The Breath of the Doing was the result of the first of my collaborations with my good friends and colleagues at Media Evolution in Malmö. It’s a book based on a foresight process aimed at “the futures of digital work”, containing a set of essays, five scenarios, and five stories (written by me) based on those scenarios. (It’s also free to download; just follow that link.)
Media Evolution frequently run what they call “collaborative foresight cycles”: having identified a particular theme or topic, they put out a call for twenty to thirty participants from the local community: people from the public sector and the private, from the tech world and the arts world, from academia and business and everywhere in between. Then they get them in a room for two full days of workshop time, in which facilitation maestro Reeta Hefner guides them through a cavalcade of futures models and methods, with the aim of producing a bunch of imaginative scenarios that explore the topic in a situated and pluralistic way.
And then they turn those scenarios over to yours truly, who takes those imagined worlds and writes a short story set in each of them.
I’ll be honest, this is real “dream job” stuff. I mean, c’mon: I get to lurk around the edges of a workshop full of interesting people having interesting discussion, occasionally sticking my own oar in when invited, but otherwise listening for the telling detail or the tell-tale scratch and scrape of contradiction that sparks a story. Granted, those stories have to be written very quickly in order to be typeset and printed in one of the gorgeous physical books that come out of every cycle—but that’s less of a downside than you might think, creatively speaking. It means that I have to work on the principle of “first idea, best idea”: I have to commit to the first workable concept, because there’s no time to come up with alternatives.
This, I would argue, reflects the way sociotechnical change actually works in the world: we are obliged to decide quickly in the context of the consequences of the decisions of countless other people, and then we have to make our decision work as best we can.
Do these stories work, then? I’m not the best person to ask: I’m proud of them, of course, but I’m artist enough to see little in them but my own shortcomings and errors.
But many people who read them have taken the time to get in touch and say they enjoyed them, and found them useful as prompts for further thought—which is the entire point of the exercise!
And the Media Evolution crew clearly liked them, too, as they’ve asked me back to do a bunch more of them… but you can decide for yourself, if you like, as they’re available to read on ME’s website: