M

Play with possibilities

by Stuart Candy
speculative design jams, where the
Situation Lab facilitates participants in
generating artifact ideas through gameplay,
and then bringing them to life. Outcomes
to date have included several popup design
fiction showsa Futurematic vending
machine at OCAD University; street
vendor merchandise from the future
created at New York University and put up
for sale on the corner of Canal St and

The Thing From The

Future is a card game that scaolds
imagination, strategic conversation and
storytelling about possible futures. One
part scenario generator, one part design
tool, and one part party game, it lets
players collaborate and compete to
describe, sketch,and even physically
prototype artifacts that might exist in
alternative futures, based on a wide array
of creative prompts.
Heres how it works. Either alone or in
small groups, players make a prompt by
combining cards from each of four
categories in the deck. These are Arc (the
applicable time horizon and type of
future, building on Jim Dators generic
futures framework), Terrain (the theme
or context for the object), Object (the
hypothetical future thing for which
players will generate a description, ranging
from device, to monument, to headline),
and Mood (how it feels to interact with
that thingdeliberately integrating an
interior dimension and casting dierent
light on the other three more external
elements).
Each prompt, then, oers the necessary
materials and constraints for players to
imagine a concrete cultural fragment of a
possible future. Just as history leaves
behind innumerable physical traces that

Stuart Candy (@futuryst, @sitlab) is

an experiential futurist, Director of the
Situation Lab and Assistant Professor
of Strategic Foresight and Innovation
at OCAD University, Toronto.
APF Compass | April 2015

The prompts can be combined in

several million ways. Each
combination allows the players to
imagine a concrete future
may speak volumes about what has
happened, the cards let you imagine
specific evidence of the countless
scenarios that could happen.

The game has been likened

to a combination of Oblique Strategies
(Brian Eno and Peter Schmidts creativityboosting card deck from the 1970s),
crossed with the Kickstarter
phenomenon, Cards Against Humanity. It
turns out to serve equally well as a group
icebreaker, ideation engine, and
imagination gym.

Broadway in Manhattan (both projects

completed in collaboration with NY-based
design collective Extrapolation Factory);
and an exhibition about the futures of live
music performance, created by Stanford
d.School students and staged at the Tech
Museum of Innovation in San Jose.

The Thing From The Future was also an

Ocial Selection at IndieCade, an
international independent games festival,
where it was one of 36 juror picks from
among 1000 submissions in all formats. It
has been played by thousands of people
worldwide, in settings ranging from the
Designed by Stuart Candy (a longtime
APF member) and Je Watson (a professor United Nations Development Programs
Annual Strategy Meeting in New York
in the University of Southern California's
City, to the Asia Pacific Foresight
School of Cinematic Arts), the game was
published in 2014 by Situation Lab, which Network conference in Taiwan, the
the two jointly run from Toronto and Los Toronto Maker Faire, Johns Hopkins
Universitys Museum Studies program in
Angeles.
Washington DC, and the 5D Institutes
In its first year, The Thing From The
transmedia storytelling event The Science
Future has had an unusually productive
of Fiction in Los Angeles.
career. It has been deployed, for instance,
as the ideation engine for several
9

A worldbuilding-themed variation of the

game was recently run live at the Berlin
Film Festival in February 2015, and a beta
electronic version was played by
participants at FutureFest in London in
March.

Designed as a combinatorial
prompting system, the card deck is
practically inexhaustible: with dozens of
options in each of the four categories,
there are over 3.7 million permutations in
the current edition, any one of which
might inspire countless ideas. Continual
player feedback helps refine the core deck,
but various extension sets or "hackpacks"
have also been created by Situation Lab to

10

help customise particular runs of the

game.
And once players (or facilitators)
understand the categories Arc, Terrain,
Object, and Mood, it becomes a
straightforward matter to augment or
adjust the contents, leaning exploration
into specific sub-territories of the futures
vast and ever expanding cone of
possibilities.

keep generating surprising creations. All of

which may be taken as an encouraging sign
that designing playfulness into our
professional processes can help foresight
have greater impact by making it more
accessibleas well as more fun.

The Thing From the Future is

available from www.situationlab.org
or directly viahttp://tinyurl.com/
futurething for $40 US per deck plus
So, stay tuned: The Thing From The
Future, aka #FutureThing on social media, shipping.
has generated a good deal of narrative and
making activity that cuts across the
futures, design, gaming and transmedia
storytelling communities, and it is set to

Photographs of Thing From The Future players and

artefacts by Stuart Candy.

APF Compass | April 2015