 My co-presenter Charlie Downoff is I think on an airplane on his way to Singapore he had travel changes. So he was going to be there in person giving the talk and I was going to be joining remotely as it turns out I'm remote and he's also even more remote. So but that's okay we've worked on this together and we're going to talk today about a workshop that we've run in several different formats over the over the last year. But rather than just give an account of the of the what we've done in the workshop in the past I'm going to walk through the methods that we've used. So we call it the open future design workshop. There's a pre-print here if you write down this number 2306.08426 that will describe some of the case studies that we've that we've done so far. So but I'm going to talk with you today about the methods. So and they're written down on these little cards so I'll kind of zoom around on the cards here to explain what we're talking about. So they're methods for envisioning and exploring the future together in in your minds and in groups. So it's fun to start with this one here called Derive Comics. So you want to develop some kind of future together to explore as a group. You have your group but everyone has their own experiences and their own lives. So what are you going to do to make a shared experience? Gather some data. So go for a walk or look out the window or just close your eyes and explore something in your mind around the theme of the workshop. Assume you know what that is. And then document okay document what what you see in your mind in a way that makes it possible to share with others. So this could be photos, a screenshot, post-it notes or whatever you might like. So if you're there in the audience you might take a second to close your eyes and imagine you know something that you encountered on your way to the conference that you might like to share with other people. We won't have time to report back but you could imagine these things and have that already do that exercise. And then if you're going to do the workshop we try to build a meaning map of the of the things that people have collected in their interactions of the previous activity and distill some kind of shared meaning. So again everyone has their own experience. So let's talk together about the problems and opportunities that everyone sees in those explorations they did. So maybe some of these will cluster together. So maybe you saw a case of disparate on the way to the conference you might have seen something that made you feel upset and you want to share those things. Or maybe you saw something that makes you happy and you want to share those things. You might find common themes around how you're feeling about that. Of course everyone's going to have their own perspectives on that. Some things someone might find something upsetting that someone else finds gives them pleasure. That's possible and that's okay too. The map can contain all of that information. Just make sure you document those different viewpoints to get everyone on the same page. And if we were doing this in the workshop we might do this around tables in smaller groups rather than all on one big map. And so that's this card here called structure conversations. Having convened the workshop if unstructured conversations are likely to take lots of time without yielding some concrete benefits then structure the conversations around your shared interest to move things forward more effectively. So maybe it's necessary to find the themes and create breakout rooms or breakout groups accordingly. When I ran this once at university at work I just did group people by faculty. I've had some of those conversations per faculty. And now once you've got all these different groups broken out you may want to or need to increase the participant control because if you only have one facilitator they're not going to be able to be in every group all at once. So you need to have people doing things inside their groups. For example, taking notes. So we have a nice system for taking notes across layers of meaning. So in these little groups you can explain to them how to take these structured notes. They can be responsible for that and responsible for reporting back to other groups as well. So those are two of the things you can do to increase participant control that there are other things to do as well. Something else to mention here is this concept of re-infusing expertise. So what I like to do in these workshops is you're trying to build this meaning map but you want to get everyone on the same page but you actually want to kind of incorporate their thoughts and feelings as human beings before you incorporate their expertise. So this is why I'm talking about the things you've seen on the way to the conference or the things you might see in your neighborhood. If it turns out that you're also a sociologist or a climate expert or a building an architect something like that then those pieces of expertise can be used to flesh out the map. That might be a second phase of activity and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. So this is something we can move towards. And I think the last one on this on this set of ideas here is to do your research. So if you're running a workshop you can already start doing the research before the workshop starts by interviewing participants and starting to build your own meaning map which you might share with them beforehand. So these are good instructions for basically getting people on the same page. So if you want to do the research to start with then that will help. And you could do that. You could help as well with getting people on the same page with some context setting. So the theme might come from a workshop sponsor convener or from this previous research and you can share that. So it's all about how we kind of get started starting to build a perhaps a visual picture one visual picture or multiple visual pictures getting everyone towards the same page. This is the next set of instructions for exploring the future. So now we've thought about these ideas that people brought to the table like things that they find exciting or things they find concerning related to the topic that that they've been tasked with or that they've brought a variety of topics. So how do you explore that? We like the idea of handing out some functional roles. So having tried this a few different ways one of the ways we tried with some kind of role playing like stepping into the persona of you know a type of imagined character that didn't really work as well for what we were trying to do as taking these functional roles which are giving people things that they can do inside of a conversation while they remain themselves and they continue to have their own expertise. So the first one here is the wrinkler and their their role in the conversation is to think about what could go wrong. So as we brought everyone onto the same picture the same map before we're envisioning all these different themes that people had brought to the table hooked up and aligned with each other in some way. That already is starting to tell a sort of story about what how these things fit together do they fit together you know again someone people might have conflicting views so their perspectives on on what could go wrong or what could go right may be very different. But for example if you're envisioning a future in which a certain set of local problems are being solved that's nice but what if what if the local government or the local authority doesn't doesn't get on board with the views of the citizens and the citizens have to stage uprising or something like that or they at least have to stage a big campaign and that's the kind of thing that the wrinkler might might propose in terms of what could go wrong and this is helping to envision different futures so possible futures in which or maybe they're quite unlikely but things aren't going the way we thought they would inside of this shared scenario. The next rule is the time traveler who asks the question what has happened in the past and what could happen in the future and they're providing some historical context and anticipating alternate futures so again in the in the context of kind of local project maybe you could imagine some local movements that have worked in different ways in the past achieving different kinds of goals you know some might be more urban some might be more rural they may have different ways of working together you might realize that in the future we'll be working across context more effectively through technology so you could imagine a future in which different local groups are networking together around themes that are shared and so forth so again this is just a kind of conversational role and you could have this physically have this card out to someone and they could trade the cards during the conversation so they don't have to be stuck as the time traveler forever. The next role is this analyst role so what are the what are the moving parts inside of your scenario that you've envisioned so maybe we focused in on a specific part of the future like you know for looking at local issues maybe we're focusing in on on housing so you could focus in on all the current challenges and components of the potential solutions that are being devised in terms of local housing so who are the actors what are the resources what are the institutions and you could identify and look at how those things work together so an example in in houston to address homelessness they formed a a coalition of all the organizations that had anything to do with homelessness and they got them talking to each other and as a result of that the outcomes for people using their services significantly improved and that's all due to this kind of internal orchestration but the analyst also has another role which is to consider the challenges beyond the current focus and to identify and orchestrate the integration of those components outside so if you if you were looking at things related to homelessness you may also want to be looking at things like jobs and mental health and families and migration or whatever the other things are that touch on the concepts related to having a home but aren't necessarily the you know they're not necessarily the the services and roles and actors specifically focusing on this topic um and then to make this all hang together we have these facilitator roles so linkers and reflectors these are looking at the proposed scenarios that people are coming up with like resolving homelessness or changing the way we use other local resources these are things that are coming up in the conversation um how do these start to uh fit together so you know maybe we um want to change how we use certain local resources and that's going to create some jobs which for people for example so these linkers have to be able to stay on their feet making these connections between the ideas that other participants are coming up with so I call them facilitator roles because they're people who are facilitating the conversation but like I said in the spirit of that increasing participant control there's no reason not to hand out this card to someone who's just showed up on the day and ask them to start making some links um and similarly this other facilitating role is a reflector who can look at how that scenario is evolving so maybe you know we've exhausted the topics uh or at least our knowledge about those topics and we realized you know to make some progress you'd have to ask an expert so um here we talked about this thing called a project action review where you say well all right we've done our initial exploration that's coming to an end it's now time to um take up another topic or look at another um look at another proposed problem that might come up etc so these reflectors can um help kind of steer the conversation along so that's it in terms of how the exploring works according to this um this system so again we promise way to get everyone on the same page and start to look at what what works and what doesn't work and then explore what could work better what has worked in the past um so here's some examples that we we looked at in these are three examples all from the same workshop so these were some of the scenarios and problems that people came up with so contested space so-called public space doesn't always feel welcoming to all members of the public it can be overrun with antisocial behavior it can feel exclusionary or uninviting it can be the site of a conflict although the uses of public space are complex each space does not need to support every use equally so um I think this is looking at the example of a public space which is used for public drinking and maybe that's uh okay at least for the people who are drinking there they want to place the to gather but other people may not feel like that so the point is when you have a public space it can be used in different ways and this becomes a feature of the space that the uses are are contested um and that's interesting right so that it doesn't force any particular resolution of that problem or challenge um but uh it gives things to talk about um another one here is funding of public space even though public space is known to increase wellness in the population well-being priorities that would lead to increased funding for public space aren't universally adopted um in order to make the benefits of such investment clear uh we should increase transparency around investments in public welfare for example creating a register of impacts of local social enterprises in the case where the government isn't investing in that so this is again proposing a proposing a solution rather than um looking at uh you know these these kind of strategies so this is saying here's a more developed uh possible solution but it's also outlining some of the problems so this is this is something that was coming out of that kind of exploration that I was talking about before um and here's another one rebalancing social services uh welfare-related services should be supplied and balanced with local needs um they're often or not uh could varied expertise be integrated in a similar way to the domain specific skills practiced by medicine sans frontier to address uh complex local challenges um so those are some of the things that came out of the conversation I'm going to skip these for the moment and come back to them uh here are a number of other miscellaneous patterns that are are useful and I'm realizing uh this one I really wanted to look at um now so these are called pattern language components um and all these cards that you're seeing here when they have a context then if then on them they don't all have those but some have this kind of structure uh for talking about where these strategies can be used you're collaborating in this case where people are new to design patterns if these new people are being invited to create their own patterns like these are starting to become you know problem solution pairs um but they don't they're not terribly acquainted with design patterns you can introduce these dynamic keywords however uh because therefore and specifically to describe a gap or conflict you allow you know help them talk about those gaps or conflicts in their situation um to talk about some clauses and that are operating in the situation um and to describe some sort of rationale for what to do about it based on what's worked in the past or what maybe works in another place um and then specifically to describe next steps they could take in their in their um in their scenario so these ones although they've been re-abstracted down into text form short paragraphs were outlined by people using those keywords uh using cards on on a table um so I thought that was uh a useful one to share right away is is these cards can also be printed out and shared around um so um other things to say about it so like uh how does this work in terms of its broader broader process and one of the more recent ones I I ran I ran it at the university I work with and they're working on creating an open research action plan at the university so um what I did was I I interviewed a bunch of people uh to gather some initial themes and make that an initial meaning map um and then at the workshop I ran through the activities uh like we've talked about in the context of our life at the university I'm talking about what works and what doesn't work for people there how they'd like to see things evolving differently and this is structured per faculty and then I took a bunch of pictures so they had laid all these themes out using pieces of uh no papers and some of those cards I mentioned over here so I took pictures and then I was able to analyze that into an outline using the supplied uh template so um having gathered themes for the participatory project uh they may have some um uh explicit uh I think they should say structure they may have some explicit structure in in them uh because the way the information was gathered so by faculty or by using these cards but additional structure can be created linking the intermediate artifacts into a relevant template so we had these this linker role kind of making a map of every everything um but now we are have leading as output from that process uh a draft open research strategy using someone else's template so that's a that's a useful um way to present the results um not not conclusive and saying this is the final thing but it could also be structured as a as a project plan or a set of working groups um you might create uh online a new online community who will work on the emergent themes which have been created um this one talks about adapt layers as needed so when I mentioned that I have a template for structured um analysis of a given uh uh theme this is called causal layered analysis and the layers uh this is uh uh created devised by something called so how in yatula who's used it in in various uh consulting contexts including with the un and so forth um the layers are litany system worldview and myth and that allows you to kind of drill down from the problems that people encounter every day to what where those problems are coming from how they fit together and the kind of deeper stories that people are telling so in the in the case of wikipedia we want to create a educational resource that everyone can access uh and the worldview is that well that that can be done with a wiki you know or maybe that that's the system that can be done with a wiki the worldview is it can be done openly online giving everyone the the right to edit things but you know we're all familiar with the litany of problems that can come up like edit wars or vandalism or whatever so these are the problems that everyone's familiar with um but you know by and large those who are highly involved share the kind of same story and myth is not meant to be um a put down it's meant to be inspiring so like what's the what's the driving metaphor here you know maybe it's an encyclopedia or an educational resource or maybe it's a more profound thing like access to uh knowledge and knowledge creation process so but that said this card is saying you can adapt the layers as needed so if you're if you're talking about a challenge that has a more technical flavor your layers might be something like the real-time updates to the system uh information or the dynamic user interactions and you're you're instead of talking about worldview you might talk about what languages uh like concrete programming languages you're going to use and what actions you're going to take so this is a nice uh starter pack of of things to analyze and so people can take notes and you can easily teach them you know talk about the problems that um come up in your situation and try to drill towards the shared meanings and then in terms of this meaning map if you have notes from different groups in that format you can try to harmonize them and you know when I did this across faculties the different faculties came up with very different pictures uh and that's that's inherently kind of interesting looking at those diverse perspectives but like I said you can adapt the analysis layers as needed um some of the other things is is in a in a in certain groups if they're already oriented around a type of action or a type of um agenda um we've developed some possible next steps but if we leave without any concrete commitments then then maybe nothing will happen it was just a good conversation so um is it possible to introduce some early actions that people already do together in the workshop format turning it into a working context that begin to get people doing things um so um yeah this I think I've covered almost everything on this page except going meta going meta says that in the course of working on our project together um can we go meta to apply the project's methods to itself so here what I might do is take these cards and this conversation if we had a bit more than half an hour we could work together and kind of having acquainted you in this in this briefing with the methods we might try to fill in some new patterns and we might try to critique these methods and we might say well how are we going to use these methods in the future can we use these uh at at a future wikimania for example to uh to you know accelerate our way of working together um or can we use these as we take them but can we use these methods if we go back home to our other professional or um volunteer context social context could we use some of these ideas and other contexts and really get into using some of these concepts like what could go wrong etc to uh to workshops and methods themselves and so that's this process of going meta and we might say well for example we might realize um these roles these uh roles are great but maybe we need some other roles beyond these ones to get the most impact out of the methods or we might say well you know in half an hour maybe it's been okay to have joe talk at us a lot but actually we could have made a micro workshop that just did one or two of these activities and and that was useful so okay now um because i'm running out of things to cover um i'll leave a couple minutes i think there may be a chance for questions as well if they're facilitated if uh if anyone wants to put questions in the chat if that's possible or otherwise facilitate them um we'll just share a little bit so we ran we ran another context we ran the um workshop in was a course and we brought our paper along and shared it as a as a pre-reading so that was this kind of context setting pattern everyone had read our paper and then we came along and talked to the students who were developing um projects at a computing course so one of the student students enthusiastically said uh these authors actively participated in our class shared expertise and created a collaborative learning environment their presence allowed us to gain deeper insights into the concepts and methodologies of paper leading to innovative project approaches um by closely studying the patterns of patterns they identified in their research i gained a fresh perspective on project organization and established the logical and coherent structure to my uh work well that that's great as a as a narrative and it sounds it sounds very lovely but really what it's saying is is how are we uh providing engagement and guidance what are some better ways that we already have tried to provide engagement and guidance to people who are developing projects so um although there's a way to envision futures together again if people are working on projects they've already envisioned a future so what can we do to support that work as it goes along um and the same uh student said the authors insights helped me to navigate common project development pitfalls um through their emphasis on effective documentary um documentation regular testing and thorough project planning i was able to avoid costly errors their guidance ensured a consistent progress trajectory and maintained the professionalism of my final project so again what kinds of scaffolding and structuring um do we can we can we build or can we help people build that help them avoid mistakes and the same thing with the skill ability and adaptability so that's it that's the tool kit that we have here that's primarily like i said uh set up as a as a workshop but some of these um concepts go a bit beyond the the workshop format um here's the pre-print again if you want to see the developing paper this was uh been submitted to um pattern sorry pattern languages of programs which will take place in uh illinois um very soon um okay so i'm gonna stop sharing and just see if i see anything coming in on the chat um i've got according to my my talk i've been talking uh 24 minutes but we started a little late so i want to make sure um we're respecting the clock but if there are questions i'll read them in the chat yep please wrap up jump to latest okay um looks like we're on time i don't see any questions coming along here um but i hope that was useful for you no question from the room nida um if there are questions i will uh drop my um email in the chat so you can email me it looks like the next person's coming out maybe so okay thank you very much i'll say goodbye thank you joe