What is Future Salience?
Future Salience is a newsletter highlighting interesting trends, developments, or issues that are shaping, or could help shape, the future. It is for those interested in looking beyond the superficiality, hot takes, and hype about the future. You know the sort – Top 10 trends; exponential this, that, and whatever; “jet packs are just around the corner”; and simplistic future utopias and dystopias.
Future Salience is about stimulating new perspectives, not about predictions.
Examples of my previous writings about the future are:
Types of futures reports (satirical)
Technology listicles, deep tech, and social systems - Lists of technologies and “disrupters” are sometimes click-worthy, but they can obscure the need for deeper discussions about the social systems in which they could sit.
Aotearoa's narrow narrative - To the limited extent that Aotearoa NZ has considered the future, it hasn’t taken a very imaginative approach. The dominant narrative is of an agricultural nation, just more sustainable and regenerative. To develop and give more salience to other future narratives were need to use futures thinking methods to explore other worldviews.
Don't plan on orderly transitions - Identifying the nature, pace and scale of change is critical in foresight, but it is easy to overlook discontinuities and the need for ourselves and our institutions to change quickly too.
What’s in it for you?
I’ve got eclectic reading habits, and like delving below the surface. So rather than repeating what many others are writing about, my objective is to provide you with developments, issues, and perspectives that you may miss.
Writing helps me think, so this newsletter is as much about me developing a better understanding of future possibilities as I hope it is for you.
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. I can’t guarantee a post every week, but I’ll do my best to produce new posts at least every fortnight.
I’m not planing on introducing paid subscriptions, so all content will be free to read.
About me
I’ve been involved in foresight and futures thinking since 2007, when I worked with some fantastic people at New Zealand’s former Ministry of Research, Science and Technology on their Futurewatch programme. I been providing my own foresight and futures services for the last five years through my consultancy Day One Futures.
From 2011 to 2022 I wrote a futures blog called Ariadne, on the now shuttered Sciblogs site hosted by the New Zealand Science Media Centre. Some of those posts are available on my Day One Futures website. From 2020 to 2022 I also wrote the weekly Covid-19 Research Tracking newsletter for the NZ Science Media Centre, which helped many local public officials, healthcare workers, and scientists keep up-to-date with coronavirus developments.
