Calculating the route to a Preferable Future
A few days ago, my classmates and I were allowed back into our classroom after four months or so of national lockdown. To be honest, I have been on campus only five or six times since the beginning of the course and I still need to check the route on Citymapper every time I leave the house. I saved Elephant and Castle as my “work destination”, so I can quickly check and double-check how to get there from anywhere. Of course, this whole process would be completely useless if the app didn’t know where the starting point was, it would just show me a dot on a map, without any connections.
The function of horizon scanning aims at this: setting a starting point for your road trip towards a preferable future, looking at the present to build a solid base and context to speculate about the future.
Once the context is set (in this case we were looking at the energy and construction industry in the London Borough of Southwark), my team and I collected articles, reports, and case studies related to our main topic and/or area of intervention to describe the present situation from several points of view, that is the economical, environmental, technological, political, legal and social sphere.
We didn’t just focus on our area of immediate interest, but also looked for the latest news and best practices from all around the world that may inform and enable some substance in our topic. We mapped our findings also in order to highlight their scope: was it an individual behavior? Was it a local policy? A national strategy? Or an international matter?
Eventually, we set our starting point where all the information describing the present could be contextualised by sphere (social, economic, etc.) and by scope (individual, local, national, etc.).
We decided to apply the Three Horizon Model developed by H3Uni to understand the impact that the present can have on the future. To do so, we color-coded all the information we previously gathered to indicate its belonging to:
- Horizon 1: the dominant system at present, that represents the practices of “business as usual”,
- Horizon 2: a pattern of innovation that could either reinforce and extend the life of the current dominant system or favor transition to a preferable future,
- Horizon 3: fringe activities or “pockets of future” that represent a disruptive innovation, which fits better in the preferable future.
At the end of this process, we made sense of the present context, laid the foundations for a preferable future, and pointed out the patterns towards innovations that could already be found within it. We are now set to explore the unknown destination ahead of us.
