Futures Thinking: A Bibliography
Jamais Cascio
2010-04-28 00:00:00
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As you probably picked up from earlier entries in the Futures Thinking series, foresight work is intensely information-based. If you're going to make grounded projections of future possibilities, you have understand both what has led us to the point we're at today, and what kinds of issues seem to be shaping up as emerging drivers. A few pieces to trigger some creative thoughts can help, too.

As I suggested in Futures Thinking: Scanning the World, a good deal of the reading you'll be doing will be in the form of websites and journals. This isn't surprising; part of the service provided by foresight workers is sensitivity to early warnings of big changes.

It will be tempting to focus on science and technology materials, in part because there tends to be an overlap between people interested in futures work and people interested in new tech toys, and in part because the pace and pattern of change is easier to see in science and technology than it is in many other realms. It's not necessarily more "objective," but it's perceived as less ambiguous.

Many futurists use a checklist approach to make sure they're covering a sufficiently wide set of topics, in terms of both research and brainstorming during a foresight exercise. The traditional heuristic is STEP: Society, Technology, Economics, and Politics. In the 1990s, this was expanded to STEEP: Society, Technology, Economics, Environment, and Politics.

It's not hard to find futurists using their own personal variations on this theme -- for a while, I played with SCEPTIC: Society, Culture, Environment, Politics, Technology, Infrastructure, and Commerce. It's actually kind of amusing to see what kinds of acronyms you can come up with that both make sense and tell a bigger story. (One off the top of my head: PLANET -- Politics, Law, Arts, Nature, Economics, Technology.) But whatever your method, the goal is to make sure that you're covering a sufficiently wide array of issues, and not just those of narrow interest to your industry or personality.

As useful as websites and journals are, there's real value in books, too. You need to recognize that the copyright date on a book reflects when it came out, not when it was written -- assume that the information in the book is at least a year older than the copyright date, and possibly two. The goal, then, shouldn't be to look at books as guides to cutting edge information, but as sources of useful interpretation and analysis.

Books are also useful for discussions of practice -- that's pretty timeless -- as well as inspiration (here, largely fiction).

What follows is a short -- and rather incomplete -- list of books I've found especially interesting in my work. I would love to hear what other books you think I should check out...

Read the rest here