A new article by UH Foresight Adjunt Professor Adam Cowart was recently published in the Journal of Future Studies. Professor Cowart teaches Design Futures and Alternative Perspectives and incorporated the research and methods introduced in this article into the curriculum of the Summer 2023 course ReStorying Futures.
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to address challenges in crafting prospective long-term stories in the Transition Design (TD) approach, and the importance of this skill set in Design Futures education in general, in order to weave long-term stories about the future in a manner that is both aspirational and compelling to inform on decision making and actions in the present. The paper contends that the challenge in this context is often not the content but the form of the story and how it is emplotted. The paper proposes the introduction of two storytelling methods to support durational and imaginative endeavors to articulate longer-term pathways: four-dimensional story arcs that add rising and falling “action” across multiple transition pathways to the future that are interdependent on each other to realize the preferred future successfully; and multi-temporal trajectories in which the traditional method of backcasting is complemented by nearcasting and middlecasting. The paper concludes with a durational storytelling prompt worksheet example to demonstrate how this approach to durational and aspirational futures storytelling can be practically applied in an academic or real-world context.
