Anticipatory Thinking

One of our fundamental tasks is to anticipate the way forward. This short paper offers a reflection for this task which will examine the value and praxis of anticipation, as it is framed in the space of the anticipatory community. Drawing upon resources of Earth-honoring faith related to our gathering, especially the work of Pope Francis and Thomas Berry, as well as other Christian-rooted sources, Hindu-rooted sources from my own ground and identity of faith, as well as intersections with eco-feminist and eco-womanist voices, we will consider our own walk into the space of the anticipatory community. Within this space we are called to adaptation, acceptance, and ultimately resurrection. Within this space we can begin to discover a way into and through climate change and climate crisis. Standing at the climate crossroads now, we must take on the garments of justice, compassion, mutuality, and care for all living beings, especially those most vulnerable, if we are to indeed keep everything we hold sacred.

The little interest that Architecture as a discipline shows towards dealing with the future, our own future, poses a remarkable paradox : the irrelevance of thinking about the future in a future oriented field. This "Design Paradox" obviously cannot and has not worked in our favor. As the role of anticipation becomes increasingly vital for responding to our fast changing civilization, "futuring" needs to be formally included within architectural practice and education. Paying attention to the future means at least two things for architectural education:

(1) It means to look at the future of our discipline without the
curriculum to inform the way we should be educating our students.
This is a top-bottom approach. Certain image of the future may
demand changes in our educational structure to 'produce' a particular profile of the future architect. The most clear example of this adjustment has been the incorporation of computing within the architecture schools. The top-bottom approach is conservative, reactive, slow, and does not include any action to incorporate futures thinking within the curriculum. Nevertheless, it is obviously a necessary approach.

(2) It means to look at the future of our discipline within the
curriculum. This is a bottom-up approach not very common. Most
of the discussion about the future has remained at the administrative or theoretical level and, with few exceptions, has not permeated into actual teaching. A bottom-up approach that considers and/or simulate future architectural practices and challenges may do more to point at the real future of architecture than any top-bottom approach constructed as response to the pressing needs of the present.

This paper explores this bottom-up approach
because it is an area that remains largely unattended by academia.

To see the official version: Markham, A. (2020). The limits of the imaginary: Challenges of intervening in future speculations of memory, data, and algorithmic archiving. New Media & Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929322

Over a three-year period, researchers, artists, and activists collaborated on eight public engagement experiments in five countries. All focused on building critical consciousness about digital futures. The interventions worked: Once participants broke through the seamlessness of interface surfaces, they immediately thought more critically about how digital platforms actually operate. Yet even as participants reached into these black boxes, they didn't imagine alternatives. This article offers a critical theory reading of the emerging theme of inevitability among the public. It draws on the concept of discursive closure, whereby particular values and (infra)structures are naturalized, neutralized, and legitimated, closing off discussion of alternatives that might counter current hegemonic power. This article highlights the importance of confronting the limits of the imagination in speculative interventions, as well as the need, in ongoing interventions focused on imagining different digital futures, to iteratively focus on creative ways to identify and then overcome the current trend in the public sphere for people to resign themselves to ‘the inevitable’ in technology designs that significantly impact their everyday lives.

As machines, clothing, buildings, even body parts become ‘smarter’, humans’ digital literacy practices need to be anticipatory to avoid disruption. Anticipatory digital literacy practices are pre-active. They help humans understand what digital literacies practices they need to acquire and/or abandon to successfully adapt to new sociotechnical realities characterised by linear exponential technological change. In a probable future, some individuals and organisations will employ their anticipatory digital literacy practices to productively capitalise on technology innovations to maximise their business, economic impact and profits. But in a preferable future, all individuals have authentic opportunities to use anticipatory digital literacy practices at school to work successfully with others and artificial intelligence to address global challenges. Critical to addressing these global challenges is education’s ability to help individuals understand the ethical dimension of their anticipatory digital literacy practices so they not only use them pre-actively, but
with respect for others and the Earth. Equally paramount, is understanding that anticipatory digital literacies practices are not skills or competencies, rather they are cultural ways of doing things predicated on taking a pre-active stance to avoid disruption with different affinity groups.

Researchers interested in anticipatory discourse are, generally speaking, concerned with discourses in or about the future. They investigate how individuals, texts, or utterances project representations of future events, states, or relations. Unlike other areas of applied linguistics, the study of anticipatory discourse is still very much in its infancy. As yet, there is no set tradition or school for the study of such discourse, even if it has often been linked with critical discourse analysis. Given this state of affairs, this article focuses on research by authors who take the study of futurity as central to their work, although not all of them designate this work as " anticipatory discourse. "