consent apply to futures studies research?

In honor of its 50th anniversary, the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF) held its XXV World Conference in Paris. The conference provided a venue for reviewing earlier developments and reevaluating prospective directions in the futures field. Scientific-based futures studies has a long history, drawing from a variety of fields including sociology, policy sciences, philosophy of science, economic prognostics, and environmental sustainability. Futures studies became widely acknowledged as an academic discipline in the 1960s when it became evident in the global scientific community. The 1970s saw a focus on global challenges and discussions about preferred futures. The synthesis of futures studies emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, with critical and evolutionary approaches contributing to the advancement of theoretical foundations. The twenty-first century focuses on anticipation and futures literacy, the development of post-normal, metamodern, and integral approaches, and the attainment of foresight in common practice. Future research is expected to focus on various aspects, including artificial general intelligence (AGI), socio-technical transitions, singularity, sustainability, societal collapses, entrepreneurial innovation, energy futures, decolonization, negation and post-prefix notions, systemic foresight, applied foresight, and on-site foresight. Future research activities are expected to also include research objects, policy challenges, and problems that do not yet exist.

In an operational environment that changes continuously the classical education cannot last for a lifetime anymore. To face this challenge, the educational programmes should be diversified to include futures studies from an earlier learning stage, in order to provide pupils and students with the necessary tools to anticipate the future and choose a learning path that fulfils their development needs. In that way, the requirement to anticipate possible changes could provide the ability to adapt quickly and overcome the potential drawbacks determined by a lack of skills and competences of the future workforce. One objective of future studies could be also to produce super-forecasters for sensitive areas such as security and defence. Future studies facilitate the examination of possible developments in the future based on current knowledge and logical reasoning, allowing the study of postulating possible, probable and preferable futures. Even though the future remains unpredictable, there are some potential developments of the present reality or alternatives of the future that can be thought of. Therefore, as far as the future is unpredictable, only some potential developments of the present reality or alternatives of the future can be thought of. Apparently, there are few options at hand: do nothing, try to prepare for the future or try to shape the future actively.Forecasting and foresight are powerful tolls in the panoply of futures studies and, even though initially these concepts were used equivalently, there is a real difference between them. This paper will explain some of these differences along with an example of a good forecasting strategy, in an attempt to stimulate how to think about the future and then act decisively to create it.

Purpose Contemporary urban and regional planning practice and scholarship often fails to address the full implications of technological change (technology blindness), lacks a clear or consistent definition of the long term (temporal imprecision) and seldom uses formal foresight methodologies. Discussion in the literature of time horizons beyond 10 years is, therefore, based on profoundly unrealistic assumptions about the future. The paper aims to discuss why conventional reasoning about possible futures is problematic, how consideration of long-term timescales is informal and inconsistent and why accelerating technological change requires that planners rethink basic assumptions about the future from 2030s onward. Design/methodology/approach The author reviews 1,287 articles published between January 2010 and December 2014 in three emblematic urban and regional planning journals using directed content analysis of key phrases pertaining to long-term planning, futures studies and self-driving cars. Findings The author finds that there is no evidence of consistent usage of the phrase long term, that timeframes are defined in fewer than 10 per cent of articles and that self-driving cars and related phrases occur nowhere in the text, even though this technology is likely to radically transform urban transportation and form starting in the early 2020s. Despite its importance, discussion of disruptive technological change in the urban and regional planning literature is extremely limited. Practical implications To make more realistic projections of the future from the late 2020s onward, planning practitioners and scholars should: attend more closely to the academic and public technology discourses; specify explicit timeframes in any discussion or analysis of the future; and incorporate methods from futures studies such as foresight approaches into long-term planning. Originality/value This paper identifies accelerating technological change as a major conceptual gap in the urban and regional planning literature and calls for practitioners and scholars to rethink their foundational assumptions about the long-term and possible, probable and preferable futures accordingly.

This paper investigates emerging logics in the production of environmental knowledge in Southern Brazil through the case study of a complex process launched in 2004 that led the state of Rio Grande do Sul to adopt a management tool known as “Environmental Zoning for Silvicultural Activity” (ZAS). In order to regulate the implantation of Eucalyptus, Pine, and Acacia tree-farms on its territory, the State Environmental Administration decided to regulate silvicultural activities by establishing a set of restrictions based on the ecological vulnerability of landscape units. A conflict between public administration, silvicultural companies, and environmentalist groups, led to a thorough reformulation of this zoning plan between 2007 and 2010. The companies succeeded in reducing the restrictions placed on their activity, however, environmentalist groups later successfully imposed the need to conserve biodiversity, most notably natural grasslands. The ZAS is innovative on a regional scale because it is the first attempt to regulate agrarian activities that underpin the advancement of the agricultural frontier over the natural grasslands of the Campos. It also represents the first legal definition of the physiognomy of this herbaceous vegetation, allowing conservation measures to be taken. We explore in this paper some salient aspects of this case study, representative of the current processes of environmental knowledge production in the neo-developmentist context of South America: The contribution of natural resource conflicts in the emergence and legitimation of new environmental categories; The greater capacity of multinational companies to reshape the legislation about environment management; The intensive use of free-access environmental geographical databases (public open data) during the zoning conflict, and the general consensus about the legitimacy of their use. We highlight how this use creates new ways of measuring environmental vulnerability and allows actors to implement new environmental strategies. In spite of being generally conceived as a factor of democratization of information and empowerment, environmental open data may reinforce asymmetries between actors in environmental controversies and the processes of knowledge production.

This paper proposes an emergent set of methods for Visual Anthropology through which to generate new encounters with and knowledge in possible and uncertain futures. These methods are grounded in ‘computational polyphony’, a mode of practice that the authors have developed to facilitate emergent and relational ways of engaging with fieldwork recordings that are orientated around an appreciation of multi-perspectivity. The paper explains the concepts behind these methods and their alignment with diffractive ethnography. It traces their development through experimental practice enabled by the Polyphonic Documentary project and applies insights gained from this project to a place-based ethnographic study of energy futures. The argument is made that computational polyphony is a valuable tool through which to consider preferred futures in ways that take into account a multiplicity of perspectives across both the human and the more-than-human.

La producción de conocimientos inscripta en el binomio modernidad/colonialidad ha condicionado nuestra forma de ver, pensar, sentir e interpretar el mundo. Desde esta matriz de pensamiento, el mundo llamado «objetivo» es un mundo muy alejado de la experiencia humana. Es un mundo inventado por un sujeto que se piensa a sí mismo como «observador neutro». Como lo señala Mignolo (2014), las políticas teo y ego lógicas del conocimiento se basaron en la supresión de la sensibilidad y la localización geo-histórica del cuerpo. He aquí la paradoja de la Modernidad: por un lado crea al sujeto cognoscente y al mismo tiempo lo elimina del proceso de producción de conocimientos. El sujeto es pensado como una superficie reflectante. Es capaz de formarse una imagen de la naturaleza externa, anterior e independiente de él. Siguiendo esta lógica de pensamiento, las Ciencias Sociales se han distanciado de aquello sobre lo cual teorizan. Han puesto al mundo y lo que acontece en él en situación de lejanía y extrañamiento, con el supuesto de construir un conocimiento científico objetivo y fiable. El Trabajo Social no ha quedado ajeno a este proceso de colonialidad del saber. Este trabajo intenta ser un aporte al proceso de construcción de conocimientos en clave decolonial. Esto necesariamente implica un giro epistemológico en la producción de conocimientos. Implica también pasar de la disciplina a la indisciplina. Para este trabajo, nos basamos en contribuciones de la epistemología del sur, la epistemología feminista y la llamada epistemología otra o pensamiento fronterizo.

The expansion of the design field and the complication of design issues require new design knowledge, and design research in practice is the main way of new design knowledge production. This study conducts multi-level research on the knowledge production phenomenon in practice-based design research, establishes new design research modes from the perspective of knowledge production, and explores the corresponding design research project management strategy. The research purposes of this study are: discovering the mechanism for new knowledge production in practice-based design research; defining the classification of practice-based design research modes based on knowledge production characteristics; and offering design research strategy recommendations from a knowledge production perspective. Aiming at the above research issues, from the perspective of knowledge production, this research applied the new production of knowledge theory and the Legitimation Code Theory. Three theoretical models are proposed, which are knowledge production cross-border model, knowledge production heterogeneity model, and knowledge production process model. Then, the three theoretical models are applied to analyse six design research cases. The conclusion discovered the knowledge production mechanism in practice-based design research, that is, the purpose of research determines the cross-border mode of knowledge production; the quality of design research conclusions is related to the heterogeneity of knowledge production; the knowledge production process contains multiple iterations of semantic waves, and produces powerful knowledge and contextual knowledge. Based on this discovery, four practice-based design research modes are proposed.KeywordsDesign knowledgeKnowledge productionPractice-based design researchResearch strategy

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama, kokia socialumo samprata remiasi socialinės epistemologijos teorijos ir kaip ji yra suderinama su žinojimo koncepcijomis. Analizuojami du socialinės epistemologijos variantai – S. Fullerio sociologinis natūralizmas ir A. I. Goldmano veritizmas. Abu klasikinės epistemologijos individualizmą suvokia kaip pagrindinį jos trūkumą, kuris neleidžia jai atsiliepti į šiuolaikinės „žinių“ visuomenės realijas. Siekdami šį trūkumą pašalinti, jie „socializuoja“ epistemologiją: Goldmanas įtraukia į ją socialinę dalį, tyrinėjančią socialinių veiksnių įtaką žinojimui, suprantamam kaip teisingas įsitikinimas, o Fulleris patį žinojimą apibrėžia socialiniais terminais. Straipsnyje analizuojami abu šie epistemologijos socializacijos variantai jų vidinio nuoseklumo ir epistemologijai atveriamų perspektyvų požiūriu.