My Blog
Keynote Speaker Artificial Intelligence: AI Day by rms/RMV
When rms GmbH was looking for a keynote speaker for its company-wide AI Day, the requirement was clear: the employees needed both a comprehensive introduction to the topic of artificial intelligence and a balanced perspective between hype, criticism and reality. Instead of a single keynote, I worked with the team to develop a format consisting…
The Beginning and the End of Foresight
Increasing the Real-World Impact of Futures Thinking As a foresight practitioner with over a decade of experience, I’ve noticed a recurring issue in our field: the lack of lasting impact of our work. Let me paint a familiar situation: The scenarios are done. You might even have done some backcasting. The report is written, including…
BOOX Palma: An eInk Android Reader for Serious Digital Reading
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with digital reading. Yes, I’ve been a Kindle user for almost two decades – there’s something magical about eInk that just works for my brain. But I’ve always felt constrained by Amazon’s walled garden, especially as my reading habits spread across newsletters, digital libraries, and various reading apps. What…
Futures as a Mirror of Society
I was on the Tech & Trara podcast recently to talk about critical futures. If you don’t understand German, I’ve summed up some of the points in this article. Images of the future shape our ideas of possible futures and profoundly influence our societal behavior. This insight, first articulated by sociologist Fred Polak in the…
No such thing as “future-proof”
That’s it. It’s relatively easy. There’s nothing that can be future-proof. This is true regardless of the promises made by marketing materials or keynote speakers. We can prepare for different futures. We can work on resilience, antifragility, or adaptability. But there is no way to ensure that anything from an organization to a building or…
What are Critical Future Studies?
In this article I describe Critical Future Studies based on the work of Inayatullah, Grunwald and Goode and Godhe. The field of futures studies describes ‘the scientific study of possible, desirable and probable future developments’ (Kreibich 2006). While most futures studies have focused on using scientific methods to create new images of the future (e.g.…
Future Imaginaries – A definition
As part of my Master’s thesis, I studied future imaginaries (see here). ‘Imaginary’ has been an established sociological term for quite some time and has been particularly influenced by Charles Taylor. He has worked on ‘social imaginaries’. In general they can be described as follows:
