Ilyse Hogue is a writer and professor at the University of California, San Francisco. She has created an institute for the future to explore how people might imagine their own futures in the not-too-distant future. Some exercises include idea fact flipping where you write down facts that are generally true but then flip them so they don't make sense. And she says we can also play with our imaginations by imagining things like shoes being free or even sleeping with your shoes on.
Future forecaster and game designer Jane McGonigal ran a social simulation game in 2008 that had players dealing with the effects of a respiratory pandemic set to happen in the next decade. She wasn’t literally predicting the 2020 pandemic—but she got eerily close. Her game, set in 2019, featured scenarios we're now familiar with (like masking and social distancing), and participant reactions gave her a sense of what the world could—and eventually, did—look like. How did she do it? And what can we learn from this experiment to predict—and prepare for—the future ourselves? In this episode, Jane teaches us how to be futurists, and talks about the role of imagination—and gaming—in shaping a future that we’re truly excited about. Jane’s new book, Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today is available now.
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