Futures Literacy: Games

Games @Futures_Sandbox
Futures Literacy, 21 November 2016.

Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University

Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

The Futures Sandbox is an initiative for transformative action learning and youth development.  Developed by Dr. Nur Anisah Abdullah and John A Sweeney (PhDc) in an effort to advance futures thinking, the Sandbox aims to develop critical and reflective modes of awareness and inquiry.  The Futures Sandbox is a collaborative and open platform for workshops, seminars, and hands-on projects to educate and inspire youth toward imagining and creating a more preferred future.

The first 3.5-hour session of Futures Sandbox was attended by 15 participants consisting of eight undergraduate and two postgraduate students of a local university in Dubai, and the remaining five were working professionals.  Three games were played in sequence as an introduction to Futures Studies: (a)Metaphors of the Future; (b)Time Machine; and (c)Where do you stand- The Polak Game.

Game 1: Metaphors for the Future consists of a set of four concepts: (i) a ride on the train; (ii) kayaking down a river; (iii) sailing in the sea; and (iv) rolling the dice adapted from Kauffman’s Ways of Thinking of the Future (1976, p64-65).  The Metaphors for the Future was brought into the Sandbox as the first activity, designed to help students think about how they visualize and articulate what they felt about their future.  This design was felt useful as metaphors unite reason and imagination depicting rationality of our ordinary entailment and inferences (Lakoff, 2010).  Though there were no extrinsic prizes at the end of the game, students were rewarded by a sense of having ‘thingified’ (Papert, 1996) the imaginings of the future.   Their chosen concepts from the metaphors explicitly described their sub-conscious images of what lies ahead.  Fifty percent of the participants felt that their future was a ride on the train; i.e. the future is fixed, pre-determined with pre-defined routes.  The future exists ahead of us although we can only see each part as we come to it.  We are locked in our seats, and nothing we may know or do will change the course that is laid out for us;  20%  felt that the future is a river- it’s a rough ride with lots of bumps ahead, little control over where they were going but they were going somewhere ; another 20% felt that the future is a great ocean- there are many possible destinations, and many different paths to each destination.  We can have some kind of control over where to go and how they want to there; and for the remaining 10% the future is a roll of the dice.  The future is entirely random.  Things happen because they happen, and things could have taken a different direction, producing a different future each time with minimum to no control on the part of us being human.  A realization of existing images of the future that people held and formed provides insights into man’s sub-consciousness  of the future: optimism or pessimism;  ‘once man became conscious of creating images of the future, he became a participant in the process of creating this future’ (Polak,1973; p6); and that the future is not “what must be”, the future is possibly  “what ought to be” (ibid; p29). 

Game 2: Time Machine.  The Time Machine was created to help students visualize the possibility of creating desired futures.  The Time Machine helps students time travel back to 1995 with visuals of what Dubai used to be and what Dubai is today.  The younger generations tend to take things for granted as what they have now was what they were used to having without realizing how the world we exist in were designed and shaped over time.  The visuals on the rapid-progressive developments of Dubai as one of the most dynamic world economies were testaments that the future of a society can be created and designed.  This game helped to set the scene for introduction of Futures Studies and the role Futures Studies play in facilitating the imaginings of the future.  Participants were divided into two groups of people living in the year (i) 1995, and (ii) 2016.   The group that travelled back to 1995 were asked to discuss and prepare questions of what they want very much to know about the future; and for those living in 2016 were to think about what were the crucial events they might want to tell the people in 1995 to better prepare for the future.  This experiment allowed students learn to appreciate that future events that were seemingly impossible but can happen and become a reality.  The game helps students anticipate change.

Game 3: Where Do You Stand: The Polak Game was created based on Polak’s thesis (1973) that man forms and holds images of ourselves and others, of our own group and of other groups; and that public images of the future can be changed and re-constructed for a preferred-larger social and cultural processes.  Any attempts in shaping those change, the images that already exist in the minds of the society must be examined to better understand the extent of possible influence on decisions; and if these influences were deemed less desirable, what needs to be done to re-direct them? (p14-15, 1973).

Where Do You Stand- presents as a two-dimensional matrix: (i) the degree of happiness/misery, and (ii) the cause of happiness/misery- people versus system creating four quadrants, namely ‘happy-system’; ‘happy-people’; ‘sad-people’ and ‘sad-system’  The game allows participants explicitly articulate the existing images they have of the world we live in; and their perceptions of how others viewed the world.  As the first step in the game, participants were asked to take their position by standing on a line across the room representing the continuum of being happy to being sad.  Another line is drawn perpendicular to the degree of happiness representing the cause of happiness/misery: ‘people’ on one end and ‘system’ on another.  Participants were asked to moved themselves into quadrants representing their worldviews.  Within each quadrant, participants were asked to describe themselves to the others. This was followed by asking participants their opinions about the others who were standing in quadrants different from theirs.  The common reflection was that they were surprised that others would perceive them differently from what they thought they had portrayed themselves to be.  The game allows for an experiment (Kolb, et al., 2000) of being in a specific state and a lense into understanding oneself and others.  For example, participants who stood in the “happy-people” quadrant were seen by others as ‘utopists’.  Polak (1973) suggests that “the minds of men were prepared for discoveries and different views of the world” (p99).  This ability is crucial for one to realize that people do have different and diverse worldviews due to various reasons, and that differences and diversity of images of the world must be examined in anticipating how decisions might be and could be influenced as we work in moulding and shaping preferred futures. 

When asked ‘what worked well at the Sandbox’, generally participants reflected positive learning experience from the games. 

The words of one participant “... an exploration into the future no longer seem impossible or as un-do-able.  The session gave me some kind of framework to think about the future-  thinking (process) is more do-able now.”  

A reflection from a master student “...open up my views on things.  If we can foresee what the future might be and could be, we can think of what needs doing now and be ready of what is to come.  We can create the picture of how wish our future look like and start working or doing stuff now.”

Participants were asked in a post workshop survey: Did the workshop help them in any way their planning for the future or their view of the future?    Amongst the various mentions of how they have learned a lot, a response from a mature working professional participant worth quoting:

“.. I’m encouraged to think about what lies ahead and this is changing my thoughts about what I do now and my plans.”

These reflective questions were important as students often fail to connect what they have learned with their personal lives, they consciously make time to take stock of learning experience.

The Sandbox can be a space for transformative learning; and Futures games can be excellent tools for experimenting imaginings of the future,  in providing sets of different lenses for the seeing things in new ways, and in facilitating thinking process.  These games took participants through a journey of exploration in preparation and in anticipating what was in stall for the world we live in and that we can possibly create a different narrative and shift the routes of lives to a preferred future.

References

Kauffman, Drapper. (1976) Teaching the Future: A Guide to Future-Oriented Education. ETC Publications.

Kolb, D.A., Boyatzis, R.E., and Mainemelis, C. (2000) Experiential Learning Theory: Previous research and new directions.  In R.J. Sternberg and L.F. Zhang (Eds), Perspectives on cognitive, learning and thinking styles.  Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Lakoff, George, and Johnsen, Mark (2003) Metaphors we live by.  The University of Chicago Press, London.

Polak, Fred (1973) The Image of the Future.  Translated and abridged by Elise Boulding.  Elsevier Scientific Publishing, Amsterdam.

Seymour, Papert (1996) An Exploration in the Space of Mathematics Educations, International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning, Vol 1(1), pp 95-123.

                                   

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