Update: December 2022 – slow archaeology

“Our brains aren’t designed for multitasking”, my dear friend Cliff Nass, mathematician, cognitive scientist and psychologist, warned me a good long while ago – and he’d written a book about it! “It will slow you down and cloud your reasoning.” OK — I’m still working on the same big three projects as back then. But…

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…

strategic foresight|design thinking – online course

Today we launched our new online class with Stanford Continuing Studies – [Link]. Strategic Foresight and Design Thinking Here’s how Tamara (Carleton) and I describe what we have to offer: “We live in an interconnected world where the old answers don’t seem to apply, where even successful businesses need to embrace radical change, where global…

foresight and innovation – the automobile

Foresight and Innovation returns to Stanford With Stanford colleagues Bill Cockayne and Tamara Carleton, I have started to revive our research interest in Foresight and Innovation, anticipating, plotting future scenarios, as a part of the Center for Design Research. Bill pioneered this effort when we worked together in Stanford Humanities Lab with Jeffrey Schnapp and…