Publications

Drawing on the dark arts, the domain where magicians and fortune-tellers commune with unknowable, faceless entities, we explore economic and cultural grey areas to reclaim tools of business administration as an artistic medium.

The Dust & Shadow Fieldnotes were collected over the course of two years during three fieldtrips in the deserts of the North-American Southwest. They are written as a panexperiential travelogue through the landscapes of the Anthropocene.

We outline the AccessLab workshop format for decentralising research skills, creating new open access advocates, and building links between communities.

Design and Futures is a major collection of essays, manifestos, interviews and peer-reviewed articles, edited by Stuart Candy (Carnegie Mellon University) and Cher Potter (Victoria and Albert Museum), documenting 'design futures' discourse and practice around the world.

In this paper we present a cross-section of FoAM and Time’s Up’s work with physical narratives (PNs), which draw upon experiential futures and experience design. We introduce PNs as explorable, multisensory spaces before discussing the importance of enabling social interaction. We describe a series of creative experiments with PNs to illustrate our approach to futures in an artistic context, including installations, exhibitions and festivals. We do not intend to provide a critical analysis of the design process, methods or implications, rather, the article offers a reflection on our motivations and insights. As an invitation to further dialogue between transdisciplinary fields, we conclude with a call for futurecrafting at a human scale.

A sonic exploration of the desert, condensed into 12“ vinyl. The album contains two 18 minute speculative tracks — “dust” and “shadow”. It is packaged with dust, sand and detritus collected from the Sonoran, Mojave and Great Basin deserts which can be used for further physical manipulation and divergence from the recorded sound matter.

This text is intended to provide a brief introduction to working with futures as artists and culture makers. One of the central concerns is how and why Futures can provide useful methods for increasing agency and encouraging co-creation of our collective futures.

Why, then, is it so difficult to remain in that state of calm and relaxed focus whether in work or in life? Why do we rush through life mindlessly, only to regret it? Do we have a tendency to fill up our plates with too many things? How can we take the time we need with the work and people we love without feeling chased? Is it a question of finding the right balance or do we simply need more rest? And if so, is it physical rest we need or is there something more to it? 

When we intervene in complex systems, our future-shaping actions are hard (or perhaps impossible) to predict. How can engineers, entrepreneurs and technopreneurs embrace complexity and uncertainty, in order to act in meaningful ways, whatever the future may bring? This article includes a series of suggestions, propositions and open questions.

The Dust & Shadow reader #2 explores attunement as a proposition for engaging with the world, Earth-bound environments and their inhabitants, in a continuously changing field of relationships.