Research

Anticipating Futures

Recognising signals of what may emerge before it becomes established.

The future rarely arrives without indications. New technologies, changing behaviours, emerging ideas, and shifting conditions can provide early evidence of what may become significant. Anticipating futures is concerned with identifying and interpreting these indications before their implications become fully apparent.

The work combines prediction with structured exploration. It asks what current evidence can tell us about what may come next, while remaining attentive to uncertainty, incomplete information, and alternative possibilities.

Analysing Change

Identifying patterns, transitions, and deviations in evolving systems.

Change can be gradual, abrupt, cyclical, or difficult to distinguish from ordinary variation. Analysing change focuses on identifying meaningful patterns in how systems evolve and determining when observed movement may represent something more consequential.

The work examines trends, patterns, deviations, and transitions across time and space. It is concerned not only with detecting that something has changed, but with characterising the nature, timing, and significance of that change.

Exploring Futures

Constructing and comparing alternative futures.

A single projection can narrow a wide space of possibilities into one expected outcome. Exploring futures does the opposite: it deliberately considers multiple plausible futures so that their differences, implications, and pathways can be examined.

The work constructs alternative futures from driving forces, uncertainties, assumptions, and possible interventions. These futures can then be compared, tested, or used to reason backwards from outcomes towards the pathways that could lead to them.

Systems, Modelling & Simulation

Representing systems and dynamics so they can be examined.

Future outcomes often emerge from interactions between multiple components rather than from individual events. This domain represents those relationships explicitly, allowing systems, structures, feedbacks, and interactions to be examined.

Models and simulations provide ways to explore how systems may behave under different conditions. Their value lies not only in producing projections, but in making assumptions, mechanisms, and possible consequences explicit enough to examine and revise.

Uncertainty & Decision-Making

Characterising uncertainty and examining decisions across possible futures.

Future-oriented decisions are rarely made with complete information. Uncertainty can arise from variation in outcomes, limitations in data and models, disagreement about assumptions, or fundamental uncertainty about how systems may evolve.

This domain examines ways to characterise and communicate uncertainty, understand how conclusions respond to assumptions, and develop decision approaches that remain useful across multiple plausible conditions.

Collective & Participatory Futures

Bringing diverse knowledge, expertise, and perspectives into futures research.

Understanding possible futures often requires knowledge distributed across researchers, practitioners, institutions, communities, and other groups. This domain examines how such knowledge can be elicited, combined, challenged, and incorporated into futures research.

The work ranges from structured approaches for obtaining and aggregating expert judgement to participatory processes that allow people to contribute directly to the exploration and creation of futures.