Studio Michael Shanks Stanford This week I am off to join Sabine (Remdisch) and colleagues as part of our collaboration — Trans-nation Co-creation. Here’s a kind of prospectus. TNCC Tour and Dialogues: A Week of Innovation, Leadership, and Foresight From June 13 to 19, 2026, the Institute for Performance Management at Leuphana University Lüneburg holds a…
JANUS Initiative
Heritage — making futures
A critical-heritage complement to the Janus Maneuver – [Link] More notes on futures studies. A second component to the same conclusion: that working with the past is a way of making futures. Convergence — the “Janus Maneuver” and heritage futures In a recent post I made the case for “The Janus Maneuver” [Link] — that…
Some archaeological notes on futures studies
The Janus Maneuver Hindsight, foresight, and futures studies Everyone, it seems, is a futurist now. Here are some loosely gathered thoughts on why an archaeology of design may be a missing foundation. These are notes – so expect inaccuracies and mistakes of memory (hopefully minor). After Janus – the divine principle of looking both back…
AI and collaboration — lessons from Stanford
Here is the keynote I presented at our reunion last week in Odense, of Danish alumni of the Stanford H-Star fellowship program (2010 to 2015). Keith Devlin (H-Star director emeritus) and Connie Svabo of the STEM Education Research Center – FNUG at University of Southern Denmark [Link], were our hosts. The program enabled about 50…
Studio update – Spring 2022
This academic year I am on sabbatical leave finishing three long-running projects and planning to focus more on applications of the archaeological imagination to matters of common and pressing contemporary concern, especially through design foresight and futures literacy. This is why I have put to one side my critical commentary on all things archaeological and…
Futures Literacy: how to decolonize the future
December 8 – 12 2020. Tamara (Carleton) and I were at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit [Link] representing our research group – Foresight at Stanford [Link]. We are standing for design foresight and what we are now calling creative pragmatics (in our forthcoming book – [Link]). Competencies, tools and techniques, mindsets not for predicting the…