Are you ready to try imagining the future?
READY…SET…PROTOTYPE…
Welcome! you probably recently experienced the immersive audiovisual experience of Radical Ocean Futures in the dome at the Swedish Technology Museum in Stockholm. You followed the QR code and now you find yourself here, curious to try your hand at science fiction prototyping. Or, you stumbled across this page, welcome to you too! The exercise below uses the Baltic Sea as a starting point but you can use science fiction prototyping to imagine the future of anything you want, the key is always to work with balancing science and storytelling.
So Your task is create a short story (max 1000 words) about the future of the Baltic sea in 2070. Feel free to be inspired by my Radical Ocean Futures but maybe something about them provokes you and you want to explore an alternate future? it’s your imagination, use it as you want. The exercise below is to create a flash prototype in one hour. If you need more time, all good but try not to spend longer than two hours on writing the initial prototype, you can always refine later!
The Baltic region in 2070 – focus on an individual, a country, a species of fish, the choice is yours – find a protagonist
You will spend 60 minutes coming up with a short narrative about the Baltic in 2070, can be in whatever narrative form you want (i.e. a new paper article, a comic, a poem, a loveletter, a few pages of script, a magazine piece, a comedy show monologue, you choose. Often selecting a format can really help with the writing process.
Before you start writing take some time to:
Think about different aspects: ecological, economic, social, cultural, technological in your story
Reflect on how to add some drama, a pinch of character or something surprising
Also, just because something is a specific way in the present, it does not have to be so in the future. this is about using your imagination building from the science of the present. The future does not exist yet so feel free to get creative, have fun with it and allow yourself to go a little wild!
Here is a suggested break-down for how to use your hour. If you wanna read or check anything, do it before you start so that you give your imagination full control for the hour.
10 minutes coming up with a core idea of your story, using one of the ocean future images for inspiration,
10 minutes thinking through the key character and the plot details
10 minutes thinking through some big change for the character, the Baltic sea or a twist that happens, then
20 minutes tying together what you have written so far, connecting the pieces together till you have a rough story
10 minutes making edits and reading the story from the future a few times.
Pens down! What do you think? cool right? what you can come up with in an hour or two?
If you really like your story and you have written it in either english or Swedish, fill out the form below and share it with me, I just might publish it here to share it and encourage others to try their hand at imagining the future!
Have you read these instructions and think, Ah….where do I start? I don’t know how to write stories, how should I think about creating characters? how do I do worldbuilding? what can I learn from science fiction. My amazing colleague and co-author, Associate Professer Pat Keys has created a set of excellent video resources that can be your companion as you try your hand at sci-fi prototyping. Pat has refined this approach through teaching science fiction prototyping to hundreds of students. There are two videos across four sections; 1) Introduction 2) worldbuilding 3) character 4) story. there are also a number of activities and exercises that you can do to sharpen your skills and support your writing: https://sites.google.com/view/keys-research/courses/futures-exercises
Share your sci-fi prototype!
EVEN MORE? If you are still curious and want to learn more about how we created the radical ocean future scenarios, the science fiction prototyping method, why we work with futures and the impact of the project so far, check out the video below!