Design for our times: workshop 3: strategic foresight
Design for our times: workshop 3: strategic foresight - Transcription
Dr. Sara Diamond: Today we meet on a virtual platform, but I would still like to take a moment to acknowledge the importance of the lands, where each of us live and work. From coast to coast in Canada, we acknowledged the ancestral and unceded territory of Inuit, Métis, and First Nations people that call this land home. For example, in Toronto, where I am located today, we are in the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat - but also in a city that is a major gathering place for Indigenous people from all over Canada, including Métis and Inuit. Please join me to acknowledge the need, to write the wrongs of the past, to engage the values, perspectives, languages and cultures which can guide and inspire us, the role of Indigenous people as guardians and stewards of the lands, and to consider how we can each in our own way, try to move forward in a spirit of reconciliation and collaboration. Thank you. So today we will briefly review design thinking. We'll then explore a successful Canadian design company. We'll move on to strategic foresight, which is the methodology that analyzes systems in order to create possible futures. We will provide some examples of ways that foresight is effectively applied. And then if we do have time we'll move on to speculative design, a growing approach to imagining and designing for the future, and that will be one of our topics in our next workshop four. So, the design thinking review.
Last workshop, we explored design thinking and undertook a design thinking exercise together. And we also sent you a design thinking toolkit in the follow-up email, which we encourage you to use. So, if you didn't get that or can't find it, please let us know and we'll send it out again. And we know that a number of you used it over the last two weeks. And thank you so much for being in touch with me. I know others will soon, and I am available as is Justine and Khalid to help you along your pathway, if you do want to use design thinking. So, we're very briefly going to review the key stages of design thinking. The first is to "empathize", to understand the human need, to gain an understanding of the problem you're trying to solve and the people who have this problem, through research and engagement with people with that specific need or set of needs.
Justine De Ridder: The second stage is "define". Where we define the problem as a human centered problem statement, focusing on insights and the needs of a particular user or users. This is where we synthesize our learned information. The third stage is ideate where by asking questions and brainstorming, we look for solutions and produce many, many ideas. And then we add constraints to narrow those ideas down to a selected few and we choose one or more solutions to go over to prototype and test.
Dr. Sara Diamond: Then we build a prototype. The prototyping phase, which is familiar to engineers, is a moment to transfer ideas into concepts that can be shared, reviewed, and validated. You produce a low fidelity version of the product or its features to investigate the solutions that have been generated during the ideation stage, and you share the prototype or prototypes with other teams and people outside of the project, including users. So, it's a virtuous circle where we move back and forth between the team and users and get more feedback. We test and evaluate responses to the complete product or the product on its path to completion, using the best solution identified. And then we iterate again and again, and then we release and test and go back to complete the cycle as we update and improve a product or a service.
So now we're going to move on to our inspiring Canadian design example. So, we share one of these at each of the workshops. And I also wear Canadian fashion design for our workshops. And my suit today is created by Comrags. And they've been around for about 25 years and they're a super design company. So, we're not going to talk about them today, but we are going to share the history of Idea Couture, which was founded by Idris Mootee. We had a chance to catch up with him and discuss the company which he sold to Cognizant in 2016 and his new work in applying AI to creative decision-making and design. But we're going to share that work with you in Workshop Four. So that's a bit of a teaser. Beginning in 2006, Mootee, brought together what he described as a “D School + B School” and he trademarked that concept. Idea Couture was the first firm in the world to combine a full design foresight and business strategy practice with engineering anchoring design in the realm of technical possibility, as well as imagination. Idea Couture relies on design engineering to make a product look the best and engineering design to make the product viable. He says the best dreamers are the ones who choose to make it work. So, he believes that you have to wed good business planning, good foresight and excellent engineering. So, Idea Couture hired foresight, strategists, anthropologists, design researchers, engineers, computer scientists, and behavioral economists and they also can draw on a wealth of subject experts, so they have an excellent network. Their goal has been to predict the unpredictable, to find what they describe as wildcards. We're going to call them weak signals when we move into our work with you. And they lead companies through contingency planning. Mootee argues that the past is not usually a good predictor of the future. So, he does not see a continuity with what happens in the past, but he obviously believes we need to analyze and research that past to understand the future. In 2021, Idea Couture focuses on service design, product innovation and corporate and organizational transformation with a focus on a number of sectors. So, patient-centric health services, encoding innovation into business practices, what they described as “orchestrating world class customer experience” and actual design. /p>
They actually are a working design company as well. And they provide insights and of course they anticipate futures. Idea Couture gives their clients maps of behavioral and industry dynamics, as well as economic impacts. They also provide maps of product or system consumer experiences. And we did some of this work again in our last workshop with design thinking. So, Idris was able to build the firm because he promoted it as a remedy to technology market failures, because new technology adoption often fails because inventors do not address human behaviors and needs. So, you can transfer a technology through strategic foresight, into the appropriate market and the appropriate receptor communities. Idea Couture scenarios look about three to five years ahead and consider human factors, technology, geopolitical issues, industry dynamics, and economy. And the latter is fundamental as companies want to be profitable as well as increasingly needing to manage and understand their stakeholders. Idris Mootee built a global company with offices in Toronto, San Francisco, New York, London, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Shanghai with Fortune 500 clients such as Johnson & Johnson, CISCO, the GAP, Bloomberg, P&G, Safeway, LG Lilly, Pepsi, Nestle and a few Canadian entities such as TD and Sick Kids. So, a global reach and a global impact. So that is our design company for this week. Justine, over to you.
Justine De Ridder: What is this discipline, that Idea Couture embodies? As Richard A. Slaughter posed in 1999, he says that “Strategic Foresight is the ability to create and sustain a variety of high-quality forward views and to apply the emerging insights in organizationally useful ways”. And Ruben Nelson describes it in stark terms. He says that strategic foresight is “the integrated capacity to consciously see, think through and do what needs to be done now, in light of the history-altering implications of the weak signals of change, while there is still time to act pro-actively and creatively – before hidden opportunities are lost and unseen threats have become crises.” . And Herman Kahn developed foresights and scenario techniques at the Rand Institute in the 1950s to plan American engagement with the Soviet Union during the Cold War – telling stories about alternate futures to help guide strategy. And Pierre Wack and his Shell colleagues in the 1970s adopted scenario planning to look at the future of the world oil supply and pricing and General Electric used scenario planning to anticipate future consumer markets. So, it has since evolved as a set of methods and tools, which are different in its human centric focus, but also with affinities to other business strategy tools that can be useful at specific points. And Sara will give you a fast review of those.
Dr. Sara Diamond: We thought it would be helpful to associate strategic foresight, both with design and also engineering and computer science and other science practices, but to get a sense of where it has adjacencies in the business world, and we'll come back to this a little bit later. So, some of us may be very familiar to, some of you, maybe all of you, to others that may be new. So here are some of the tools for the present that businesses use. So, Porter's 5 Forces study the competitive landscape very carefully. So, they're really looking at what are the threats of new entries into the market where they're currently situated? What is the status of rivalry amongst competitors, and then looking at the two tensions between consumer power on one hand and supplier power on the other. And then they look also at the threat of substitutes. So, this is really about situating themselves in the present, as they're thinking about what their next stages of action will be. Another technique that's used by many companies is called VRIO. So, it measures the kind of internal strength of the company, but also again, where it's situated within a landscape and it looks at whether its products or services are valuable, which is what people want, whether they're rare, which means that there's more competition, whether they're difficult to imitate, which means that they constantly have to be just a step ahead of a market that could move in if they are imitated. And then is the organization organized, is it capable to really deliver the product or service and what changes might need to happen. Especially if they want move up that chain from, difficult to imitate, to valuable. Then GE and McKinsey developed what they described as the nine box plots. And this considers industry attractiveness against the strength of the business unit or product to compete there. And we've just got an example here, which identifies talent within a company engaged in cultural influence. But you can see that the axes here are looking at the potential of a company versus the actual performance of the company. So those are things that would be measured using this kind of nine box plot strategy. So, business school is almost over, but we're going to talk a little bit about tools for the future. And then you'll again, see some of these reflected within some of the foresight work.
So, the three horizons framework is one that looks at: where is a business mature? Where is it rapidly growing? And where is it emerging? Healthy businesses try to have their capacity distributed amongst those three categories. Usually with less invested in the emerging business lines where they're testing and probing, and a significant investment in their mature business and the rapidly growing business. Another methodology is to look at core adjacencies, so really how to apply existing capacities into a new market or product. And I just want to say, as an aside, a lot of people in the university sector, where I'm partly situated have really been able to move effectively into online learning delivery as a kind of core adjacency to face-to-face education during COVID-19. And we'll keep a lot of that capacity as we move back to face-to-face learning. So that would be a core adjacency, an example. Another method is the blue ocean method. I happen to love this metaphor. So, in a blue ocean, there's an uncontested space. You can make the competition irrelevant. You can create and capture new demand and you're jumping as an existing company into a new kind of place. We used the example, way back in Workshop One, of Google which is really an ad revenue driven search engine essentially deciding it would move into creating Android as a platform and capturing phenomenal revenues in terms of the mobile marketplace. So that would really be looking at a blue ocean. And a red ocean is self-explanatory, it's a highly saturated environment where you're competing against a lot of different competitors.
And then the 10 times change or black swans. This is a way of describing, what one analyst said, an environment where “only the paranoid survive”. Also 10 times shift is another way of talking about it. So, it's an exponential change in environment. So, these are inflections and conditions that require major strategic responses. 2008 and the financial crisis was that; physical environmental events like earthquakes and hurricanes; over the top streaming for the media industry. And COVID-19, I have to say that every black swan event is highly contested within the foresight and business community, because people said, we saw that coming, there were all these signals, there was all this work and we'll come back to that later. But in any case, the black swan is something that really throws your environment in a spin so dramatically that you have to really make major adjustments.
Foresight use as tools from a number of these methods, but it's different because it looks at multiple possibilities and acknowledges that humans have the capacity to think about the future. Maree Conway in her book, Foresight Infused Strategy proposes a set of principles for foresight. She says, first of all, the future is not predetermined, inevitable or fixed. So again, getting back to Idris Mootee's idea that, you can't just rely on history to know what's happening in the present. So, the future is not predetermined. Secondly, the future is uncertain and unpredictable. We have choices to make today that help to set its path. Third, there are different types of futures, whether when one imagines them, where they're preposterous, potential, possible, plausible and preferable. Or Five Ps. And then that future outcomes can be influenced by action or inaction today. So, you can see how she's building this argument. And in a concept that parallels Indigenous cultural values, this is very important. We are all responsible for future generations. Of course, in Indigenous culture, the idea is seven generations ahead that you have to always look to unforeseen consequences and consider impacts well into the future when you make decisions.
Like design thinking, strategic foresight supports collaborative learning. Hence the process brings a sense of collective investment in a shared vision, and it allows for multiple futures to be balanced in planning and it places critical uncertainties and stark relief resulting in backup plans that people can draw from ,and relevant whether companies or institutions, when conditions change. We've hinted at the foresight process through our design company case study. And Justine's going to take us through the first phase of what we do with foresighting work.
Justine De Ridder: Thanks Sara. A bit similar to design thinking, in foresight, the first phase is also to really identify the problem space or the hard question that we want to explore. And these questions, as in design thinking are often also refined through the process. So, foresight is really valuable when we want to assess questions that are really complex and critical to the success of an organization, a society, government, or research units. Some contemporary examples of research spaces are the future of learning in the university sector in response to COVID-19 or the impacts and opportunities for the use of digital technology for cultural organizations. The adoption of Artificial General Intelligence and jurisdicial or operating counter balances vs super intelligent machines. The adoption of robotics supports for aging populations, the appropriate balance for Alberta in new energy investments and oil sense investments or investigating Canadians’ willingness to spend more for sustainable products, et cetera, et cetera. And as an example, all strategic plans at OCAD were developed using strategic foresight, back when Sara was president. Maria Isabella Gariboldi and her colleagues laud the way that foresight has been really important in health policy research. And they say, and I quote, “The UK government foresight program, for example, has employed a foresight approach to tackle obesity. The project involved visualizing scenarios for obesity in 2050 to build a sustained response. And the Dutch Public Health Foresight Study in 2018 was used to develop this National Health Policy Memorandum. Youth mental health as an issue largely based on qualitative analyses emerged as the unexpected and one of the salient themes, which demonstrated the importance of integrating both qualitative and quantitative approaches”.
Dr. Sara Diamond: Over to me. Thanks. So once a problem area is identified, there are six phases of a strategic foresight process. So, we're going to ask you to help us with the work over the next while, not as actively as you were required to do during the design thinking process, but certainly to help us build out some of our information here. We'll again use the chat function when we ask you questions or you can indicate that you'd like to speak. And what we're going to do is to undertake a foresight exercise relevant to the Sustainable Food Research and Technologies program at the NRC and the Protein Industries Supercluster that it works with very closely. We all eat, right? We all shop. We all are in environments where we cook, or we go to places where we receive food. So, you have some knowledge, outside of the context of the industry as a user and consumer. So, this is part of why you can help us with this exercise. Why this particular theme? Agriculture is a very significant economic sector, deeply embedded in Canada's history, and it comprises both an agriculture and Agra food systems. So, there's two different systems interrelated there. In 2018, the combined sector generated $143 billion, so that's total revenue. And then by December 2020, it had hit an all-time GDP of $48394 billion Canadian. So that's 7.4% GDP in Canada, or one out of eight jobs in this country is an agricultural work job. It's healthy and profitable, and it's experiencing strong growth and continues to in the past decade. I'm sure we also heard about labour shortages due to COVID-19 and there's a set of issues and questions, but we're going to get into those. So globally agriculture is a $2.4 trillion global business, that's US dollars. So, we're going to explore each stage through the foresight exercise. And we should say that we didn't undertake a facilitated process with a team that's undertaking this research. We invited them today if they can make it, and we do hope that they're here. Hence, what you will hear is a partial process, but we have taken it through the stages. We did undertake secondary research, including the Fit4Food 2030 EU research and reports, which include foresight exercises in the EU, funding reports and research from Canada’s Agricultural Program and Services Local Food Infrastructure Fund, Agriculture Canada's climate change and climate scenarios for agriculture, publicly available information from the Protein Industries Supercluster and the document towards a Canadian R & D Strategy for Bioproducts and Bioprocesses prepared for the NRC. We looked at international research, additional international research, like the TEAGASC and the Cawthron Institute foresight work in New Zealand and sites like Future Farmers, Trendhunter which is a Canadian trend search tool, is also helpful. And our friend Google. ResearchGate and other search engines. And we looked at CBC and other media archives. So, we did a fair amount of secondary background work.
So, the first stage is framing. It’s how to focus the questions that will be asked and to understand what the receptor audience is for that question and the outcomes of the foresight exercise. So, we're considering research in sustainable food systems in the context of Canadian agriculture with potential policy and action outcomes for government and industry. And we shaped the question as follows. What is the future of sustainable food adoption in Canada and the market for Canadian sustainable food products? That will be not only in Canada, but beyond. The first work that we undertook was horizon scanning. This is the second phase of foresight work. We've created our question. And so, in this work, we undertake an environmental scan, also known as horizon scanning to look for emerging trends, significant directional shifts across broad spectra of life. Scans are developed with real data and participatory design led field research and extensive secondary source references. We ensure breath in this stage of the foresight work by scanning across social, technological, economic, ecological, political, and values categories. And for some projects, depending on the research, you would include a legal category and for others, a big C category for culture. We identified change drivers that can lead to alternative future outcomes. And in scanning parlance, this involves identifying macro trends that will form a baseline or more likely forecast, as well as what are called weak signals. So, these are understood as disruptors. So, these are things that are coming in from the future that are going to impact your scenarios. Trends are extracted and their connections and impacts are mapped into clusters. And, we're showing you just a little bit of the last work that OCAD U did in 2017, as we were developing a new vision and a new academic plan again, using foresight tools. So, if we go back to our original question on sustainable food practices in Canada and its markets, an initial scan of the trends, again, this is using secondary sources, will be provided by Justine, over to you.
Justine De Ridder: Thank you. So, we'll start with the social trends. And so, we have pulled up a bunch of different research and kind of categorize them under, I would say overall titles. The first social trend that we see is food waste, where consumers actively try to reduce food waste by using apps nowadays, such as “too good to go” that connects them with restaurants that have available leftovers. We also see consumer choice as a social trend where research done by Forbes shows us that 65% of consumers look for products that can help them live a more sustainable and socially responsible life. You also see health and food consciousness. So, people are becoming more conscious, both of food origin, its supply chain, and also the effects it has on health. Also, we see new shopping behaviors. So COVID has either taught us to be really quick in our purchasing decisions or use online shopping thus having more access to more options and more choices. We also see home grown food. So, more individuals are interested in learning how to cultivate their own food now that they have time to care for plants, for example, and COVID-19 also has intensified it. There having been periods of food insecurity. We also see designed new food sources where design intervention in the aesthetics of new food sources also plays a key role, including to make food appear, to be like the products that they are trying to emulate. We can see that in plant-based alternatives, for example. We also see the globalization of diets, where there is an increasing need for the availability of different ingredients to allow for a more diverse cuisine. And finally, also see complete communities, which was a movement at first, but it's also both a rural and urban planning concept that meets the basic needs of its residents, and this includes food resilience. So, these are, our I would say our first social scans and social trends. And now I’d like to open it up to you to ask if there's any additional social trends that you think are relevant in this exploration.
Dr. Sara Diamond: You’re welcome to put them into the chat or if you want to, we've got the participant list open, and if you want to raise your hand, we'll ask you. You've all been probably observing what's happening with food consumption over the pandemic, and you may have some comments that you to add. Okay. We've got a good one: online communities. Yeah. So, “buy nothing group” for sharing. So yes, this is really important. This also came up when we talked about the trend towards new kinds of design practices and sustainable economies. So that's actually really a great one, thank you. Any others that you'd like to add? Circular design and, absolutely, new forms of co-op movements. We'll give it a little bit more time. Okay. We're not seeing more, but don't worry. There's lots of opportunities as we keep going for you to participate. So, thank you, Justine for that beginning, we're going to move on to technological trends. And one of them is lab grown proteins through cultured meat or meat alternatives. And so that's one area where we're seeing really significant, interesting lab-based research, of course, with all kinds of questions about adoption, but this is meat. These are meat type proteins being grown in labs. We're also seeing alternative and ethically sourced proteins. And this is certainly where the NRC is deeply embedded. So many examples, non-dairy products, nut milks, oatmeal milk, soy milk, pulse-based ingredient liquids. And flavors for pulse. New protein sources from a from high protein pea, canola, lentil, and fava beans. So, this is a really dynamic area of research. Genetically modified food. So, gene editing techniques to allow even more sophistication and this somewhat contested space, so as an alternative, non-GMO high yield crops. This is a competitive, global advantage that Canada actually has in its soybean innovation. And one of the questions that we'll talk about too, when we look at attitudes again and values is: will consumers care if something is GMO or not? And there's vast differences in Europe and Canada on this question. And the use of by-products from food processing.
So back to the circular economy, in Canada, we see the creation of micronutrient fertilizer. Again, NRC is leading some of this research using products that once were considered waste. So, for example, pea and lentil hubs. And then fiber based biodegradable packaging derived from sustainable materials from food waste also in another NRC research area and then precision farming. So, Canada has a lot of strength in this space, University of Guelph, other places across the country, U. Saskatchewan. So, this is really about increasing productivity to produce more food on less land with a smaller environmental footprint. To larger spaces, digital agriculture, which is a real game changer for farming at a global level. So, the use of data and AI through integrated platforms to make farming more transparent, affordable, and profitable and manage supply chains, including the ability to take farm level data and integrate it into AI driven predictive models for crop planning, storage and marketing. We also have the Supply chain Supercluster in Canada, that's working with companies like Loblaws to look at, how does food get to them? And then what happens after it gets to them? Other areas of really important innovation, robotic technologies for seeding and picking, drones for watering, prop testing and surveillance and 3D printed food and the digitization of food manufacturing. So those are not quite the same things, but the ability to print food, using 3D technology and model how new food will look using new sources and then deploy digitization in food manufacturing. Also advanced robotics, you can see that there's labor force displacement, in a number of these areas and the need for intensification of investment. So, we're going to do the same thing and we know that we've jumped into technology. Oh, great. We've got another comment in terms of social trends, which is using the Flip app for coupons. So that's an important one. So where are those coupons directed and are some of them actually for sustainable practices is an interesting question. So, any additions you want to make on the technology side in terms of where we think agriculture is going and the Agri-system? Give it a couple of a minute, a few seconds. I know this is more from our secondary research. GHG, reducing technology. Thank you, James. That's great. Okay absolutely. So that's another factor as we're looking at technology adoption. Super. So, Justine, I think back to you to talk about some of the economic drivers and we started, looking at the impact of agriculture in Canada and obviously, with that important an industry, government policy and we'll get to that later as part of the economic cycle, but on the economy, Justine.
Justine De Ridder: Thank you. So as part of economic trends, we see supply chain innovation and solutions to determine the performance of all elements of food processing and distribution throughout the supply chain to get the right foods processed and distributed. We also see efficiencies in organic food production, which also means that a high output production of organic food is possible at a lower cost, which breaks the rural myth that organic food can't be scaled up. And this allows us to have healthier food for more people. We also see increased wealth that derives a desire to invest and buy more meat-based products and refined and processed foods. And then, at the opposite of that, we also see low price, high calorie food. So, there's a proliferation of processed and junk foods that is often couples coupled with food deserts and the connection of those to poverty. This is a downstream economic health impact of poor diets. We also see food security, so ensuring that urban food supplies and backup plans are there in case of crisis and disasters and the need for food supply to support those living below the poverty line at the global level and in Canada as well. And this is done by breeding livestock and crops, which has an impact on climate change or aquatic ecosystems and expanded intensive farming as a response to market demands. We also see farmer activism in Canada, for example the not for profits alternative land use for sustainability or ALUS, which promotes environmentally sound practices. And if we expand a bit and look all over the globe in India, small farmers have risen up against monocultures and taxation and French farmers drove the yellow shirt or gilet jaune movement. We also see a consolidation of agribusiness, so, the end of the small farm in a way and the availability of an agricultural labour force, which is strongly impacted by immigration and national labour policies. And moreover, technology could make this labour force obsolete. So, these are our economic trends. And again, if you want to add anything, feel free to put it in the chat.
Dr. Sara Diamond: And Justine, maybe I'll just add that Canada is also leading research, the Niagara food Institute and others, on how to adapt crops and also livestock to adapt for climate change. It's not just that there's impacts on farming from climate change, but on the economic level, it's how do we adapt and how do we know that change is coming and ensure that there's resilience in what we're breeding and what we're growing? Any other comments here on economic trends that you think or see are relevant. The chat is open. Clearly when there's significant incidents like hurricanes or weather or drought, and Canada certainly experienced some of that, it has a direct economic impact. And we're going to talk about ecological in a moment. In fact, I'm going to start that discussion and, okay, beautiful! Thank you again. Here's a good one. Thanks, James. Lack of competition for consumers. Yes, this is really important. Also, if we looked at the centralization of food distribution and the kind of loss of local marketplaces and loss of farmer markets. Sobeys vs Loblaws, right? Those are really good points. Thank you. Great. We're going to move on as I mentioned to talk about ecological impacts and scientists have argued that climate neutral is not enough to impact global warming. It's important to look at every possible strategy to reduce GHG, which we've defined as greenhouse gases and CO2 emissions. So, we've seen two really important counter trends. One is the shift away from ranching and large-scale meat production towards plant-based food sources. So that is one driver. And then quite the opposite is the intensive expansion of ranching in many places like Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Australia, and the US to meet growing market demand, especially in China and India. Rising up in terms of one's economic status has led in many instances to more demand for meat and meat type products. We've also seen this tension of biodiversity farming versus monoculture. Very big tension in terms of, again, the global agricultural environment. We've seen the growth of circular farming which is ways of looking at every point within the farming cycle and ensuring that there's a cradle-to-cradle approach. NRC is leading some of that research, the reduction of plastic packaging of foods and food waste recovery. So, upcycling into new sources of packaging. Also we've seen a big trend towards urban agriculture. We'll come back to that a little bit, in a moment. So again, any additions on the ecological side that you'd like to make, we've touched on some earlier. Well, feel free to add them as we keep moving through these different trends.
So, I'm going to talk a little bit about political trends. Again, we've indicated some of these in other sections, but an interesting trend towards transparent labeling - it's a movement where there's been an insistence and an argument that sources of foods, as well as contents of the foods and the additives, and certainly information on calories and vitamins, et cetera be available. In some places that's intensified, Europe, I would say in others, it's relaxed. During the last presidency in the US there was a relaxation of labeling requirements. Food regulation, who gets to inspect, is there inspection, is it industry based? Is it government based? And other forms of reporting on the quality and also the process of food production and manufacturing.
And then farm subsidies are very important. So, treaties, national, regional and municipal policy, and again, this tension between free trade and protectionism playing out in terms of Canada and the US, the Pacific treaty and others where food was really at the core. And then global action against food as a weapon of war, as well as food being used as a weapon of war. So, Tigre being one of the saddest crises right now where we're seeing this at a current global level.
Municipal and regional policy to support short food supply chains. So, connecting local consumers with local suppliers. That's relevant to urban agriculture and we'll come back to that again also, and then the focus on rebuilding national economies coming out of COVID-19. And so, where does subsidies for food and support for local and national food businesses fit? So again, we'll just open the floor for a moment to see if there's any additions. Excellent. Thanks James, water management and quality. Thank you. That's actually another really important environmental factor. So, Justine, we need to add that to our analysis, as well as all these great points. We're going to provide this to the folks who do the work at the NRC. So, your comments are really helpful. Anything else on, on government policy that you might want to add? Energy regulation changes. Thank you. Hanan yeah. So that's another one, “Buy Local” policy, Bruno. Thank you. Okay. These are really good factors and will help to amplify how we understand this sort of economic trends. Thanks. Okay, Justine, you're going to talk about values.
Justine De Ridder: Yes. So, looking at values is always, something really interesting to do when we go through STEEP-V because we're looking at it from a human perspective. And so, when we look at values, we see the rise of environmental veganism and flexitarianism where people choose to eat mostly plant-based because of environmental concern as a primary concern and at the opposition of that, we also see the equation of wealth with a carnivorous diet. So, whilst the extremes between wealthy and poor have intensified during COVID-19, there's also a larger number of people who have entered the middle class over the last two decades, which led to an increased demand for meat and meat products. We also see responsible consumers that actively work towards lowering their ecological footprint. And this connects back to the social trend about consumer choice that we talked about. And we also see fast and convenient foods. So, there's trust in a big brand producing these fast foods. And a lot of family traditions have incorporated fast food as part of their culture and the food that they eat altogether. We also see home cooking and DIY or do-it-yourself tradition. So, individuals are getting more involved in cooking and growing their own food, we can think about the popular trend of baking sourdough bread during lockdown that I miserably failed at. We also see religious values regarding food types that also plays a big role in deciding what kind of foods are consumed and also where they're sourced from. And again, we'll open the floor. If you have any other additions in the chat.
Dr. Sara Diamond: Again, feel free to add them as we move forward. And, oh, there we go. Culture. Yes. So, from Hanan, culture, yes, absolutely. The culture of food and food as a cultural practice actually is a really important thing to think about and the pleasure and many people have lamented the loss of restaurants, for example, over the last period of time. Okay.
We're going to talk a little bit about now macro trends and we'll try and move forward relatively quickly through this. So as a reminder, our question is what is the future of sustainable food adoption in Canada and the market for Canadian sustainable food products? Big trends: what some called the Anthropocene. It's a term that The Geological Society agreed to use about four years ago. So, it's one where human activity is impacting the global environment for the first time. Of course, with global warming and increased unpredictable climate, which affects food production. Second is urbanization with all the respected food demand that goes with this and loss of agricultural land and farmers. Globalization, so the fragmented production across global value chains and tensions with protectionism. The digitization of agriculture, and then gene editing. So, the ongoing manipulation essentially of the agricultural gene pool.
I think we're going to then talk a little bit about weak signals which we will provide, through a couple of, three examples, actually. So, one is a micro alga, which is a burger that Sophie’s bio nutrients company created, which is a next generation sustainable urban food production technology company that's based in Singapore. So, this is making burgers from micro algae. The second is the Planty cube, that won the consumer electronics show award, best of innovation award. It's so interesting that consumer electronics, some of us who've come out of a computer science and engineering background, have spent a lot of time studying what happens at CES. It shows really big trends or conversation within the industry. So that an agricultural tool, essentially, this is a plantation wind farm using hydroponics and vertical farming that is built based on stacked two-inch tubes that supply the growing environment and data about the growth. It allows the people to start and grow their own farming businesses at a greatly lower cost and in less time with a high efficiency rate and a lot less disease.
So, the question in the chat is what is a weak signal? Thank you very much. So, a weak signal is something that is a practice or something that's happening on the margin that has the potential of really accelerating to have an impact in the sector in the future. So, the first one is this really interesting commercialization of algae-based food. So, we've seen it really in the lab and now we're seeing it move into the consumer market. And then the second is a technology, the Planty cube, which is really super cheap and allows this idea of small farming and very concentrated farming that can happen kind of replacement for hydroponics, which if you've ever tried it is intensive energy intensive, expensive, difficult. So, here's a way to really look at that within an emerging technology.
And we had a great comment here from Andrew. Did the loss of plant diversity create vulnerabilities to regional disease and blight surface in our study? Yes, it did. But we looked at that as more of a way of thinking about biodiversity versus monoculture. So, thank you. And we should have explicitly raised that, Justine. So again, we're really taking your chat comments into account as we look at how to strengthen this work that we've done. So, thank you very much. And completely relevant, you must be psychic. Thank you.
So, our next, what we've described as a weak signal is actually a major movement, but it's in the research world. Which is iBOL, which is the international barcode of life. So, this consortium and its BIOSCAN activities is an alliance that brings together nations who are trying to transform biodiversity science, to support biodiversity science and build the DNA barcode reference libraries. So, the sequencing facilities, the informatics platforms and the analytic protocols and international collaboration required to create an inventory assess bio-diversity. These are major bio surveillance projects and they're looking at over 250 million specimens and the expansion of the DNA barcode reference library 2.5 million species. This means that you can do exactly the kind of research that Andrew is talking about, which is to understand how those species are diminishing and how they're being impacted as we look at forces like climate change, genetics sampling and manipulation. And then the final weak signal, is looking at urban agriculture on steroids. Detroit - maybe literally, steroids were used to grow plants, but this is an urban economy. Detroit, which was in deep decline and part of its resurgence has been through really aggressive urban agriculture. So, there we go. So, Justine, over to you to talk about the drivers.
Justine De Ridder: Thank you, Sara. And I'll use the occasion to jump back on the question of Hanan about weak signals, to differentiate them with drivers. So weak signals, you could see them as a sign of the future that you have now in the present. So, it's a little dot on the horizon that is coming to the present and showing this is where something could grow into, and drivers are different from weak signals because they are a larger undercurrent that are fostering this trend. So, they're the underground movements that move with us as we move into the future. And so, these are often systemic and involve complex interrelationships with multiple groups and structures. And so, when we do a driver’s analysis, we look at these forces and how each may influence several trends due to their large scale and complexity. And so, we use drivers and trends to build an enriched descriptions of possible futures, important plural, to better understand how different systems and actors will behave and interact with those futures. So, identifying these influential forces that are coming on the horizon is also really critical in developing sustainable innovation strategies. And so, we defined polarities. So that the most important ones can be chosen and laid out across axes that we'll do a little bit later. Examples such as you see on these slides could be economic restructuring, cultural values civic, instability, institutional (dis)integration, resource availability, or scarcity, technological connection, or disruption, rising global powers versus, an old-world order, demography shifts such as aging population.
And so, jumping back into the research that we are undertaking altogether, some of the important drivers for our food specific research are population growth, economic impacts of climate change on agriculture. So that is through water shortages, extreme temperatures, for example, the digitization of agriculture and supply chains, which is utilizing new technologies, food price instability, cultural values, and food culture, and genetic editing. And so, at any additional drivers that's you think are important for us to add, and I'll leave the chat open as I move forward, but feel free to drop it in and we'll make sure to integrate it in our research.
Then the next, I would say movement, after drivers are critical uncertainties. And so, these are also drivers of change that may threaten the logic of how we see things by virtue of legacy, institutional operating principles, disciplinary, or any other assumptions. And we use these to identify future possible worlds that we might find ourselves in. So, in our context, critical uncertainties are really changes in agricultural practices and supply chains, climate change impacts and also its impact on sustainability and the use of certain materials, the scalability or lack thereof of technological innovation and shifts in cultural values of consumers.
Dr. Sara Diamond: Yes. We've essentially boiled things down and gone from the sort of first stage, which was looking at the drivers and then pulling that down to narrow that to some extent into critical uncertainties that we're going to work with very shortly as you'll see. But we're just going to divert for a moment and talk about one other set of foresight tools, which broaden and deepen the scanning process. And these are systems maps. So essentially mapping the system is like creating an organizational chart, but one that also places the organization in the context of its external environment. It outlines the forces factors and stakeholders and the relationship considering the issue being studied. So, we're going to show you very briefly two OCAD University’s Strategic Foresight Lab uses of what they call Gigamap techniques, which were developed by Birger Sevaldson of the Oslo School of Architecture and Design to build, descriptive systems maps of the social economic or scientific systems of concern. And these maps show patterns and extract points of leverage for systems change. So that's what their job is. And you can see that on this slide. And again, you'll have this as a takeaway for your reference. So, here's the first one that we're going to show you. This one is called “going viral”. It looks at the sources of misinformation and means to counter these during COVID-19. It's looking at how formal and social media can empower the public to manage pandemics. So, it's looking at the positive side of social media, and it's also looking at the challenges of disinformation and it looks at media sharing literacy, who produces media, and some of the flows there.
And then the second very briefly, the second example is looking at the circular economy. And in this instance, it's not looking at agriculture as much as the circular economy within the idea of the built space in urban environments to unleash value and wealth using sustainable principles. They're quite engaging. They're really bring together infographics, as a methodology with information flows. So, we don't want to get diverted here. We're going to come back to forecasting possible futures, but we just wanted to give you this as a reference. And return to our process and our case study.
Critical driving forces are laid out in polarities. The next step is to lay these out in quadrants, which are significantly different from each other. Participants create four possible futures, which are positioned along the quadrants and respond to four dynamic tensions and the scenarios describe what life will be like, in one's organization, in an institution, in a business, in a nation, in a sector in each of these scenarios. So, you're going back to answer the question that you've posed by building the scenarios and one textures each with trends and drivers, and these worlds are written as fictions. They're often accompanied by sketches or images. And preceded by a brainstorm which generates ideas, which can be narrowed based on agreed upon criteria, such as the importance or the likelihood of those criteria happening. One asks, “what if”, questions such as governmental change or policy change. So, we've, we talked earlier about protectionism versus globalization or globalism or an unexpected parasite. So that came up earlier as another impact through loss of biodiversity, for example. So, these would be used to sharpen the description, and these are the critical driving forces that we've used to address the question: what is the future of sustainable food adoption in Canada and the market for Canadian sustainable food products?
We've chosen from highly local ways of growing and consuming food to highly global networks of production and distribution, and from emphasizing monocultures to consciously fostering biodiversity. So again, highly global networks of production distribution to highly local, and then from emphasizing monoculture to consciously fostering biodiversity. Critical uncertainties that we previously identified and play a central role in the example we've created are:. -Changes in agricultural practices and supply chains, - Climate change - so considering sustainability, and then what that means in terms of farming and agribusiness practices. The materiality of climate change. - Scalability of technological innovation, so new food types and sources and digitization. The ability to scale and then - Shifts in cultural values of consumers.
I know I'm revealing what you heard before, but just provide some context. We're going to now go through the quadrants, so we'll put them up and you can see what they are, and I'm going to read through our fictions that we've created. So, in the upper left is Monoculture. But localized monoculture. Okay. Now you're seeing all of it, so that's great. So, we're going to start on the upper left and we called it Garden City. So, keep that in your mind. And then we're going to go back and look at the qualities. So back to that Khalid, please. In this scenario, city, governments, and industry partners strive for carbon neutrality and the means to feed the growing population by emphasizing urban agriculture and highly technological ways of farming processing and distributing food. Even beyond the city. Cities become food providers, which creates tensions with farmers who are facing a new kind of competition. Community co-ops committed to biodiversity and heirloom plants are pitted against agribusiness. So, this is agribusiness monoculture, the Garden City.
Okay, we're going to go to the lower left. And in this instance, we called it Slow Growth and its qualities are biodiversity and it is highly localized. So, in Slow Growth, food insecurity and environmental concerns drive people to invest time and energy into growing their own food. The complete community movement provides them with available gardening and growing spaces, feeding local neighborhoods. Canadian food industries face diminished, consumer demand however, and this method is highly localized. Bio-diverse method does not provide enough surplus food to feed people around the world, which leads to a growing number of climate refugees and intensifies the global health crisis. Food deserts also remain in parts of cities. When people can't afford this kind of farming and cultural practices.
So, we'll now go to the upper right. Which again, we're looking at monoculture and in a globalized context and we've called this Lab Meals. So, in Lab Meals, technological advancements have made manufactured lab food a commodity around the globe because it is a simple, regulated and low-cost way of consuming proteins and other nutrients. It is widely adopted by the public, which leads to the amplification of fast-food culture. Albeit a healthier one. Monocultures and global supply chains using AI ensure efficient production and distribution of goods. Canadian food industries do well due to research in plant-based proteins. Effective advertising, social media promotion and packaging build the global market, despite the initiatives to encourage recycled and biomaterials packaging, however, global adoption is uneven of these new practices. And this new way of distributing food generates waste and pollution.
And then we'll go to our lower right, which again is biodiversity, but globalized. And we've called this the Magic Mushroom. In the Magic Mushroom, new alternative materials, such as plants algae or mushrooms are being experimented with all around the world to create replacements for meat, milk, leather, fabrics, and many other commodities. Canada leads this innovation designers play an active role in transforming these new materials into presentable and palatable bespoke experiences. Preserving the local biodiversity is a requirement for all farmers who divert to sustainable and less invasive pesticides and fertilizers. However, farmers and farms, unable to convert face economic desolation, the drive to agribusiness consolidation of failed farms, accelerates Canadian food industries do well though, due to food research.
We hope that was fun for you. It is important to understand the interaction of change drivers and of course analyze common factors between quadrants. Often you have enough people to divide in four different groups and work on four scenarios or world-building exercise. And these are often accompanied by a day in the life of a participant in that scenario. You do a very similar thing to what we did with design thinking, where you create a persona and talk through what their life experience is. The next stage is wind tunneling, which is a metaphor borrowed from aviation testing, where the robustness or integral soundness for one or multiple environments is assessed by the group or groups and projects and strategies from the world are compared across worlds and alterations that would have to be made in specific scenarios are discussed and captured. And we realized that we were very much focusing on plant-based industries in part, because of the space that the NRC research occupies, and obviously there's other kinds of foods and other kinds of factors. So, Justine's going to talk about the next stages around implications for action, which kind of takes us way back to the beginning about some of those business tools.
Justine De Ridder: Thank you, Sara. When we talk about action, visioning and creating emergent strategies is the next stage of this process. So, the starting point is really to connect these alternative futures to the organization itself and ask ourselves, what does it mean to the organization? If one of those futures, or all of them occur, it means making different tracks, right? To see what would happen if these alternative futures were to occur. And although the visioning phase needs to stay practical, it's also really important to think big and ask, what is the preferred future, or what is the future that we want to see unfold and then move on into the strategic work. So, the tough work really is to turn this into a strategic focus and to develop strategic options and implications. This is where we ask ourselves what issues or factors show up in one or more of these scenarios, which one of these things are within our control or sphere of influence and which ones, if we manage well, would mitigate risk or help us gain advantage in some way. What are the tools that are embedded in all of those worlds? What is already emerging in the scenario, is one scenario already emerging and what must be monitored in case the scenarios were to happen. And the exercise of tests and plan against assumptions for credibility and it helps identifying policy, business, or invention that will lead into new opportunities. And then the next phases are really moving into planning and acting and the latter involving constantly testing projects and strategies over short and long-term. And that's where the business tools come back in the ones that presented at the beginning. They can be really helpful for the strategy stages here as foresight insights must be taken into strategy and risk management. And so obviously for the sake of time we are not going to develop strategy and action plan based on the scenarios that we created or to address the quadrants and our question around sustainable food adoption and sustainable food products. So, we'll leave that to you to refine and reconsider but we would love to hear feedback on that.
And so, let's now step out of agriculture and food and look into other practices of foresight. And let's go into the black swan that we all experienced, being COVID-19, and the use of foresight. Sohail Inayatullah and Peter Black, cite many trends prior to 2020, that signaled a pandemic, created brief future scenarios to illustrate distinct metaphors at work in public commentary, and also related to policy or the lack thereof about how the pandemic would play out. And I think it's really important to note that this work was done in spring of 2020. So, some of this is very, has a lot of premonitions, so you will be really interested in those scenarios. So, they called them, the scenario or these metaphors: Zombie Apocalypse, the Needed Pause, the Global Health Awakening, and the Great Despair. We'll go more in depth into each one of them. The first one being the upper left. So, Zombie Apocalypse and this future emerges because of the mutation of the virus plus xenophobia plus panic. Uncertainty leads to continued market crashes. Supply chains, tourism, travel, and conferences are all disrupted. A severe and long-term recession, if not depression, results. Failure to act leads to several regime changes, for example, in the USA. Now, moving on to the second scenario the Needed Pause. In this one, the efforts are made in most countries to ‘flatten the curve’ to help health systems cope. In the future, COVID-19 becomes just another winter flu – dangerous as it is for the elderly, those with underlying medical conditions and those who smoke. Big Pharma sees the money-making opportunity and by 2021 a vaccine is available. In the meantime, the frenetic pace of everything slows down, with multiple benefits to the planet and personal health. Greenhouse gas emissions fall, for starters. Over-touristed cities like Venice get a break. Localization heals. People focus on their inner lives…After a needed pause we speed right up again. I leave it to Sara for the next two ones.
Dr. Sara Diamond: Yes! That feels a little bit familiar. So, the third is Global Health Awakening. Large AI companies, science, start-ups, and public health expertise come to the rescue. We truly enter the digital fourth wave era – genomics plus artificial intelligence (AI) help monitor and then prevent. The five ‘p’ health model – prevention, precision, participation, partnership, and personalization become the norm. There is breakthrough after breakthrough with innovation (real-time detection, health monitoring using big data) cascading through the system. Working from home booms as new relationships between employer and employee are created. Universal basic income is supported as the strength of a society is based on how we treat the weakest. Evidence-based science and technology inform public policy, not the whims of leaders. The insights from fighting COVID-19 are applied to climate change. And then the fourth scenario is The Great Despair, not an apocalypse, not a depression, no magic – just a slow and marked decline of health and wealth. Walls appear everywhere. The World Health Organization and others try to contain it, but the virus repeatedly slips in and infects the bodies, minds, and hearts of all. Back to the European Middle Ages. The efforts to address fail. The least connected to globalization fare the best. The vulnerable are forgotten. Inter-generational memory of past pandemics informs current practice.
So as Justine started, what's so striking about this work is that it occurred really early in the pandemic, in March of 2020. While we might all hope for the Global Health Awakening we leave it to you to tell yourselves what scenarios feel the most realistic. And then a reminder that scenarios are also contextual. They depend on where one is and what's interesting in them is that there's, again, you want to look for that middle ground. And certainly, if we look at them, there are places where there is consistency amongst all four. The writers offered some advice coming out of their research. They said shut down wet markets to create buffers between humans and wildlife in future planning, invest in prevention, prediction, and transitions to plant-based economies.
Because we've talked a lot about foresight as a very human practice, we did want to talk about where data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning fit into strategic foresight work. So, these are emerging tools and they're really important to bring into this process. AI and ML can crunch through large quantities of data to bolster the qualitative process of foresight. So, this includes secondary material appropriate for the subject, searching for and extracting trends using natural language processing and other tools, applying social media analysis to understand opinions and doing effective analytics, applying new forms of polling using AI and analyzing the outcomes. A team that allows the data side to collect and manage the data points and the design side to manage the foresight process and brings these together is really an asset. So then where does human intelligence fit into the picture? Because in foresight, we're really arguing that you don't just get the machine to do the foresight work. It's really a collaboration. So human intelligence and expertise are fundamental to choosing which questions are asked and which data should be gathered and retrieved. AI is notoriously poor at recognizing outlying data or analyzing margins correctly. And other forms of analysis are really important to ensure integration and recognition as weak signals then can become dominant. So, foresight's good at identifying the weak signals. AI is not so good at understanding those datasets effectively and often will eliminate them in the process of data gathering. Defining potential panels, so panels are the groups used for polling surveys and other gathering efforts. So, what are the demographics you want to reach out to and how do you ensure inclusion or focus in precision, depending on what you're doing with your work. Developing the choice of scenarios. So that's of critical human importance and then interpreting recommendations emerging, both from the AI and from the foresight work and then creating extrapolations that are based on gathering insights and data. So, data analytics can support the work, but humans need to undertake it. Engaging in decision-making and change. So, Idris Mootee, who we started with Idea Couture states this goal as quote “Bring a Human-centric AI to dream of scenarios which can be qualitatively enhanced with an anthropological human lens”.
We're nearing the end of our discussion today, but we wanted to just share, other work the government of Canada is doing to support strategic foresight and its Policy Horizons, Government of Canada effort with its associated publications and foresight labs, which exist in several ministries and is important and quite recent work. Advice is focused on deputy ministers and policy communities to encourage creativity within government and to champion collaborative technology and to integrate perspectives across ministries. They just finished their foresight week very recently, and we thought it was interesting to share some of the areas of exploration because some of them are very logical given the fourth industrial revolution and COVID-19, others are less, and also interesting, I think, to NRC research. They're looking at shifts and implications of COVID-19 for Canada. They're looking at the future of citizenship. They're looking at the future of sense-making, how we understand the world in the context of fake news. One really fun one is they're looking at “dadfluencers”. Yes, that is a new term. Those are performative fathers. So, people who perform fathering. And then some of the more science focused work is Forever and Ever: 3D-Printed Magnetic Liquids. Secondly Bio-digital convergence and then relevant to all of us, the impact of digital technologies, including the future of work. And that's very relevant to the work that's being done at the NRC.
Policy Horizons publishes an annual meta scan, that synthesizes factors that impact Canada over the next 10 to 15 years. So, I just want to pause here and looking at some of the new input that we've had from you. Andrew has suggested, “What about low mid-level geopolitical conflict, creating barriers between producer and market?” Yeah, absolutely. That's a really important driver and factor and would be part of our overall analysis and trends and I don't think our quadrants looked so much at the factors and inhibitors to food distribution. In really building them out, if we've really done the work we would have, they'd be much longer than this. And they would have considered these, as we wrote the story and we'd look at all those geo-political factors and the issues of free trade, versus protectionism, et cetera. So, thank you. And then with sense-making, Hanan asked, “Is sense-making related to Cynefin? It's this whole, problem of how in our bombarded world, data, and information saturated world, we understand. And also, because we've looked at so much siloing of information that has been a really big challenge.
We've got about five minutes left and we have a couple of things to say about what we're going to be looking at next week, in the next two weeks. But we just wanted to also ask for any questions that people might have or comments.
I'm going to just give you a little bit of a foreshadow to taste of what we're going to be talking about in the next week. Khalid, we'll keep moving forward a little bit. So, we'd love you to come back and not next week, but in two weeks. And we're going to look at speculative design, which is also a method for problem solving and it's rooted in fiction and science fiction. And it's an interesting method. It sits side by side with foresight and it was a term that was developed by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby who are two design researchers out of the UK at the University of London, and they see speculative and critical design as a means of essentially spearing a public debate. And what are potential preferred societal developments. So, they propose that one imagines impossible or ridiculous worlds. So, these are really the outliers in foresighting. They believe that any truly useful idea about the future should at first appear to be ridiculous. So, looking at weak signals, that might seem really unusual and thinking about what would happen if those became natural occurrences. And they positioned design into two ways. They say that design really on one hand solves problems, but then on the other hand, it finds problems. They feel that we really understand the ways that design solves problems and that's “affirmative design”,, it's very solution oriented, but that the second practice, which is finding problems is very important for research organizations. And that speculation can help to define what the problem should be, which means that one can expand an organization's research agenda. So, it can be helpful for governments to use when there's pressing issues. Again, climate mitigation, population increases, pressures on borders, technological development, but also to inventors who are trying to imagine an application for new technology. It's an interesting method and I'm just going to we're going to pause on this slide and in the next workshop, we're going to work through the method and give some examples of it. I wanted to add that science fiction and speculative fiction is also a really interesting tool kit, one that sits side by side with speculative design, and now of course has expanded to include Afrofuturism and Indigenous futurism.
I'm part of an interdisciplinary reading group that the Creative Destruction Lab, you may be familiar with them, they're connected to the Rotman School at University of Toronto. They're also a national organization that essentially supports innovation with a big focus on AI and machine learning. So, this reading group is primarily scientists and inventors exploring AGI, this is Artificial General Intelligence. So, this is really about machines that have really superpowers. Nola Hopkinson, who just received an honorary doctorate from OCAD university, she’s a science fiction writer, and she’s a member. We've read her books, including Falling in Love with Hominids. We've read a lot of science fiction as well as really hard science. We just finished Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro which is about highly realistic artificial friends. And I recommended it, it's a fun read, kind of sad but fun read at points, I don't want to give it away. And also films, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which is a very funny teen movie about robots and the worst fears about robots. But this role of, science fiction, speculative fiction in how we think through design processes and engineering processes is really relevant. And next time we meet… And this is Margaret Atwood, of course. We may have some sense that her dystopian world has felt close to home in recent years as has William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Snow Crash is one of my all-time favorite books. When I was running the Banff New Media Institute, I always included science fiction writers as part of our science and design teams. And we were doing a lot of work in speculating about the future of technology. We're out of time! We have a few seconds left. I want to really thank you all for staying with us.
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| DOI | Trouver le DOI : https://doi.org/10.4224/40002671 | ||||||||||||
| Auteur | Rechercher : ; Rechercher : ; Rechercher : ; Rechercher : 1 | ||||||||||||
| Affiliation |
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| Format | Texte, Object d'apprentissage | ||||||||||||
| Sujet | design; prospective stratégique; analyse commerciale; encadrement; analyse prospective; moteur de changement; représentation des systèmes; scénario; alimentation durable | ||||||||||||
| Résumé | |||||||||||||
| Date de publication | 2021-08-18 | ||||||||||||
| Date de création | 2021-06-16 | ||||||||||||
| Maison d’édition | National Research Council of Canada. Digital Technologies Research Centre | ||||||||||||
| Publication connexe | Voir les objets (3) | ||||||||||||
| Traduction de | Voir les objets (1) | ||||||||||||
| Langue | anglais | ||||||||||||
| Exporter la notice | Exporter en format RIS | ||||||||||||
| Signaler une correction | Signaler une correction (s'ouvre dans un nouvel onglet) | ||||||||||||
| Identificateur de l’enregistrement | 35b6b034-d605-49e2-991e-caf021765334 | ||||||||||||
| Enregistrement créé | 2021-08-18 | ||||||||||||
| Enregistrement modifié | 2022-05-19 |
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