research in progress...
see also the audio file of interview with Johan Siebers, for more reflections on scenario planning and the future.
Its icon looks like this:
Future studies
reflects on how today’s changes (or the lack thereof) become tomorrow’s reality. It includes attempts to analyze the sources, patterns, and causes of change and stability in order to develop foresight and to map alternative futures. The subjects and methods of futures studies include possible, probable, and desirable variations or alternative transformations of the present, both social and “natural” (i.e. independent of human impact). A broad field of inquiry, futures studies explores and represents what the present could become from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives.Futures studies takes as one of its important attributes (epistemological starting points) the on-going effort to analyze images of the future. This effort includes collecting quantitative and qualitative data about the possibility, probability, and desirability of change. The plurality of the term "futures" in futures studies denotes the rich variety of images of the future (alternative futures) and preferable futures (normative futures) that can be studied. (source: Wikipedia)
Futurology
literally means the study of the future. The term was coined by German professor Ossip K. Flechtheim in the mid-1940's, who proposed it as a new branch of knowledge that would include a new science of probability. The modern multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural discipline of futurology, known more generally as futures studies, emerged in the mid-1960's, according to first-generation futurists Olaf Helmer, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Dennis Gabor, Oliver Markley, Burt Nanus, and Wendell Bell.[1]As a discipline it is still early in conceptual and methodological development, grounding, and validation.
(from Wikipedia)