THE FAN CLUB
FUTURES ANALYSTS NETWORK NEWSETTER
SEPTEMBER 2006
Communicating Futures
One of the challenges facing policy makers and strategists who work with scenarios, horizon scanning or other futures techniques is how to communicate the often complex and subtle messages arising from their work to stakeholders and partners in a clear, concise and engaging way.
Visual and creative methods - such as video, dramatisations, still images and creative writing techniques - are all popular and effective tools that futures practitioners use to get futures messages across in a memorable and meaningful way.
Communicating Futures
The September 2006 meeting of the FAN club - which was held at 76 Portland Place, London - offered participants an opportunity to learn more about these different approaches, to hear where they have been applied - and to try them out for themselves.
futurefocus@dti
futurefocus@dti is the DTI's dedicated envisioning centre, based in 1 Victoria Street, London. The Centre, which has been running for five years, uses film and images to help groups visualise future scenarios, work with change drivers and scan for future signals. Clive Margetts, Director of futurefocus@dti, talked about the different approaches they have used and offered some insights into the pros and cons of each.
The centre has commissioned filmed dramatisations of scenarios, has used actors in workshops and has worked with Getty Images to produce a variety of communication tools. Since futurefocus is used constantly for policy and strategy discussions - not just within DTI but across government and industry - these tools need to communicate futures issues and scenarios clearly and in a way that workshop participants can use to achieve breakthrough thinking.
Three clear messages came from Clive's presentation:
- the medium is certainly important - but it needs expert input from the futures team to ensure that it conveys the right message;
- there is no 'best' way to communicate futures - each approach has benefits. Choosing the right approach for the task is important;
- it isn't necessary to have a high production budget to get things done; to demonstrate this, Clive presented a short film made in-house to stimulate discussion at the beginning of a horizon scanning workshop for members of the retail sector.
Contact Clive if you would like to know more about - or use - futurefocus@dti.
Digital Britain 2014
Amanda Singh (formerly at the BBC and now with the Burns Owen Partnership) and Barbara Heinzen (an independent consultant) presented the Digital Britain 2014 scenarios, designed to help the BBC think about the forces driving digital media in the UK.
There are two scenarios that explore social structures, mobility, technology and digital rights. Little Britain describes life in the UK following a decade of economic slowdown and failed restructuring of the energy industry. Times are tough and local issue politics have become stronger as communities have become more isolated from national government. Alien Nation describes a society which has enjoyed sustained economic growth and where government and business work closely together to solve public service problems. The gap between rich and poor has widened and surveillance and monitoring are used to maintain public order.
Amanda and Barbara focussed on how the scenarios are presented. The report is accompanied by a DVD which describes life through the eyes of four different characters - Meg, Ranjit, Nick and Ela - who live in 2014. All four characters are interviewed in each scenario to show how they fare in the different futures. The report itself is short, in A5 format and printed on different colours of paper.
The use of graphic design and dramatised character interviews makes the scenarios very accessible. The DVD is broken down into eight separate sketches and viewers can navigate around as they choose.
The scenarios were used by the BBC New Media Board to assist them in their thinking about the future of broadband.
Creating Stories
A key purpose of this meeting was to give participants the chance to have a go at communicating futures through one of four workshop activities:
- writing;
- using stills images;
- creating a short video; or
- working with actors.
Each workshop group was invited to communicate key messages about the Detection and Identification of Infectious Diseases - the most recent Foresight project to be launched. Nana Abadji from Foresight gave a short presentation of the main findings from the project; then, armed with copies of the executive summary, participants disappeared off to create presentations.
The writing workshop focussed on using creative writing techniques and characterisation to explore ways of conveying the issues; the stills and video workshops used library material to create powerpoint presentations (using images) and quicktime movies (using video); and the acting workshop began with a short dramatised scenario in which a businessman travelling to the UK fails to declare that he is carrying a plant infection - with unexpected consequences. Participants then went on to write and direct two new sketches with the actors.
Cartoons
Throughout the meeting, Graham Ogilvie, a corporate artist from Ogilvie Design, listened to participants' conversations (about the day, about futures thinking or about the challenges of using these techniques in the public sector) and built a gallery of images (Adobe PDF) around the walls of the room.
After lunch, Graham invited participants to write feedback on post-it notes and attach them to the relevant poster (comments in green are ones that broadly agree with the message of the poster; comments in red are ones where people are challenging the message).
Graham uses this - and other techniques such as storyboarding and futures postcards - to help groups break complex issues down into a logical series of picture framed images that ensure the ideas are easily understood by a wider audience.
Artefacts from the future
Professor Anthony Dunne, from the Royal College of Art, spoke about how his consulting partnership - Dunne and Raby - use design to create physical products that evoke ideas about the way we might live in the future.
Professor Dunne presented a range of hypothetical products developed in collaboration with the Science Museum that explore the ethical, cultural and social impact of different energy futures. He began by showing us what might happen if local communities began to produce their own energy and to create their own brands to compete in the energy marketplace.
He then challenged the group - to think about how social behaviour and etiquette might change if human sewage became a significant source of energy.
The rest of Professor Dunne's talk covered a range of other challenging topics and showed how producing physical objects and setting them in a museum - as an exhibit of how we might live in the future - can really bring futures issues to life.
Communicating future competencies
Simon Maugher of NIACE gave the final presentation of the day, speaking about the benefits of using scenario thinking to support policy discussions in multi-stakeholder organisations. Simon highlighted the cultural and emotional difficulties which can emerge when different organisations, perhaps with different perspectives and objectives, work together on cross-cutting issues - and how scenario thinking can help them structure conversations and engage a wide variety of stakeholders in the process.
Using the example of the EU's Article 6 project - which seeks to understand the competencies regions need in order to respond effectively to the challenges of economic development - Simon showed how scenarios can help partners from different organisations work together to create a shared sense of what the future might hold and what they would - individually and collectively - define as success. In the scenario creation process, Simon pointed out, different organisations were able to move beyond traditional ways of discussing economic success - exchanging data and focussing on policy challenges - and explore differences in regional and organisational culture, personality and disposition. For the Article 6 project, this meant that partners were able to
- elucidate the economic & social drivers creating the need for change;
- build a shared picture of how these drivers will affect partner regions in the medium to long term;
- identify challenges that are common across partner regions; and
- consider - and build a shared understanding of - the different routes that different regions may need to take to achieve and balance their economic and social objectives.
Stock images and video
There are a number of websites where images and video are available. They generally have to be paid for through a licence or by subscription to the site (but see, for example, freeimages.co.uk). Other popular sites are
There are, mainly, three types of rights available for using images and clips (the following definitions are taken from Getty Images - definitions may vary for different suppliers):
- rights-managed products are licensed on a use-by-use basis
- rights-ready products may be used for a particular type of use specified at the time of licensing
- royalty-free products may be used by the licensee multiple times for multiple projects without incurring additional fees