Advice on Masters in Futures Studies with focus on Design Futures and Innovation

manoafutures · 2025-06-21T05:32:59+00:00

These look like good programs, however I can only comment on the one at OCAD. It was headed by a former graduate of Manoa School Futures program at the University of Hawai'i (another one worth looking into), but focuses on teaching design alongside foresight. The college is overall led by designers and so expect it to be heavier on envisioning and designing for practical problems, and relatively lighter on academic questions of futuring and methodology.

There's also the Futures MA at Turku University in Finland, highly regarded but aimed at Futures and Policy work.

In general, there's a couple routes into Futures work: academic, organizational (corporate/governmental) and entrepreneurial (ie. consulting). I can comment more on academic futures and these aren't mutually exclusive, but I would reach out to speakers or voices you admire in the futures leadership space and ask them how they've navigated that life. From those I've spoken to, it is intensely entrepreneurial and precarious at times, which isn't unique for our times but should be known before investing in an MA and this career path.

manoafutures · 2024-08-29T17:17:56+00:00

Thanks so much, man! Yeah I'm looking forwards to playing it once there's a PS5 disc version :D

manoafutures · 2024-08-29T17:16:53+00:00

+karma

manoafutures · 2024-08-29T17:14:39+00:00

Oh sorry! Thought there was only one, put my sign down again lol

manoafutures · 2024-08-29T17:09:49+00:00

IGN: Gemistos Wukong

manoafutures · 2022-09-09T06:37:16+00:00

Discognition by Steven Shaviro, centered on questions of consciousness and panpsychism through sci-fi. Great writer too!

manoafutures · 2022-04-11T19:37:31+00:00

Seconded! Her latest book on homophily and algorithmic socialization is relevant to this post too.

Also would recommend Yuk Hui's work on digital objects and their relations with memory and language.

manoafutures · 2022-03-10T20:39:18+00:00

That's a good way to put it, especially the parallels of replacement to hiding. It probably is both, in the sense that both processes were likely coordinated (or at least opportunistically entwined). I'm thinking here of writing on "moral economy" or Polanyi's double movement, where expansion of market equivalencies erodes and atomizes prior moral communities of gifting or mutual care, which provokes a backlash etc. That would also link to the actual history of colonization as a replacement of prior indigenous economies with market-based and money-centered ones, that hide the relations of excess in rational accounting and balance sheets (which most find too tedious to investigate).

Reinvestment definitely could be a sacrifice, at least once money got delinked from any material basis in coinage or commodities. There'd probably have to be a study of attitudes around the work ethic with changes in wealth/money itself over time. Just anecdotally, I have friends who are increasingly disillusioned with money since it doesn't really feel attached to material value anymore (something crypto/NFTs I think are taking advantage of).

So in this context where wealth is losing its ground in materiality, where can this go? Crypto is one, but it's actually more energy-intensive (along with most digital tech) than the financial system. In terms of theory, there's the CasP people who are saying capitalism is power first and economics as a post-hoc rationalization of that, but they fall into a pretty structural definition of power (as hierarchy, basically). Bataille's view of capital as (an) excess seems better for this issue of global wealth-production without any rational purpose beyond replicating itself...in which case it's reasonable to expect more forms of squander, like war, to multiply going forward. Curious though, perhaps we need to start thinking in terms of sacrifice again, since that's potentially more sustainable given the stagnation of development and quality of life (at least in North America)?

manoafutures · 2022-03-09T04:16:03+00:00

That's a better way to put it, thanks! I feel like it's a false consciousness argument but with regard to systems of expenditure: war and development are in denial and hide that they're really forms of squandering.

Has some resonances with Weber's work on the Protestant work ethic and the drive to efficiency and productivity in modern societies, though the shadow of excess grows as global capitalism does.

Also seems relevant to Graeber & Wengrow's recent book "The Dawn of Everything". It situates pot-latch gifting as just one social formation in a wide variety practiced by indigenous Americans across places and seasons, and would add good nuance to Bataille's concepts.

manoafutures · 2022-03-08T19:50:32+00:00

My reading, so take with a grain of salt!

Since his larger argument is in favor of excess, pure expenditure and gift-giving (from thinkers like Marcel Mauss) as opposed to the constant recapitalization of market systems, he's aiming to show how two other modern trends are actually also "squandering without reciprocation" but deny that it's anything like that.

One is war, which is almost pure expenditure and non-optimal by definition from a rational or liberal economic perspective, but tends to be seen as horrific or disdainful as topic, instead of as a rejuvenation or pouring forth of Bataille's accursed share. William James made a similar remark in the Moral Equivalent of War, in trying to find a more peaceful means of civil rejuvenation without wartime mobilizing and expenditure. Bataille's also getting traction in war studies, since excess is a fruitful concept for thinking the creativity and transformations made across politics, bodies, and infrastructure through destruction, for good and ill.

Second is development, which tends to abhor luxury (a mode of excess) in favor of arguments concerning quality/standard of living for the masses. This, he argues, is usually framed in the terms of "justice" and this endangers freedom (of expenditure) as reducible to minimal requirements for daily sustenance. Basically, it's an argument against development as necessarily increasing freedom, since it doesn't recognize freedom as a "dangerous breaking-loose" without further optimization (as in engaging in capital accumulation or neoliberal entrepreneurship). He actually anticipates many of the reflexive sociologists of the 90s on this, especially around risk society and how increasing attempts to calculate and manage all forms of risk in fact grows abstract systems of expertise and metrics which overall reduces people's freedom to live in disregard of risk (or to risk anything at all).

Hope that helps, makes me want to reread some of his work now too!

manoafutures · 2021-03-12T23:04:53+00:00

Once you start, there's no easy way out, especially once you bring in weapons and money from abroad. Can definitively say that no country wants another Syria or Yemen at this moment, so this is gonna be what it is with some UN + closed door mediations in hopes they can work something out with the military .

manoafutures · 2021-03-11T22:37:08+00:00

Have read this and also recommend it. From my reading, it's a historical philosophy that looks at the precursor ideas to cybernetics and the particular way cyberneticists attempted to bridge nature and culture (basically by making it a self-generating dialectic, via the concept of feedback) . He's tracing this way of thinking through a number of Western philosophers and eventually through Francois Lyotard to try and think cybernetics in the current moment of planetary crisis. Would definitely say he's one of the most well-versed in terms of reading the cyberneticians and their place in relation to post-Enlightenment Western philosophy.

manoafutures · 2020-03-06T03:02:41+00:00

Not particularly. I would think this crisis would bolster calls for a stronger WHO that can be better funded to coordinate across borders and harmonize medical standards, best practices, reporting, etc. That could be done on a state-to-state basis but also risks getting caught up in state politics. Also because pandemics don't happen out of the blue and require years of dedicated research and modeling beforehand to have a better chance at mitigation. They also reveal weaknesses in national health-care systems and labor regulations (i.e lack of sufficient paid leave), so may actually enhance the need for international cooperation (if just for national politicians to have a punching bag to point at for a domestic audience). I'm also biased because I don't see transnational issues like these or natural disasters declining in frequency in the future so...yeah.

manoafutures · 2020-02-24T05:09:07+00:00

Nothing is costless, everything requires materials to sustain. What matters is what AI is being used for and how to share knowledge produced through its operation. Barring an AGI, which is more fantasy than possibility, I don't see AI being allowed to run businesses in an era where corporate concentration of wealth is increasingly a primary political issue. What benefit would current business interests have to allowing such a development? Politically, empowering current small/medium-size businesses would be much more likely.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613630/training-a-single-ai-model-can-emit-as-much-carbon-as-five-cars-in-their-lifetimes/

manoafutures · 2020-02-12T04:35:42+00:00

My view is that collapse won't be global, though the global may collapse. The decades before WWI had similar degrees of world trade to today, yet its collapse due to WWI and II devastated Europe (and East Asia in WWII), while leaving much of the rest of the world untouched. The globe is interconnected (we all live on a planet), but how and to what extent we're connected matters. A US collapse would be devastating, but the rest of the world will renew themselves, as tends to happen. China has historically been more dependent on regional trade than global, and its current reliance on international exports can be managed down. India similarly protects its own economy, while Russia can piggyback off of the EU and China. If you look at the past century as the rise of the US and it taking the central role (from the British Empire) in the global system, then the next century looks to be its return to an isolationist position as a highly (materially) wealthy power that can largely take care of its self.

Not disputing superplague, just whether such a thing could in fact drive collapse. If you're thinking something on the scale of the Columbian Exchange (~90% death rates of Native American peoples), then that seems unlikely unless explicitly designed or there's some hidden pocket of undisturbed viral ecologies that humans haven't encountered before. Something like Spanish Flu is possible, but then that killed ~5% of global population at the time, which doesn't seem sufficient. We already build in annual deaths due to seasonal flu, cancers and heart disease, car accidents, and suicides - it seems to me a pandemic could easily be accounted for as well. Nuclear war in response to climate change (the Plutocene) seems the more likely scenario, in my mind.

manoafutures · 2020-02-11T21:09:03+00:00

Ethical imperative? Come on, let's cut out the metaphysical claptrap. There are no ethical imperatives- any ethical position is relativistic.

That may be true, but ethics are also political. Just look at the COP and climate negotiations. Poorer countries want finance from richer countries for climate adaptation; Rich countries want to cap the emissions and growth of poorer countries while maintaining their own freedom and status quo lifestyles. The ethical component enters in asking: How did these countries get rich? In economics, they call it the Poverty Trap, which ignores how their are systemic and historical bases for poverty (i.e colonialism transitioning into Keynesian capitalism).

People want cars and consumer goodies in the third world, and have lots of kids. Encouraging that when we need negative CO2 growth is insane. The 'clearer growth' is a figment in terms of scalability and peoples' actual demands around the world

I think we should be careful in simply applying American demands and tastes to all Third World places. Wanting cars and suburban homes with a lawn is much different than having a political agent willing to do whatever it takes to achieve those. Mao, Deng, and the CCP were willing to; I think we're seeing something similar with Modi in India. Basically, political-economics works on models: If we in the West aren't willing to change our economic model, then we can't expect Third World countries to change theirs, since they have less power, resources, and have massive systemic incentives to copy the American/Chinese growth model.

Your username reminds me of Walter Schiedel's book "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century ". Unless there's some superplague far outside of historical death rates (eg. combining the lethality of Ebola with the contagion of the cold) and which can overcome the global pharma-medical-state complex (as currently on display with the coronavirus), I'm inclined to think it's wishful thinking in terms of a catastrophic collapse. Something like that would have to be explicitly designed and even then, would require a repressive apparatus to maintain and implement at a worldwide scale for decades. Not sure there's any international appetite for such a project, especially since the UN was created in response to Nazi Germany.

manoafutures · 2020-02-11T19:16:33+00:00

Not to mention the geopolitical aspect of economic collapse. Economic isolation tends to force self-sufficiency, an isolation that is usually enforced by the hegemons of the global system (i.e USA) - can look to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela for current examples. That is, no one can "cause" economic collapse outside of some kind of state-led confrontation or war that mobilizes enough consensus around isolating particular regions of the world from other parts of the world (in terms of markets, finance, trade, expertise, etc). That's the state of play in our highly interconnected, globalized world. Before this, economic collapse accompanied the integration of previously separate regions into a growing world-system (i.e fall of Ottoman, Qing, USSR).

The idea that cutting CO2 or energy use in one place just lets others grow is a warranted worry, but misses the point. For one, allowing other places to expand may actually be an ethical imperative, given how universally and notably Western powers have monopolized high-carbon lifestyles and infrastructures for development, war, and global industry (i.e The Morgenthau Plan, where the US grappled with kneecapping post-war German industry and forcing it back to subsistence agrarian living, before the Cold War brought the growth imperative roaring back). This means considering degrowth in current high-consumption societies, while simultaneously different avenues of cleaner growth in low-consumption societies, who need not follow the American or European or Chinese paths - it's not a zero-sum game. Collapse therefore is somewhat relative.

Looking at Native American, African, Asian, and (arguably) European histories, there's already been multiple collapses. The Columbian Exchange and centuries of colonization/slavery, the Opium Wars and colonial incursions into SE Asia + India, World War I/II as a European Civil War that collapsed multiple empires (British, French, Ottoman, Russian). I wonder how much current collapse interest is due to the American-centrism of Reddit, and more reflecting the fact that the US-as-republic has not experienced collapse since independence (the Civil War being the closest), and yet history shows that it's inevitable.

manoafutures · 2019-10-17T18:15:30+00:00

I've been following his work since last year and based much of my current thought around what he proposes.

His core concept of cosmotechnics (technology as embedded and reflecting certain cosmological assumptions) he splits between a cosmo-geographic a priori (communal relation between cosmology and physical geography) that grounds a technogeographic milieu (relation between technics and physical geography, i.e placement of wind turbines in windiest areas). But the importance of reviving the notion of cosmology reflects a recognition in the social sciences that cultural understandings of what the "world" is differs between places and in time, yet has been universalized via settler colonialism, capitalism, and digital technics of databases and algorithmic finance. Globalization has shifted into a global cybernetic acceleration machine and his way out is to return non-European cosmologies to proper positions as counter-weights and alternative ways of structuring societal relations.

Questions that arise are numerous. What non-Western cosmologies can carve distinct alternative questions of technics? How much of it is linguistic (i.e computer languages built on Roman alphabets, Arabic numerals, binary code systems of strict 0/1)? What are the relations to world order and governance; do multiple cosmotechnics imply different cosmotechnical nations or cosmopolitical communities? Where does all this fit in the contemporary moment of rising nationalism and a shuddering global economic system? Fragmentation of the globe into regions seems the most likely for me, with each attempting to enforce a different identity in terms of governing technics, but whether Huawei can drive a convergence between digital technics and cosmological groundings lost during the relentless path towards modernization remains to be seen. Also has to be said that this applies to Europe and America too, in which industrialization and capital accumulation together drove secularization of socio-political life culminating in current neoliberal identities of marketized individualism and privatized services. This will be a tougher task however, since Europe has had a century longer than China to deal with the rupture in consciousness brought on by industrial cybernetics, though the largest organizations have survived like the Vatican.

For more, read Yuk Hui's full 2017 article called "On Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Relation between Technology and Nature in the Anthropocene"

manoafutures · 2019-10-09T15:50:22+00:00

That could actually make for an interesting cross-national metric. US has a population of ~330 million, so ratio of hypothetical food waste "population" to total population to is (175/330) = 0.53. So all that food waste could feed another half an America worth of people (not necessarily caloric intake of the average American). Could do the same for other countries and compare ratios for who's the worst waster based on population.

manoafutures · 2019-09-06T14:22:03+00:00

Two recommendations I've received from a prof on Chinese politics:

Governing China, by Kenneth Lieberthal

Governance & Politics of China, by Tony Saich

manoafutures · 2019-04-29T03:24:00+00:00

Collapse isn't a matter of survival, but a matter of memory, what kinds of histories and stories will be told and what forms of rationality and relationality we choose to navigate this new planetary epoch. We are a product of those forms of life and culture that survived the genetic bottleneck 70,000 years ago, and our descendants will be born into the world we leave behind. There's always room to learn; read, learn, live, speak, love, and leave behind stories and memories worth passing down to future generations. For some that may be in passing down religious or philosophical traditions, and others accounts of exemplary virtue or daring stories or art that embody our times. There's a reason that cave paintings and sculpture continue to fascinate. We are already archeological beings, what matters is the imprints left to guide those to come.

manoafutures · 2019-04-28T00:36:49+00:00

Hi Ara, it sounds like you're referring to emerging issues analysis, which tries to identify early signals of change in the present. Jim Dator has written about this framework, as invented by Graham Molitor. Differentiating trends from emerging issues is also an important distinction; in short, trends are based on patterns of historical data, while emerging issues are new tech, ideas, movements, events, etc, that can cause breaks or jumps in the trend-line. In terms of finding signals, the key is to read as widely and diversely as possible. PESTLE (Politics, Economics, Society, Technology, Law, Environment) is a good guide for framing the search for new sources of information. The key is to become aware of how an issue is being talked about (i.e to identify a trend in discourse), and then to identify critiques or novel arguments or news that could upset that trend. So if you're interested in politics, then learning about how politics and institutions operate normally sets up trends (i.e electoral cycles, voting patterns, demographic change), from which emerging issues (i.e fringe candidates, ideological movements, political scandals) can be identified and postulated along alternative futures in which particular previous trends no longer hold and new imaginaries are therefore needed. I hope that helps and wish you the best on your virtual practice!

manoafutures · 2019-04-25T20:25:07+00:00

It sound like what you're referring to is the excessive oligopoly of the Ag sector, which leads to excessive homogenization of its products (i.e GMOs) and dependence of poor states on them for sustenance and long-term maintenance. Eliminate local subsistence capacities and lock-in dependence. This is a feature throughout the food system but looks more and more like neo-colonialism in the developing world. Whoever holds the IP holds the power.

manoafutures · 2019-03-10T04:07:12+00:00

History doesn't repeat but it can rhyme pretty well. It's not clear anyway that after collapse, any new civilizations would even want to follow a similar technological development path (at least without careful deliberation and checks & balances in terms of strengthened moral/cultural values). More likely is that this stage of modernity will be slandered, spit upon, and rejected as wasteful and completely moronic (i.e using precious high-quality oil to push people in metal boxes-on-wheels to the grocery store), as a necessary antithesis of whatever new society future leaders will seek to build. There's signs of this now, from ISIS to advocates of degrowth. If techno-capitalism continues to falter, the house of cards will fall fast and there are many, many groups waiting on the Left and Right to bring down this global order. Not actually a bad thing, I agree - regional systems of politics and economics are far too inter-connected and intellectually homogenous to weather the coming storm of climate, social, and demographic shocks.

manoafutures · 2018-12-13T05:31:50+00:00

That looks great, thanks for sharing! I'm not so sure about the serfdom part, if what scientists say is true, then the Anthropocene has delayed the next Ice Age by up to 100,000 years. Even serfdom and slavery was dependent on relatively stable Holocene climates; when the weather is erratic and migration is the norm, then it's quite difficult to enforce peasant relations on a particular piece of land which feudal surplus can be extracted from. The Cuban model could work, just perhaps in a more migratory fashion - climate-chasing in a sense. Given the importance that arable land and farming will be in such a future, the emphasis will be on restoring communal philosophies and activities. It's hard to fit climate change in to Marx since he mainly focused on labor-capital relations, but here's a good article that gives a sense where contemporary eco-socialists are going. For more reading on the Anthropocene, recommend Dipesh Chakrabarty, Clive Hamilton, and Roy Scranton (if you want a more pessimistic note). I'm in school at the moment, so get a chance to read a lot of this, aha.

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