Future Studies Terminology
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and literary movement in the early 20th century in Europe. It is considered by some to be the most revolutionary of the avant-garde movements of that period. Futurism was proclaimed in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian writer, in the Futurist Manifesto published in the newspaper the Figaro. The artists' motivation lay in their passion for life, action, machinery the future and a certain sense of rage against prevailing “bourgeois” values.
Futures Literacy
A term used by UNESCO and Riel Miller to describe the ability to use the future, or the skill of imagining futures on purpose in order to see the present in a new way. It is said that people always rely on implicit images of the future and that being able to make this clear is a skill that can be learned.
Futures Cone
It puts the present in one place and lets you see the future, which are arranged by how likely they are to happen: possible, plausible, and probable. The word "preferable" cuts through these futures based on value instead of odds. Building on work by Hancock, Bezold, and Henchey, Joseph Voros made the version that most people use official.
Protopia Futures
It was Kevin Kelly's idea to name a future that isn't perfect but is a little better than now. Utopia is a world that is finished and perfect, and dystopia is a world that is broken. Protopia is a state of slow, incremental progress, where each year gets a little better than the last and brings new problems with it. The "pro" refers to the process and the progress, not the end result. It's too slow to notice while you're going through it, Kelly says, which is how most real change works.
Plausible Futures
Futures that are plausible are those that we think are possible based on what we know about how the world works now. It's not against science, economics, or society to want them to happen, even if that's not what most people think will happen. This is where most scenario planning takes place.
Possible Futures
It's possible for anything to happen in the future, even if we don't have the knowledge or technology to make it happen yet. It's possible as long as you can imagine a way to get there, no matter how unlikely it is. It's not in the narrower categories of plausible or likely futures.
Preferable Futures
Preferable futures are the ones we as a society want to happen, based on our values instead of how likely they are to happen. As they are based on desire rather than chance, they cross the lines between what is possible, what is plausible, and what is likely. For example, a desired future could be likely or not likely at all. When you ask which future is better and for whom, that's when foresight becomes political.
Thrutopia
Rupert Read came up with this category for futures stories as a third option, along with utopia and dystopia. Where utopia imagines a perfected end state and dystopia imagines collapse, a thrutopia tells the story of how to get from the current crisis to a future where people can live. It puts process over goal, asking not what a better world would look like but how we can get there from here. Read came up with the phrase in response to the breakdown of the climate as a way to talk about change that is neither escape nor hopelessness.
Utopia
In 1516, Thomas More came up with the word "utopia" to describe a made-up island with a perfect society. As the word "utopia" comes from the Greek words for "no place" and "good place," it means a perfect world that doesn't exist anywhere. There isn't really a goal in futures work; instead, it's more like a mirror that shows what's wrong with the present.
Dystopia
A society that is based on fear, control, or falling apart is the opposite of utopia. The word first appeared in the 1800s, but it became very important in modern fiction, from Huxley to Orwell. A dystopia isn't usually just about the future. This is a warning because it takes a current trend and makes it worse until its risks can't be ignored any longer.
Ustopia
This is Margaret Atwood's word for how utopia and dystopia are not opposites but built on each other. Every imagined utopian society hides a dystopia, and every dystopia holds on to a dim hope for a utopia. Atwood made up the word for her own writing to show that the two urges can't be clearly separated.
Margaret Atwood, The Guardian (2011)
Solarpunk
A story about the future that is based on ecological hope instead of collapse. Solarpunk imagines worlds that are powered by clean energy, built on community, repair, and living in harmony with nature. These worlds usually have a bright, plant-filled look. Cyberpunk came out online in the early 2010s as a deliberate counterpoint to it. It didn't believe that the technological future had to be dark.
Afrofuturism
A movement in art and culture that imagines futures through the experiences of Black people who have moved around the world. It combines African history and culture with technology and science fiction. It was named by Mark Dery in 1994, but Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, and other artists had done work on it before that. It serves as a reminder that the future is not culturally neutral and that there has always been a fight over who gets to imagine it.
Mark Dery, "Black to the Future" (1994)
Backcasting
A foresight method that starts with a desired future and works backwards to the present, making a map of the steps that need to be taken to get there. In the 1980s, John Robinson came up with it as an alternative to forecasting, which looks ahead to see what trends will happen next. It's a lot like design fiction in that it asks first what future we want and then how to get there.
John Robinson, "Futures Under Glass" (1990)
Scenario Planning
A method to think several possible futures at the same time instead of relying on just one. You can test your strategy against a number of possible outcomes by making up a story about how the world might turn out. The method came from military and business planning in the middle of the 20th century, and it was first used by Herman Kahn and then by Pierre Wack at Shell.
Three Horizons
Bill Sharpe observed a change as three curves that overlap. The current system, which is dominant but falling, is shown on the first horizon. Third, there is a new future that is still on the edge. The second is the rough area of new ideas and change that happens between them. The framework helps you figure out where an idea fits in time and what kind of future it belongs to.
Weak Signals and Wildcards
Two terms for the edges of foresight. Weak signals are early, ambiguous hints of change, easy to dismiss before they grow into trends. Wildcards are events that have a small chance of happening but would have a huge effect if they did. Both of these push futures go beyond just extrapolating from current trends.
Dator's Four Generic Images of the Future
Jim Dator argued that all the different futures people imagine can be summed up in four images: Continuation (growth continues), Collapse (systems fail), Discipline (society reorganizes around limits), and Transformation (a fundamental break, usually technological or spiritual). His goal wasn't to guess which would happen, but to make sure that any futures exercise takes all four into account. The four pictures are the basis for the Manoa school of futures studies, which Fergnani and Song later built on.
Jim Dator, "Alternative Futures at the Manoa School" (2009)
Scenario Archetypes
A set of words that can be used to sort imagined futures by the type of story they tell. Fergnani and Song looked at 140 science fiction movies and simplified them down to six themes: Growth & Decay, Threats & New Hopes, Wasteworlds, The Powers that Be, Disarray, and Inversion. The six give a more detailed set of groups than the first four. They are used to sort the hypothetical situations that people in this study come up with into groups.
Fergnani and Songm "The six scenario archetypes framework" (2020)