Interview with Joice Preira, researcher in the field of Futures Studies and specialised in Strategic Foresight, Co-Director of the Speculative Design Hub of the Italian Institute for the Future

If we do not think about our future, someone else (or something else) will do it for us. We have the power to decolonise futures, avoiding roads already written, but to do so we need new skills, from the field of Futures Studies and Foresight, while counteracting the emerging phenomenon of “futureswashing“, a neologism introduced by Joice Preira, a researcher in the field of Futures Studies and specialising in Strategic Foresight, Co-director of the Speculative Design Hub of the Italian Institute for the Future, and developed – making it a real literacy project – with Arianna Mereu, trends expert consultant, Visual Language teacher, Trends Forecasting and Strategic Foresight, recalling the better-known greenwashing – façade environmentalism – and, more generally, the verb to whitewash (to whitewash, to give “a coat of white” in the sense of “to disguise, cover, hide”) applied to Futures & Foresight (thus indicating a kind of ‘whitewash ability’, those that Alex Fergnani, researcher on Corporate Foresight and Futures Methods attributes to “pop futurists” or “charlatan futurists”) and to the ways in which companies today approach the future: they all talk about the future but those that methodically explore futures are very rare.

“Futurists (practitioners in the field of forecasting based on Futures Studies and Foresight) do not make any predictions about the future, simply because the future does not exist and even if we wanted to attempt to predict it, we would never have all the information available to contemplate all the variables at play,” explains Joice Preira. “However, we are all aware that the choices made today correspond to an alternative possible future. That is, we know that what we choose to do in the present generates a series of impacts and conditions our future. Yet… more and more often we choose to become helpless spectators of a future written and decided by others. We must take back our ability to choose and decide, aware that we can “hack” these already written futures and anticipate changes“.

What Joice Preira is referring to is the idea of breaking out of the mould according to which we are led to think that the future only has a temporal dimension, starting to conceive of the future as an occupiable space and, as such, colonised by some to the detriment of others (we are getting a taste of this in this historical era with Big Tech that is pushing – more or less consciously – towards a future characterised by economic oligopolies capable of influencing the political and social life of people and entire nations).

Futures Literacy

What futurists do is to decolonise (and teach to decolonise and haker) futures, starting with the realisation that there cannot be a single predetermined future but an infinity of possible, alternative, potential, desirable futures… “The future is not linear, it is a set of alternative realities that we have to learn to imagine and explore from different perspectives and “lenses” (social, economic, political, environmental, technological, legal and ethical according to the so-called STEPLE analysis, an acronym for Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Legal, Ethical),” explains Joice Preira.

To learn how to imagine and explore possible futures we need new skills and a new cultural mindset, we need a real Futures Literacy, the so-called Futures Literacy, not to be understood merely as a basic knowledge of a theory or concept, but a real theoretical and practical education of the Futures & Foresight approach and methods. “The process of literacy is a means of civic emancipation and freedom: just as learning the alphabet opens the door to reading, knowledge, understanding, and the formulation of thought, literacy to futures allows us to learn to anticipate the world to come,” invites Joice Preira to reflect.

A journey far from complete… in fact, it has only just begun and takes time to produce its effects. “What we need to do in this period of ‘interregnum’ is to make sure that this literacy gets rid of the insidious futureswashing that is already manifesting itself by causing even more confusion in people, companies and social, economic and political organisations, which have not yet had a chance to learn about, delve into and ‘get familiar’ with Futures Studies and Foresight,” is Joice Preira’s warning.

Everyone is talking about the future, companies, brands, advertising messages of all kinds and predictions by experts and analysts. There is talk of the “future of work“, the “future of retail“, the “future of social networks“, the “future of food“, the “future of mobility“… and so on, the list could even stretch to infinity if the imagination were not in danger of running out of steam.

“But these are all one-sided narratives, which well demonstrate what it means to colonise the future… often for that matter with narratives tainted by (sometimes unconscious) prejudice,” Preira warns.

Let us take the example of the future of food. The predominant narrative goes towards a future of protein food from insects and so-called ‘cultured meat’, but this is only one of the possible scenarios that, moreover, is not even global in nature (this type of narrative only concerns certain geographical areas of the Earth). “Too often, narratives of the future are not inclusive, much less take diversity into account,” points out Joice Preira. “This is because they are narratives that lack any rigor of method in Futures & Foresight and are constructed simply by projecting some of the most obvious trends of the present onto the future in a linear fashion. But history has already taught us that this approach is no longer sufficient to anticipate changes and cope with them in the best possible way. We cannot simply project into the future what we know of the past and observe in the present, we must make an extra effort, a creative, imaginative effort, of qualitative exploration starting from what we do not know at all‘.  

“The risk of this ‘pop futurism’ is that the discipline and the rigorous methods are not fully understood and that people and companies get ‘burnt out’,” is Joice Preira’s concern, “as happened in the past with other disciplines. Let’s think of Design Thinking, before it could really be perceived as a rigorous and professional method, we had to go from the widespread perception that associated the method with a fun session of playing with coloured sheets… it took years of ‘cultural battles’ by professionals with expertise and experience to recognise – outside of niche professional contexts – the value of the discipline and method. I hope that the road to Futures Thinking can be less tortuous‘.

Joice Preira: ‘Generosity to nurture a true culture of change’

The fight against futureswashing, in Joice Preira’s vision, also involves the willingness of today’s professional futurists to open up generously to democratise futures studies and foresight: “We must learn to share more, to be generous by making access to our theoretical knowledge ‘open’ and also passing on practical experience within a real community. We should not be afraid of losing markets but help to develop new ones‘.

Today there are so many different approaches, even recognising that there is no one better than another and that contamination of method is enriching is a necessary opening. “Sometimes I witness first-hand some closures and rejections towards new or alternative methods compared to the ‘classic literature’ of Futures Studies,” confesses Joice Preira, “but I am firmly convinced that diversity (from all points of view) should be encouraged and even ‘pushed’, which is why I move courageously even in environments where I know I am not entirely welcome and accepted.”

After all, the decolonisation of futures also requires courageous and somewhat countercultural choices.