Future Narratives

Identifying a list of technologies that will have an impact on a specific area is an important necessary step. Understanding how these effects could be requires a different, yet complementary approach.

Together with envisioning we have jointly developed several radars on various topics, all focusing more on the technologies, than on what they could enable once implemented and actually used.

This research tries to build an additional layer on top of the presentation of the technologies. What we present here has the form of a narrative where the reader is part of the decision process.

This was decided to emphasise the fact that there is no fatality and that there is always a decision involved in using or not a technology.

Example of a story tree in which you can decide to be more or less conservative with respect to technologies. Being conservative will place you in an environment in which you use technologies that are already existing today (around TRL 9), while fully embracing technologies will allow you to use technologies that are not yet existing and for some of them only ideas (around TRL 1). 

Inspired by 53 forecasted emerging technological solutions that are expected to impact the interactions between humans and machines, we asked science fiction writers to develop four interactive narratives of potential futures having the interactions with the technologies at the center of the intrigues.

We hope this additional step leads towards a better understanding of the opportunities and consequences that future technologies could represent in that context.

We wish you an interesting reading of these stories in which you are the hero!

The Radar

Of course, we couldn’t do less than present the technologies used by the authors in our Radar format. Technologies are identified in the various stories and connect directly to it.

 

DEFTECH-envisioning radar on Human-Machine Interaction future narratives