Postgraduate Course: Building Near Futures (EFIE11552)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh Futures Institute |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | *EFI Skills and Methods Suite*
Please Note:
This course is only available to students enrolled on one of Edinburgh Futures Institute's postgraduate programmes.
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 prototypes for near-future worlds and work together to showcase them and engage others in critical futures thinking. |
| 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 (e.g. Open Prototyping).
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 their programmes, and to develop future scenarios, challenges and controversies suggested by these themes/datasets. The students develop an understanding of how narrative, imagery, design fictions, and other creative methods can give tangible form to abstract concepts and create prototypes for 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 showcase and an alternative approach to thinking about the future as a collective exercise. The model of the showcase 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 scenario definition. They will be introduced to experiential learning through a public output and associated showcase, which 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 showcase will build a repository of futures thinking in EFI. Students can look back at how the futures change over the years, and explore correlations with the present day.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) - Hybrid Course Delivery Information:
The Edinburgh Futures Institute delivers many of its courses in hybrid mode. This means that you may have some online students joining sessions for this course. 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 be aware that:
- Classrooms used in this course will have additional technology in place: in some cases, students might not be able to sit in areas away from microphones or outside the field of view of all cameras.
- All presentations, and whole class discussions will be recorded (see the Lecture Recording and Virtual Classroom policies for more details).
You will need access to a personal computing device for this course. Most activities will take place in a web browser, unless otherwise stated. We recommend using a device with a screen, a physical keyboard, and internet access.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2026/27, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 70 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 5,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 5,
Supervised Practical/Workshop/Studio Hours 10,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
The course will be assessed by means of the following components:
1) Group Project (30%)
Students will work in groups to produce a 5 minute video and 500 word curatorial statement.
Learning Outcomes Assessed by Component: 1, 3
2) Individual Essay (70%)
Students will produce a 1,500 individual essay.
Learning Outcomes Assessed by Component: 2, 4, 5 |
| Feedback |
Feedback on any formative assessment may be provided in various formats, for example, to include written, oral, video, face-to-face, whole class, or individual. The Course Organiser will decide which format is most appropriate in relation to the nature of the assessment.
Feedback on both formative and summative in-course assessed work will be provided in time to be of use in subsequent assessments within the course.
Feedback on the summative assessment(s) will be provided in written form via Learn, the University of Edinburgh's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Formative Feedback Opportunity:
Formative feedback is ongoing feedback which monitors learning and is intended to improve performance in the same course, in future courses, and also beyond study.
Formative feedback will be provided verbally by tutors and peers during studio sessions. |
| No Exam Information |
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
Candy, S. (2014). Experiential futures. The Futurist, 48(5): 34-37.
Candy, S., & Dunagan, J. (2017). Designing an experiential scenario: The People Who Vanished. Futures: The Journal of Policy, Planning and Futures Studies, 86, pp. 136-153.
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.
Godhe, M., & Goode, L. (2018). Critical future studies - A thematic introduction. Culture Unbound, 10(2), pp. 151-162.
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.
Hemment, D., & Manghani, S. (2025). Sensing emergence: four decades of anticipatory research from electronic arts to interpretive AI. Journal of Visual Art Practice, 24(4), pp. 365-392.
Hemment, D., Vidmar, M., Koppel, K., & Earl, S. (2024). Open prototyping: The cocreation toolkit. The New Real, (2024), 1-42.
van Lente, H., & Peters, P. (2022). The future as aesthetic experience: imagination and engagement in future studies. European Journal of Futures Research, 10(1), 1-8.
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.
Magistretti, S., Ardito, L., & Messeni Petruzzelli, A. (2021). Framing the microfoundations of design thinking as a dynamic capability for innovation: Reconciling theory and practice. The Journal of Product Innovation Management, 38(6), pp. 645-667.
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.
Vidmar, M., & Vermeylen, S. (2022). Utopia (s), Outer Space Law and Ecology. EASST Review, 41(1). |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Postgraduate,Future,Society,Gallery,Exhibition,Experiential,Agency,Change,Practice,Project-based |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Matjaz Vidmar
Tel: (0131 6)50 7792
Email: Matjaz.Vidmar@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Abby Gleave
Tel: (0131 6)51 1337
Email: abby.gleave@ed.ac.uk |
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