BCNM Around the Web January 2023
Check out the great work of our faculty and alumni around the web this January!
Jane McGonigal
Jane is a research director at Institute for the Future and New York Times bestselling author of Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World and SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully. Jane has created future forecasting games for organizations like the World Bank, the National Academy of Sciences, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New York Public Library, and teaches the popular "How to Think Like a Futurist" course for Stanford Continuing Studies and the "Futures Thinking" specialization on Coursera. She has spent over a decade working as a futurist at IFTF.
Jane held a zoom conversation on Science Fictional Scenarios and Strategic Foresight: Planning for the Future with Applied Sci-Fi for Arizona State University's Center for Science and Imagination, which talked about the difference between fiction and foresight. The ability to imagine and prepare for a range of potential future scenarios is a key skill for adapting to our increasingly complex and uncertain world. Such scenario planning is a cornerstone practice in the toolkit of “strategic foresight” professionals, whom governments and the corporate world have relied on for decades to enhance their planning processes.In many ways, these foresight practitioners leverage the same skills as science fiction writers to envision plausible futures for technology and society, their scenarios working as a kind of Applied Sci-Fi. Indeed, many actual sci-fi writers also work as foresight professionals, and vice versa.
Learn more about this online webinar here.
Also, Jane held an online training on Dec 06, called IFTF Fast Futures, a 90-minute, introductory-level online learning experience that will teach you how to get started with your own creative foresight. The course is designed for individuals with little or no previous experience with “futures thinking” or creative foresight. The class will be conducted live on Zoom and is limited to 50 students.
To participate in this course in the future, please find information here.