“Practices of Futurecasting: Sharing Imagined Tomorrows,” edited by Michael Shamiyeh — an ambitious exploration with a ton of fun contributors describing how we can effectively envision, communicate, and shape desirable futures. At its core, this volume makes a compelling case that our ability to imagine and construct viable paths forward is perhaps the most critical skill needed in our age of accelerating change and uncertainty. I was super excited to participate in the book and the Desired Futures 6 event two years ago that led up to it, even if remotely with a conversation via Zoom with my co-essayist Tobias Revell who was in attendance. (I had a prior engagement and in any case by then I would have max’d out my self-imposed constraints on long-haul travel by the time of the awesome event was going to happen..and it was awesome..off a lake and in some castle or some such? But, look..the long-haul travel thing? Right?)

Tobias Revell and I contributed a chapter titled ‘Stories to Imagine Alternate Futures’

The book brings together diverse voices from academia, design, business, science fiction, and futurism to examine how we can move beyond simplistic utopian or dystopian visions to create more nuanced and actionable futures. A key insight that emerges is that effective futurecasting requires balancing analytical rigor with creative imagination - what several contributors call the “iron fist and velvet glove” approach. Hard data and trend analysis must be combined with compelling narratives and experiential elements that help people viscerally understand and engage with possible futures.

One of the book’s most valuable contributions is its emphasis on making futures tangible and participatory. Rather than futures being the exclusive domain of experts making predictions, the authors advocate for more democratic and collaborative approaches that bring diverse stakeholders into the process. This includes using techniques like design fiction, experiential scenarios, and immersive environments to help people literally “step into” potential futures and grapple with their implications.

The volume pays particular attention to the role of narrative and storytelling in futurecasting. As several contributors note, humans fundamentally think in stories rather than abstract trends or data points. Therefore, crafting compelling narratives about possible futures - while ensuring they remain plausible rather than purely fantastical - is essential for engaging people and spurring action. The authors explore various storytelling approaches, from science fiction prototyping to experiential scenarios to immersive environments.

A recurring theme is the need to strike a careful balance between making futures feel both plausible and provocative. If visions of the future feel too familiar, they won’t inspire new thinking or behavior change. But if they seem too outlandish or disconnected from present reality, they risk being dismissed as unrealistic fantasy. The sweet spot is creating futures that stretch people’s imagination while maintaining enough connection to current trajectories and constraints to feel achievable.

The book also wrestles with important questions about power and participation in futurecasting processes. Who gets to imagine and shape futures? How can we ensure marginalized voices are included? Several contributors argue for more democratic and inclusive approaches that bring diverse stakeholders into the process rather than futures being dictated by experts or elites. This includes being mindful of whose interests and perspectives are privileged in how we envision and construct futures.

Perhaps most importantly, the volume emphasizes that futurecasting isn’t just about prediction - it’s about agency and action in the present. By helping people imagine different possibilities and understand their role in bringing about preferred futures, effective futurecasting can overcome paralysis and fatalism to inspire positive change. The authors share various techniques and case studies for moving from abstract futures to concrete action.

The book makes a compelling case that we need new ways of thinking about and engaging with the future. Traditional forecasting approaches based purely on extrapolating trends or making predictions are insufficient for navigating today’s complex challenges. Instead, we need more creative and participatory methods that combine analytical rigor with imagination and storytelling.

While ambitious in scope, the book maintains a practical orientation throughout. The various contributors share concrete methods, tools and case studies that readers can apply in their own work. This includes specific techniques for running futures workshops, creating experiential scenarios, developing design fictions, and moving from imagination to action.

The volume’s diversity of perspectives and approaches is both a strength and occasional weakness. While the different voices and viewpoints provide valuable texture and insight, there are places where the book’s narrative thread becomes somewhat fragmented. A stronger synthesizing framework might have helped readers better integrate the various concepts and methods presented.

That said, “Practices of Futurecasting” makes an important contribution to how we think about and engage with the future. At a time when many people feel overwhelmed by change and uncertainty, the book offers practical hope by showing how we can more effectively imagine and shape desirable futures together. It should be valuable reading for anyone interested in futures thinking, strategic foresight, design, and social change.

While the book might sound like it is primarily written for practitioners and academics, there are some really practical chapters in it that have actual hands-on things to do. It’s also got insights about how to make futures more tangible and actionable are relevant for anyone concerned with creating positive change. With everything going on these days, and seemingly every complex challenge you can imagine, the conclusion that there’s nothing that can be done is ridiculous: it’s time to imagine harder; it’s time to imagine new possibilities. The tools and approaches shared here are more vital than ever.

HOpefully readers will be left with both expanded possibilities and concrete tools for engaging with the future. Rather than the future being something that simply happens to us, it shows how we can take a more active role in imagining and shaping desirable futures together. In doing so, it makes an important contribution to both the theory and practice of futures thinking.

But actually — speaking of that essay, when Tobias and I sat down to write Stories to Imagine Alternate Futures, our goal was to share how we see storytelling as a vital, transformative tool for rethinking the future. It’s one of several areas of creative overlap and crosstalk we have. And a bit of a recognition that in the world of foresight and future studies, there’s a tendency to lean heavily on models, data, and prescriptive policy stuff. Even when justifying the work in more structured contexts that perhaps rely heavily on data, sometimes to their own detriment. I get it. I’m an engineer. I write code. I play with data. And in my experiences, these are tools that are valuable but often are challenged when you try to connect with the deeply human experience of what it means to imagine “what comes next.” We wanted to highlight how stories, material cultural artifats as design fictions, especially speculative ones, create a space for people to explore alternate futures in ways that are tangible, emotional, and even unsettling.

In our essay, we get into the practices of speculation and Design Fiction in the context of ways of telling stories that might have a foot in data (trends, for example) but also a foot in the space of imagination and wondering. And we look at the practices we both engage in professional and creatively as a kind of sandbox for doing futures work that is about imagining future possibilities. Of course, readers here will appreciate that Design Fiction, unlike the ‘casting’ practices, is not about predicting what will happen but creating immersive provocations that let us test out ideas, values, and even fears in a low-stakes way. For example, we write about the film Abundance that Tobias contributed to in his role there at Arup, a speculative project imagining a regenerative urban culture in London. It’s a world where food imports are tightly controlled, and energy use is deliberately constrained. These scenarios aren’t just technical exercises — they’re ways of asking, “What kind of world do we want to inhabit?” These experiments, studies, films, artifact constructions are opportunities to challenge the defaults of what people assume the future will be, whether it’s endless technological progress or unchanging cultural norms.

We also explore the unique feedback loop between speculative storytelling and real-world innovation. Science fiction doesn’t just reflect our dreams and anxieties about the future—it actively shapes them. Think about how the gadgets in sci-fi films often inspire real technological advancements, or how games and stories subtly shift our collective sense of what’s possible or desirable. But we also argue that the work of imagining futures needs to go deeper than shiny tech or dystopian clichés. It needs to include voices and perspectives that aren’t always part of these conversations, so the future isn’t just a projection of the same dominant narratives we see today.

Writing this piece was a way for us to articulate why we believe storytelling is so powerful—not just as a way to entertain but as a way to make change. It’s a call to arms for anyone who cares about the future to embrace the messy, imaginative, and deeply human process of shaping it. The future isn’t written; it’s something we imagine into prototype and build, through stories that may not always be prose — they may be objects that evoke and imply what could be. These ways of ‘futuring’ might just make all the difference and remind us that we may be living in someone else’s dream of one possible future — and that may not be the future we desire.