Nicole Woods

“If you want a new world, start making it right now, in whatever you are doing.” This is the best advice I ever had, it came from Brian Eno. If you imagine the world you would like to be in and start making objects, systems and collaborations that belong to that world, that world comes into being.

Why are we futuring to find solutions to the problems created by extrapolative, exponential, and extractive systems, when we should be futuring to imagine emerging novelty and construct transformative realities that would allow us to elevate our human, planetary, and universal experience above and beyond those systems?

We are wired to seek and sustain relationships and cannot survive without them. The future of the human race won’t turn on space travel or climate tech, but on our ability to attach to others. A sense that we matter, that we can call on and be called upon by others to ease burdens and celebrate joy.

Said differently, society today frames productivity in a way that only sees “doing” and excludes “being”

“The Official Future” tells us to “think exponentially, act incrementally,” beckoning us to utilize foresight in service of the ever-expanding present systems of quantifying, micro-analyzing, extracting, consuming, and automating. This way of futuring is at the heart of Epistemic Uncertainty. “The Emergent Future” instead challenges us to “ think t... See more

As author and philosopher Bonnitta Roy would say, we must “dream ourselves awake.”