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Speculative fiction, strategy planning, future studies: We work our way through the field of futurism and use its methods as our creative tool
The future: let’s patch it together from scraps. Future studies and strategic foresight are methods of guiding businesses and politics. Punk means to take the master’s tools apart, repurpose them to serve our own goals.
The compound of the words future and punk, just like in cyberpunk or steampunk, indicates that in the case of futurepunk, future itself would be setting the stage for the narrative, provide the condition against which the human beings in the world of the story have to struggle. Science fiction readership is skyrocketing. Strategic foresight and speculative design have become standard features in business events. While the former pulp genre has turned into a commodity, a new generation of creatives re-appropriates futurism into emerging subcultures of non-western identity-focused speculative fiction and art.
Futurism can be a key skill for a fast-changing humanity that has become aware of global media exposure and global threats: To dream up, conceptualize, and prototype outside the strict factual norms. The Emirates, with the strong dedication to a long-term future strategy, are the most fascinating place to study the applications of futurist thinking.
The class introduces speculative fiction and the more scientific forms of speculation. Students envision, draft and draw their own images and imaginations of alternative worlds, discuss, critique and apply the futurist methods in the good old punk tradition, taking futurism and use it for their own creations.
- Additional information: Course number, course rational, methology, assignments, grading etc.
- Bibliography
*Subject to minor modification and clarification of language. Readings/videos refer to the complete text/video except when indicated otherwise.
### Week 1: What is future (if anything at all) *Introduction: What is the future? How can we think about the future?
### Week 2: There is no future Utopia, uchronia, science fiction, speculation, exotism, escapism, Techno-determinism, Future punk
### Week 3: Futurisms Manifestos, creating the future, declaring the future, understanding what might come, Ethno- and other identity-futurisms
### Week 4: Speculative strategies and big business Paul Saffo, scenario planning, “the dark spot of the next five to ten years”, Hype cycles, Possible vs. preferable, Speculative design, Planning your startup
Draft and prototype “A thing from the future”, based on both, utopian thinking and startup ideology. The project can make use of creative writing, corporate “business planning”, visual techniques, maker tools, etc. The proposals will be presented and discussed in class before the work on the actual projects start.
### Week 5: Pace layers, history and other forms of velocity Con- and a-temporality
### Week 6: Futurist dialectics and future ecology McLuhan’s Tetrad etc.
### Week 7: The singularity is near: Messianism and eschatology (and mid term project due) Fuller, Teilhard, Kurzweil, Singularity
[### Week 8: Systematic dystopianism]( Future punk in strategy and warfare
### Week 9: What ever happens to musicians Soft signals and good narratives
### Week 10: Now Punk The weirdness of the present ### Week 11: The desert of the unreal Going really far to talk about important things
Week 12 through 14 focus on the final project.
### Week 12: Punk Patching it together
Studio class
Studio class
Presentation of the final project.