Postgraduate Course: Building Near Futures (fusion online) (EFIE11030)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh Futures Institute |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
| Course type | Online Distance Learning |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 10 |
ECTS Credits | 5 |
| Summary | This course will develop students' agency and critical competencies in envisioning, articulating, and questioning ideas about the future. By introducing futuring frameworks, methods and tools, it will equip students to investigate future scenarios, challenges and controversies with and for society. It explores how futures methods - including creative and experiential methods - can generate insights that can be implemented in the present to effect real world change. In teams, students will create fragments of near future worlds, and work together to display those fragments in an online, near future publication or gallery. |
| Course description |
The course introduces the students to qualitative futuring frameworks, concepts and methods (e.g. Three Horizons, Experiential Futures, Design Fiction, Weak Signals, Anticipation), and to practice-based creative and experiential futures enquiry, as a part of the EFI masters core.
The course combines classroom and online teaching, interdisciplinary teamwork, experiential learning through practice-based enquiry, the production of public outputs, and reflection on those experiences. Over the duration of the course, students will have engaged actively, through seminars and group work in future-scoping and creative enquiry.
Students will apply futures methods to investigate challenge themes and datasets introduced elsewhere in the EFI shared core, and to develop future scenarios, challenges and controversies suggested by these themes/datasets. The students develop understanding of how narrative, imagery, design fictions, and other creative methods can give tangible form to abstract concepts and create fragments of future worlds. They will learn how futures methods can be applied to investigate entanglements of data, people, algorithms and situations, and to give people agency over change that is happening today.
They will be introduced to experiential learning through a public, online gallery/publication, and an alternative approach to thinking about the future as a collective exercise. The model of an online, near future gallery/publication enables the students and audience to suspend disbelief and take risks, while the challenge themes and datasets ground the futuring process in pressing issues of global relevance faced today.
Student learning experience:
Over the duration of the course, students will have engaged actively, through seminars and group work, in future-scoping and challenge definition. They will be introduced to experiential learning through a public output and associated launch event, and an alternative approach to thinking about the future as a collective exercise. The course will entail hybrid delivery (physical/online), with group-to-group interaction between co-present and remote students and through practical group work. The gallery/publication will create a shared experience and platform connecting online and hybrid participants.
An annual EFI futures gallery/publication will provide an output and stimulus for the masters course, and a focal point in the academic year for EFI more widely. This public output will signpost the challenge themes and datasets for the year, and will be a point of synthesis when the pathways meet. It will be an antenna to bring an influx of new energy, ideas, people, stimuli into the masters programme, and an imaginative way for more people and organisations to be a part of the EFI community. Taken together, each annual gallery will build a repository that is legacy for EFI. Students can look back at how the futures change over the years, and explore correlations with the present day.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) - Online Fusion Course Delivery Information:
The Edinburgh Futures Institute will teach this course in a way that enables online and on-campus students to study together. This approach (our 'fusion' teaching model) offers students flexible and inclusive ways to study, and the ability to choose whether to be on-campus or online at the level of the individual course. It also opens up ways for diverse groups of students to study together regardless of geographical location. To enable this, the course will use technologies to record and live-stream student and staff participation during their teaching and learning activities. Students should note that their interactions may be recorded and live-streamed. There will, however, be options to control whether or not your video and audio are enabled.
As part of your course, you will need access to a personal computing device. Unless otherwise stated activities will be web browser based and as a minimum we recommend a device with a physical keyboard and screen that can access the internet.
As part of your course, you will need access to a personal computing device. Unless otherwise stated activities will be web browser based and as a minimum we recommend a device with a physical keyboard and screen that can access the internet.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Engage critically with futures frameworks and methods e.g. Three Horizons (Futures literacy).
- Develop a future scenario, challenge or controversy prompted by a challenge theme and/or dataset (Analytic skill).
- Critically evaluate implications of that future concept for decision-making and action in the present. (Analytic skill).
- Draw on and apply relevant skills and perspectives to creatively investigate and articulate the future concept in any media and form. (Creative skill).
- Work, with peers from across multiple disciplines, to develop and frame an output for presentation within an EFI futures gallery or publication. (Engagement skill).
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Reading List
Indicative Reading List:
Candy, S. (2014). Experiential futures. The Futurist, 48(5): 34-37.
Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Ehn, P., Nilsson, E. M. & Topgaard, R. (2014). Introduction. In: Ehn, P., Nilsson, E. M. & Topgaard, R. (eds.). Making Futures. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 1-16.
Hemment, D. (2011). The FutureEverything Manual. FutureEverything and Cornerhouse Books, Manchester.
Hemment, D. (2020). Reordering the assemblages of the digital through art and open prototyping. In Leonardo, MIT Press, Cambridge.
Hiltunen, E. (2008). Good Sources of Weak Signals: A global study of where futurists look for weak signals. Journal of Futures Studies, 12(4), pp. 21-44.
National Intelligence Council (1997) Global Trends.
Nesta. (2013). Don't stop thinking about tomorrow: a modest defence of futurology
Nesta. (2019). Our futures: by the people, for the people.
Sharpe, B. (2013). Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope. Triarchy Press.
Shultz, W. (2012). The History of Futures in Association of Professional Futurists. The Future of Futures. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Students will develop key knowledge skills and understanding through actively trialling futuring methods which will involve analysis of readings, presentations and the production of research material (SCQF characteristic 1 and 2).
They will deal with complex issues and make informed judgements in the absence of complete or consistent data (SCQF characteristic 3).
They will develop generic and cognitive skills through the generation of responses to real world problems (SCQF characteristic 4).
Working in small interdisciplinary teams, they will develop communication, autonomy, accountability and skills in working with others (SCQF characteristics 4 and 5). |
| Keywords | EFI,Postgraduate,Future,Agency,Project-based,Experiential,Change,Society,Practice |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Drew Hemment
Tel:
Email: drew.hemment@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | |
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