How to Invent the Future in 6 Easy Steps (2024)

A risky presidential candidate. New legislation for labeling GMO foods. A social injustice demanding a response. All these things challenge us — personally and collectively — to envision a future for ourselves. What are our hopes and fears? What are the consequences of the choices we make? What do we want the world to look like 10, 20, 50 years from now?

Nothing could be more important than planning for the future. Yet we’re rarely offered pragmatic tools for building the future we want. Yes, there are academics and experts who are devoted to studying and envisioning the future—a discipline called futures studies, or futurology. (Watch futurist Stuart Candy’s TEDx talk, “Whose future is this?” and artist and engineer Natalie Jeremijenko’s TED Talk “The art of the eco-mindshift” for more.) But the rest of us? We’re mostly shooting in the dark.

Enter The Extrapolation Factory — a design studio that develops methods for engaging the general public in hands-on futures research. Since 2012, designers Elliott P Montgomery and Chris Woebken have been organizing experimental group events that streamline and simplify futures research methods so that anyone — from Brooklyn public school students to New York City emergency management experts to climate researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and beyond — can try their hand at envisioning future scenarios based on present-day factors.

Woebken and Montgomery want to make expert futures research methods accessible so that absolutely anyone can take part in shaping our tomorrows. They’ve just assembled The Extrapolation Factory Operator’s Manual, a new book that shares ideas and strategies culled from think tanks and professional futurists — plus the techniques they’ve developed along the way for getting regular folks inspired to participate in hands-on futures explorations. Now anyone, including you, can start an Extrapolation Factory! Below, Woebken and Montgomery offer a basic framework to get you started thinking about the future.

As William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” Signals—ongoing developments and research that we already know about, which can help point us toward possible futures — are all around us. For example, we already know that our microbiome affects body weight, and biologists are now trying to identify microbes that might someday help people lose weight.

When we aggregate, organize and examine such signals, they can help us envision the changes that might take place over a given time horizon. That’s why, in Extrapolation Factory events, we often present sets of signals as a database that participants can add to and elaborate on.

For example, during our Junk Mail Machine project in New York City, we invited passers-by to stop and engage with a database of already-imagined scenarios to help them extrapolate services and businesses that might exist in NYC’s future. One group focused on a prediction that robots could take over one third of service-sector jobs (Irvine and Schwarzbach, The Futurist Magazine, Jan-Feb 2012). In response, they envisioned a service called 1–800-DRONEINJURY.

It can be difficult and messy to frame something as vast and unwieldy as the future. Futurists use framing tools to help rein it all in and make thinking about the future more manageable. One might apply contextual lenses — political or economic models, for example — or “time horizons” that comprise a certain number of years. Probability continuums consider how probable, plausible or possible any given outcome may be.

As part of a workshop organized with The Situation Lab at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, we asked design students to imagine products that might someday be found in a vending machine of the future, and to cluster these inventions in one of four future trajectories: continued growth, disciplined stabilization, abrupt transformation and general collapse. Participants wrote down their ideas for products and placed them within a wall diagram, allowing the group to cover the four different themes evenly.

From here, various scenarios emerged from which designers created objects out of an assortment of oddities, trinkets, foods, packaging, spare parts, craft materials, tools and adhesives. These were put on sale in a Futurematic vending machine, from which Toronto residents could purchase such items as the Medi Boop nipple-mounted early breast cancer detection device, the Childshare Info Kit (“52 parents are better than two”), and a DIY ecosystem replication kit from the Congo.

Telling a story can help make a vision of the future less technical and more personal and, hence, relatable. At the Extrapolation Factory, we pose prompts for storymaking to help workshop participants leap into crafting narratives about possible futures.

We invited visitors at the Museum of Art and Design to envision items that don’t yet exist — and then to imagine what they might be worth at a pawn shop in the future. Our Pawn Shop Submission Form solicited short stories about the future, asking participants:

1. What circ*mstances would cause their item to exist?
2. How might these circ*mstances give rise to a new need?
3. What new item might be invented to address the need they envisioned?

During the Pawn Tomorrow project, one participant imagined that we’d need to find new creative ways to cope with rapid increases of insect populations on Earth. He envisioned the “Critter Orchestra,” a device that “allows the user to compose and assign new sounds to small critters.”

How do we suspend disbelief? By making fictions real. At Extrapolation Factory workshops, we often create physical manifestations of our future visions — objects that can be picked up and handled. This lets us experience and evaluate the future as a momentary reality.

The workshop participant who envisioned the Critter Orchestra (above) translated the scenario he wrote into a description of a product—then built a demonstration of his device using a dissected alarm clock, several emery boards, empty plastic packaging and other miscellaneous items we provided at the workshop.

Physical artifacts help to make fictions tangible, but the boundary between fact and fiction gets really blurry when imaginary objects show up in contexts we perceive to be actual. During some of our Extrapolation Factory events, we’ve placed fictional future objects in such contexts as 99¢ stores, science museums and piles of junk mail in order to offer people a brief experience of a possible future.

For 99¢ Futures, we nestled fictional products like a “Home Transplant Kit” (for DIY replacement of your ageing organs) right next to the Band-Aids and first-aid kits at a family-owned pharmacy and 99¢ store in Brooklyn. We also created a custom window dressing to complete the visitor experience — including a glowing green window sign advertising “Cash for DNA.”

Once we’ve experienced future fictions in real-world settings, we can imagine how this particular scenario might feel, allowing us to reflect on the concept with experts but also to start conversations with communities. Ideally, these conversations will lead to more visionary actions and decisions.

In the project Alternative Unknowns, we built an Emergency Simulator in partnership with NYC Emergency Management to pre-enact emergency scenarios and test speculative products. Improv actors role played each situation and interpreted how custom emergency preparedness products might be used. Afterwards, the participants reviewed the experience in a roundtable discussion. An expert from NYC Emergency Management said: “There are always these gaps in large institutions, those blind spots. It’s not something that you think about enough. The use of improv and playing characters has revealed that not everyone always thinks as we think.”