ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a case study of an experiential futures card game called The Thing from the Future, reflecting on it as a method for popularising and demystifying futures, and explaining the design mechanisms that make it tick. The Thing from the Future is a foresight tool and imagination exercise in the form of a deck of cards. Part scenario generator, part design method, and part party game it invites players to collaborate and compete in describing, telling stories about and sketching or physically prototyping artefacts that could exist in alternative futures. To date it has been played by thousands of people around the world, in settings ranging from the United Nations Development Programme’s annual strategy gathering in New York to Nesta’s Futurefest in London. Gameplay is simple. In a small group, usually three to five people, players co-create a prompt and are each challenged to describe an artefact from the future which meets the parameters.