Making futures that matter: Future making, online working and organizing remotely

Abstract

Future making is the work of making sense of possible and probable futures, and evaluating, negotiating and giving form to preferred ones. Practices of making futures are increasingly online. Yet, as organizational participants come together online – organizing remotely to make offline futures – they lack the shared experiential knowledge that is gained through embodied and situated practices. In this essay, we argue that the lack of experiential knowledge makes future making online difficult to organize and vulnerable to excluding relevant expertise; dialogue may become inward-looking and self-referential within the online environment, with an emotional and cognitive distance from the futures being made outside of such representations. We draw on the pragmatist tradition to theorize online future making, to articulate its dynamics and the challenges that arise, and to suggest remedial actions. By conceptualizing future making as a form of inquiry – as a distributed and reflective process that proceeds through engagement with representations of the future – we identify three remedial actions for online future making: to solicit feedback, juxtapose alternatives and change medium. These remedial actions seek to compensate for the lack of shared experiential knowledge by both sustaining the online involvement of heterogeneous remote participants and by bringing in relevant (offline) places, people and materials to online future making.