M E T H O D S

APF Compass | April 2015 9

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

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 creativity-boosting 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.

Designed by Stuart Candy (a longtime APF member) and Je Watson (a professor in the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts), the game was published in 2014 by Situation Lab, which the two jointly run from Toronto and Los Angeles.

In its first year, The Thing From The Future has had an unusually productive career. It has been deployed, for instance, as the ideation engine for several

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

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 United Nations Development Programs Annual Strategy Meeting in New York City, to the Asia Pacific Foresight Network conference in Taiwan, the Toronto Maker Faire, Johns Hopkins Universitys Museum Studies program in Washington DC, and the 5D Institutes transmedia storytelling event The Science of Fiction in Los Angeles.

Play with possibilitiesby Stuart Candy

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.

The prompts can be combined in several million ways. Each combination allows the players to imagine a concrete future

M E T H O D S

10 APF Compass | April 2015

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

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.

So, stay tuned: The Thing From The Future, aka #FutureThing on social media, 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

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 shipping.

Photographs of Thing From The Future players and artefacts by Stuart Candy.