Back in Black
Last day of 2024, above Barcelona.
2025 it is.
The end of 2024 landed hard — intensive travel, packed schedules, and the emotional drain of American political turbulence. We've since found our footing, and set new coordinates. A lot is happening outside (two fly-bys of London done already in 2025, Australia to come), but inside Changeist as well.
Year-end highlights included:
Science Comms Workshop Day at Leiden University: Scott gathered with science communicators from the university in a canal-house attic, mapping the shifting landscapes of science, technology, policy and culture. Actual gezellig workshopping with a view.
Mini-workshop on future science communication in Europe, Leiden, NL.
Madrid's Tech & Foresight Summit at IE University: Morning discussions followed by our workshop, where four teams filled the room to chart distinct European futures across varying timelines. The room was packed, and students and participants from government and industry brought great energy to their diverse three-horizon challenges.
IE University/Center for Governance of Change Tech & Foresight Summit, Madrid.
What’s Ahead
FOREVER
In the course of our Visiting Research Fellowships at UniSA in Adelaide in late 2023, we had the privilege to join in some concepting work around the next exhibition MOD. would host after the terrific BROKEN in 2024. That exhibition, FOREVER, just opened yesterday, January 14, at MOD. and explores “Beginnings, endings & everything in between”.
From the MOD. description:
“In this exhibition, experience time in new ways. Traverse past, present and future by navigating the blurred lines between these states of being. Look at the world, ourselves and our actions differently.
Evoke memories through scent. Explore the changes that mark your aging. And though it may be confronting, contemplate the end of existence.
But perhaps the future is not so set. Enter a speculative world where the end is just a new beginning. With growing technology we could go beyond death, the job opportunities are endless. Is there life to be found in the infinite expanse of forever?”
For our part, we specifically looked at what is shaping the futures of aging and end-of-life experiences, both for the individual and those who care about them. It was a moving experience from beginning to end, and we came away both more aware of the changes in our own lives and with our perspectives shifted. If you are anywhere near Adelaide in 2025, make the trip to FOREVER. You won't regret it.
Thanks to the MOD. team and collaborators. There's a little more to come on that front, but we won't get ahead of the news... :)
FACT 2025
Sliding east to Melbourne, we're also excited to be invited to join FACT 2025 (Future of Arts, Culture & Technology) at ACMI, an institution we've loved from afar, on 12, 13 & 14 Feb. This will be a double dip, with Scott participating in the Future of Media panel alongside the distinguished Angela Stengel (ABC), Stuart Buchanan (Sydney Opera House), Keri Elmsly (ACMI), and Dr. Indigo Holcombe-James(ACMI), AND a public session of Foom for registered attendees (additional cost to FACT registration), which should be exceptional fun and a learning opportunity for those who join us.
We've made some new upgrades to the Foom experience, finding novel ways to enrich the worldbuilding of the simulation and making it even more responsive to participant decision-making in real-time. FACT has some amazing speakers and sessions, including talks by Dr. Deb Chachra, Prof. Dan Hill, Adrian Hon, and many of the brightest lights in Australian arts, culture, and media. As if that's not enough, the fantastic Future & Other Fictionsexhibition is on at ACMI as well, so we will be in our element. Come!
What is Foom Again?
For those unfamiliar with Foom, it’s our strategic simulation experience that explores the future of AI that we introduced in the last edition of this newsletter. Foom is the first of hopefully a cluster of strategic simulations helping organizations deal with rapidly emerging frontier risks. To quote ourselves: “These simulations allow individuals and organizations to engage with complex, unpredictable environments in a safe yet realistic setting. By engaging participants in active, responsive scenarios that reflect future uncertainties—such as technological disruptions, geopolitical shifts, or economic shocks—they provide opportunities to test decision-making under pressure, and expose collective differences.”
Foom is contextual, designed each time around the participants and their sectors of interest. It's dynamic and responsive, with team decisions shaping the world as we play. And it's collaborative or competitive, depending on how teams position themselves.
Foom isn’t simply a card game or tabletop exercise. It’s a multi-team, multi-screen experience. It’s designed for large organizations or teams, private and public events. Likewise, it can be the anchor event of a strategy, or run multiple times for different teams or units. We have already run versions with government teams in two countries and a global content producer, and more are coming up.
What are the benefits of Foom?
•Strategic Decision-Making: Practice decisions under uncertainty to improve organizational agility.
•Stakeholder Empathy: Understand diverse perspectives to enhance collaboration and alignment.
•Systems Thinking: Explore AI’s ripple effects on interconnected systems and strategies.
•AI Governance: Gain insights into ethical, practical AI regulation and risk management.
We have built, extended and refined Foom in the last 18 months or so, learning from each playtest and session and folding these insights back into Foom’s design and mechanics to keep making it better, more valuable and more engaging.
To that end, we’ve added a blog—The Gradient—to the Foom site to document what we’re learning, how our own perspective on this tool changes, and new ways to understand it.
Feedback from Foomers.
One other important addition to Foom — a new team member, Henry Cooke, who joins us fresh off a decade with BBC R&D. We had the pleasure of working with Henry and colleagues around foresight and the futures of public service media in the past (described in Future Cultures) and we are happy to have his expertise in the mix. He will manage hands-on technical development and helping shape the experience alongside other Foom squad members Igor Schwarzmann, Susan Cox-Smith, who is now front stage, and Scott Smith, who pulls the strings backstage and shapes where Foom is headed. We’re expecting 2025 allows us to push it much, much farther (and wider).
If you are looking to stimulate your organization's approach to AI strategy, stretch your understanding of where it might be headed, and have a chance to red team your own thinking, contact us to discuss shaping a Foom experience for you. We are already delivering custom sessions, talking to exhibition and conference curators about bringing Foom to additional big events internationally, and have the road cases ready to roll.
Unexpected Endings
This is a sad note to close this newsletter on, but we can’t go without honoring the recent heartbreaking loss of a mentor, friend, and guiding light. Nicolas Nova—design educator, anthropologist, thinker, convener, author, and deeply kind human—passed away unexpectedly on December 31. Many in our community globally have been mourning this loss these past few weeks, and exchanging many fond memories, inspirations and connections we made with, through, and because of Nicolas.
We’ll share here our comments at the time we heard the news: We first connected nearly 20 years ago across the world of blogs and conferences, and Nicolas opened our eyes to the connection of anthropological practices to both the digital and cultural present and the future. It was this connection that drove us to take the leap and form Changeist, and it has been a fil rouge that has run through everything we do. Whether it was the first invite to join the Lift community, to collaborations, to friendships and conversations, to crawling the bottom of the Large Hadron Collider with him, to joining him on stage at Impakt and FutureEverything, any time spent with Nicolas was quality time. In his short life, he still left us so much new knowledge, fundamental practices, and a taste for noticing the faint signals in material culture.
Nicolas Nova, CERN, 2014.
Separately, we also want to recognize the hardships that some of our dearest colleagues and friends have been experiencing during the ongoing fires in Los Angeles this past week and a half. LA has been a longtime base for us when in the US, and many friends are experiencing the waves of loss from this disaster. A number have lost homes, some livelihoods, and all are dealing with the trauma of seeing their communities disappear in an instant, and are starting to grasp what will be a long, long tail of impacts.
If you want to do something to help and haven’t found an opportunity yet, or are looking for other ways to assist and support, this collection of GoFundMe initiatives and other support efforts is a place to start. Here’s another for GFMs below goal at the moment. Thanks to Samantha Culp for pointing us to these resources.
That’s all the news we can share for now. Wishing everyone a safe, sustaining, and successful new year, and we look forward to seeing you somewhere out there in the coming months.
Contact us if you want to discuss ways to explore your future question or challenge.
