Summary
Want to learn how to make the future you see in your mind come to life? Cut through red tape, flip limitations on their head and inspire meaningful progress in both the short and long-term by creating artifacts from the future. Artifacts from the future are designed objects or creative representations of everyday life at a different point in time, meant to persuade or challenge, develop champions and align resources. Learn how to create and share your own “preferred futures” as well as cautionary ones through artifact design with a civic design strategist, experiential designer and certified futurist.
Key Insights
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Artifacts of the future are visual and narrative prototypes that help stakeholders experience plausible futures, moving beyond abstract descriptions.
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Layering scenarios with additional context (like AI use, timeframes) shifts assumptions and reveals moral and cultural biases.
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Governments can use near-term artifacts of the future to gain faster buy-in and reduce resistance to change.
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Artifacts serve to align diverse teams or communities around a shared North Star vision in uncertain environments.
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Exploring risky or undesirable futures through artifacts clarifies trade-offs, consequences, and necessary policy considerations.
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AI tools like Jasper, Midjourney, and Picasso enable rapid creation of future artifacts combining writing and visuals.
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Physical prototypes, even built from household items, help communicate future experiences tangibly, as Apple demonstrated with smart glasses.
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Emerging use cases of AI writing are already happening in classrooms and professions, demonstrating practical trends behind speculative futures.
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Designing artifacts with a human-centered and place-based mindset provides richer, more relatable futures than purely technology-driven visions.
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Communities like the Urgent Optimist Community and programs like Future School provide valuable support for strategic foresight and artifact creation practice.
Notable Quotes
"Evan spent less than 15 minutes on his essay because he used AI to write it for him."
"What if by 2040 writing an essay with AI was actually the assignment to train students in policy translation?"
"Artifacts of the future help us feel and see the richness of a moment and grasp the change we hope to have."
"Government often moves slowly and struggles to communicate future intent amid short-term sustainability concerns."
"We used a Wizard of Oz smoke-and-mirrors prototype to get quick buy-in from Detroit stakeholders around early childhood education access."
"Sacramento’s Civic Enrichment Center is an artifact aligning a city around community and future workforce needs."
"Exploring Wi-Fi-free zones in Toronto highlights citizen-driven desires to unplug and maintain data privacy in public spaces."
"A reparations invoice artifact imagines holding largest climate change contributors accountable with multi-trillion dollar bills."
"When we stick to just verbal descriptions, a lot of nuance about future experiences gets lost."
"If we center design on people and place before technology, we create more meaningful futures."
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