Imagination Ambassadors Ruth Wylie and Ed Finn: How Sci-Fi Fuels Positive Futures
Season 2 Episode 9
Are sci-fi stories the key to a better future?
This week’s episode of How We Future features Ruth Wylie and Ed Finn, co-directors of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. For nearly 15 years, they’ve been running what might be the most unusual university center in the country, one that brings together science fiction writers, scientists, artists, and engineers to imagine hopeful, yet practical, futures.
Ruth and Ed describe how they turn imagination into practice: Kids building Scribble Bots and debating who deserves credit when a robot makes art. Commissioning writers worldwide to explore what human flourishing looks like in a warming world. Pairing speculative fiction with expert essays and original artwork, creating story packages that explore what might actually be possible down the line.
Stories work when data doesn’t. A science museum table advertising “ethics discussions” sits empty, but one about Frankenstein draws crowds. People engage through narrative, play, and art in ways they never would through charts or lectures.
In this conversation, you’ll learn:
How collaborative worldbuilding helps experts ask each other new questions
What happens when you pair exciting stories with science-backed facts
Why reflecting on the futures you consume in media matters more than you think
CSI’s website hosts free teaching resources, the Imagination Sketchbook video series, and the full Future Tense archive. Ruth and Ed both emphasize they welcome cold emails and collaboration ideas. That’s how some of their best work starts!
Links from the Episode:
Book and Articles:
Frankenstein at 200, Ed Finn, New York Times
Step Into the Free and Infinite Laboratory of the Mind, Ed Finn, Issues in Science and Technology
Collaborative Imagination: A Methodical Approach, Ruth Wylie and Ed Finn, Science Direct
Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, edited by Joey Escrich and Ed Finn
A Rewilded Mind, Corey Pressman, CSI Imagination Fellow
When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis by Anna Lee Newitz
Exercises and Resources:
Frankenstein Kit, Resources created by CSI
Solar Tomorrow Resources, CSI (Great for Educators!)
Postcards from the Future, Futures Exercise from CSI
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Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow, starting today.
This week, I’m joined by two amazing guests, Ed Finn and Ruth Wylie. Ed and Ruth run the Center for Science and Imagination at Arizona State University. It’s an incredible place that brings together scientists, writers, artists, and storytellers to imagine hopeful futures we actually want to live in.
In our conversation, we explore how stories shape what we believe is possible, why a robot learning to speak crow can change how we think about technology, and how simple games and exercises can help kids wrestle with deep questions about responsibility and ethics. Ed and Ruth share so many resources for teachers, parents, and anyone hungry for permission to think more hopefully about what’s ahead. Let’s jump in with Ed Finn and Ruth Wylie.
Ed and Ruth, thank you so much for being here.
Ed Finn: Thanks for having us.
Ruth Wylie: Yes, thank you. So excited for the conversation today.
Lisa: I am so excited. You really are the embodiment of How We Future that is everything that you all do in your work. I think probably one of the most important things we do, from the top, is to explain to our listeners: what is the Center for Science and Imagination? Because usually, I will say, when I tell people about your work, the first thing they say to me is, “Wait, can I work there?” “What is that?” Ed, maybe you could give everyone a better understanding of what you do and even how you came to be, because it is one of my favorite stories.
Ed: Absolutely. I often wake up thinking, “Do I still get to do this job?” So, I feel that, too. Every week, every month, every year that the Center continues to exist, I think, “This is amazing. I can’t believe it’s still going.” Because we’ve been at this for almost 15 years now. The Center started in 2012, and it does have this origin story. Way back when I first started at ASU, I had this fellowship, this one-year fellowship called University Innovation Fellow. It was really hard to tell what that meant. There were a lot of buzzwords, but I was very excited.
Maybe in my third week on the job, my boss came by and said, “Hey, Neal Stephenson, the science fiction writer, just had this really interesting conversation with the president of Arizona State University, Michael Crow, and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Neal Stephenson.” I was like, “Yes, I’m a huge fan. I’ve been reading his book since I was a kid.” We wanted to see if we should do something about this conversation here at ASU. The conversation was, Neal had written this essay called Innovation Starvation, about how when he grew up in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, we were doing all this big stuff.
Our relationship with the future was really positive. We were going to the moon, they were the Apollo program, we were going to go to Mars next. We were building big infrastructure. We were planning for the long term. There was the Peace Corps. The future was bright. Young people were going to work on these generational, long-term projects. Everything was really exciting. When Stephenson wrote this essay in 2011, we weren’t even flying to space anymore. We were paying the Russians to fly our astronauts to space.
All of the infrastructure was crumbling, and all of the smart young people weren’t going to work on these long-term things anymore. They were working on better ads for Silicon Valley, micro-targeting, or better mortgage-backed derivatives on Wall Street. This really short-term thinking. Stephenson’s argument was, “What happened? Why aren’t we thinking big anymore?” Crow’s response was, “Well, you could blame the entrepreneurs and the scientists and the engineers, but maybe this is your fault, Neal, because I’ve read your books.” Michael Crow’s also a huge Stephenson fan.
“They’re pretty dystopian. The future they present is not really hopeful. Maybe if we want to be working towards this better future, we need to start with better stories about that future. We need to tell stories that could inspire people to build that future and make it real.” That was what landed on my desk. I thought this was so out there and weird that it was just sort of a test. They wanted to see if I could write a memo. I was like, “Okay, yes, let’s do this.” I found this quote from Albert Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
I thought, what if we created a place where we can bring together the writers and the artists and the storytellers with the scientists, the engineers, the researchers, to come up with technically grounded, hopeful stories about futures we might actually want to live in? Then it became a thing. I think part of why it still is here is that so many people are hungry for that permission to think more hopefully about the future. That’s been throughout our whole time of existence, the singular thing that everybody reacts to say, “Oh, I’m allowed to be hopeful. I’m allowed to think a different kind of dream about the future. I’m allowed to have a relationship of joy with the future.”
We can’t tell anybody to do that. We can model it and perform it, but that invitation has been hugely and enthusiastically received by people. That’s, I think, why we still get to do this crazy thing.
Lisa: I love that story. There’s so much to unpack there, including one of the core principles of certainly my work in this podcast, which is that you can’t build a future you haven’t first imagined. I love that the Center for Science and Imagination started with a dialogue. Started almost with a challenge between Neal Stephenson and Michael Crow saying, “Wait, whose fault is it that we’re not imagining and we’re not building the jet packs and the things that somebody imagined?” Michael Crow is such a titan and a futurist in his own right, who has totally changed the way we can think about higher ed.
The idea that he leaned into that as an opportunity, a way to maybe challenge the status quo and say, “Why doesn’t this exist?” I just think it’s so extraordinary, and how wonderful for you that you took up that invitation and said, “Wait a minute, what if this could exist?” I love that you are going on almost 15 years, because I think the need for more hopeful stories is more important than ever. I feel like the harder our present feels, the more it’s important that we have stories that can pull us towards a future we want to be a part of and give us permission to flex our own imagination and agency in that. There’s so much this ripple effect of goodness in what you’re doing.
Ruth, I want to bring you in because we met in part because of a really exciting project that CSI did a number of years ago that I think, again, really encapsulates this beautiful integration between imagination and science, with the Frankenstein celebration. Was it the 200th celebration of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? I think that was 2019. We met right after. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that project as a concrete example of just one of many that’s unfolded from that initial prompt.
Ruth: Yes, thank you. Yes, that was the Frankenstein Bicentennial Project that celebrated the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley launching Frankenstein. This was in 2018. It really invited people to take another look at the story that many of us are familiar with, that probably has more impact on how we think about science than maybe any other stories, and the themes around innovation and responsibility. The question about what are our responsibilities for the things that we create is still something that we grapple with.
We look at this with AI, we look at this with autonomous vehicles, we look at this in all spaces and ask, as creators, as innovators, as engineers, what are our responsibilities to these things and to the society in which we’re launching them into? We used this bicentennial of this launch to put together a project that brought these questions in many different forms, but particularly to young people, using play, using imagination, using creativity, and really bringing in some pretty deep science ethics questions, but in ways that people might not originally expect.
Lisa: I love that you took that theme and then you really made it accessible with the kind of partnerships that you had, particularly with science museums. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you thought about not only building it, but making it more accessible to more people.
Ruth: Yes, of course. The thing is, if we were to just put up a table at a science museum that said, “Come talk to us about science ethics,” we probably wouldn’t get many people to show up. When we’re at a science museum, especially in October of 2018, and people are dressed as Frankenstein, they’re dressed as the creator, and we say, “Come talk to us about Frankenstein,” people come up. They have stories. They remember the book maybe they read in high school, or TV shows, or the cereal that they ate. It’s just such prevalence in our society, that people are excited to engage with it.
So they come up and they’re like, “Tell us about Frankenstein.” Then we have them do little art projects. Our favorite was the Scribble Bot, which is, I’ll try to keep this brief, but it is a little robot, if you will, that you take a pool noodle, and you can decorate it, and you can put markers as legs that are attached with rubber bands. Then you put an electric toothbrush, that you can just get at the dollar store, in the middle of this thing. You turn it on and it starts to shake and draw, and it creates these really interesting images. You can do this from as young as about three years old to-- we’ve had adults that get really into this activity.
They’re playing with this, they’re designing, they’re creating. Then we start to ask them questions. Like, “Okay, is this thing art?” At first they’re like, “Of course.” Some people are like, “I don’t know, and they’re just a bunch of scribbles.” We’re like, “Okay, well, if it is art, who is the artist? Is it you or is it this creature that you made?” Get lots of different opinions here. A lot of times, if people like the art, they start taking responsibility for it. Sometimes people distance themselves. Then we move into, “Okay, well, what if somebody wanted to buy this art? Who should get the money?”
My favorite is doing this with elementary school kids who start to get into these really delicate trust relationships. They’re like, “Well, I would take the money, but I would make sure that my Scribble Bot had all the markers that it needed, that it was well cared for.” It’s like, “Okay, great.” Now I say, “Well, what happens if it accidentally turns on and draws on something expensive, like your homework or your couch?” Now they take a little step back, and they’re like, “Oh, wait, that wasn’t what I intended. I like that question that you asked before about someone buying my art.”
Then you can, with a really short series of questions, questions that are pretty easy to understand, again, these are questions that young people understand what we’re trying to get at, but are actually pretty hard to answer. You can start to engage in these really deep conversations around science, ethics, and responsibility, in a playful, in a non-threatening, in a really engaging manner. We created a set of table talk activities like the Scribble Bot, we distributed them to over 50 science museums and children’s museums around the country.
They created sets of programming. They used it sometimes in their summer programs. Then we measured how it impacted people’s thoughts and feelings around science, ethics, and responsibility.
Lisa: It’s so awesome. I often talk about how design and futures can have outsized impact if it’s oriented in the right way. I think that is just such a great example of it. The other thing, that just sort of model of giving, particularly young people, a chance to practice these thorny, complex, even ethical questions in ways that engage them authentically, and where they can work it out without the consequences. I think so often, and particularly now, we’re expecting people to know how to be an ethical decision maker without any kind of explicit practice.
I love that you made it experiential, and then you created different formats for people to take it into their classrooms or to make it accessible. I will say, speaking of getting the ideas out there, it’s worth noting that it is, in fact, the reason why we all know each other. Because Ed wrote this beautiful op-ed in The New York Times shortly after you put that out in the world. This was, again, 2019. I was like, “Wait a minute, this really sounds like the work that we’ve been doing.” I cold emailed Ed, who happened to be on sabbatical, who pushed it off to you, Ruth, and you decided to accept that cold email.
I often teach my students the power of a cold email. This is just one more example. We’ve been collaborating closely ever since. Thank you not only for doing that project, but for taking the time to write it up. I really think it’s had exponential dividends of positivity.
Ruth: Well, thank you for sending that cold email, because the work that we’ve done together has really shaped the work that we’re doing here at CSI. It’s been just so much fun. I’ve learned so much. We’ve been able to collaborate on such great projects that, again, not only that power of that cold email, but for folks that receive those cold emails, say yes, because sometimes they turn into these amazing things.
Lisa: [laughs] Thank you for that. It’s circulating the imagination. I want to pick up on the theme of how you’ve been writing about your work. I just can’t believe, for such a small team, how prolific you are in your anthologies, in your books, and all of the free resources that we’re going to link to in the show notes. Ed, I want to congratulate you, I think, on your most recent edited anthology on Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures. You’ve been exploring climate futures, CSI has, for almost as long as you’ve been around. We’ll talk a little bit more about that. I wonder if you could tell us about this latest book.
Ed: Absolutely. Like so many of our projects, they just keep expanding. You start something, you build a network, and then that network keeps creating new connections. When you were talking about how you cold emailed us around Frankenstein, Frankenstein just continues to open all of these doors. All of our climate work is like that, too. This book is the culmination more immediately of a project that started during the pandemic and immediately after the pandemic.
Kim Stanley Robinson, who’s another really well-known science fiction writer, and someone we love and have worked with for a long time, talked during the pandemic about how that crisis, that catastrophe, showed us that we could make major changes happen. If you remember, 2020 is the only year on record where carbon emissions went down, because suddenly we realized we could. We could stop flying as much, we could stop driving and shipping things. Now, I’m not saying that that was a great way to make those changes, but all of these things that everybody said were impossible, suddenly became possible.
Public squares emptied, entire school districts going online over the span of a day. Things that were really difficult and challenging, but also reminded us that the way we organize the world is not the way it has to be. From that starting point, we started to think about how we could engage this kind of shared imagination around climate. Robinson’s point is, this is the major crisis that humanity is facing in the next century, and we need to have a radically different imagination in how we approach it.
Our immediate response to that was to create this Climate Imagination Fellowship and invite people around the world, a small group of science fiction writers, to imagine hopeful climate futures from their own communities and geographical regions on the premise that we’ve tried the other thing. We’ve tried the doom and gloom. We’ve tried the now, what? Maybe 50 years of scientists telling us that things are getting bad and getting worse, and people trying to frame this in the context of individual responsibility, or, “Stop doing this, everything you’re doing is wrong and bad.”
That narrative is never going to get us to the kind of transformational change we need. You’re not going to motivate people through that kind of framing. We need to inspire people to imagine the futures that we actually want. Which isn’t going to mean that we’re waving some magic wand and it’s all going to be sunshine and unicorns and climate change is just going to go away, because that’s not going to happen. What does human flourishing look like? How are we going to adapt? What are the things that will remain true? What values do we want to bring with us into this future? What elements of community history and personal meaning and narrative do we want to bring into these futures?
All of that is bound up in this project, in this book. We commissioned these fellows to write long novel at length short stories for this project. We have a group of many other people writing fiction and nonfiction from all over the world who contributed to the book. We’re really excited that it’s now out in the world. It just came out a couple of months ago with MIT Press. It’s, again, with all of our projects, really an invitation to do more imagining around the future. As hard as we try to engage lots of different people around the world, this is just a small sampling.
We need, I think, every community, every individual, to feel empowered and invited to imagine their own future, and especially in the context of climate change. This really comes back to, the mission of our Center is to inspire collective imagination for hopeful futures. The target is not, “Oh, we’re going to come up with one particular vision of the future, or one prediction.” The target is, how do we build our collective capacity to imagine?
Lisa: It’s hard to do our best creative work when we’re being told we need to eat our beets. That has been the mindset, right? No, no, no. Now I’m just going to give you more horrible data to make you feel worse about what’s happening versus this whole other side of inviting more people to imagine wider. Just yesterday, in my view from the future class, where every week we bring in a guest to help our students understand the futures that are unfolding, to get them also to imagine the kind of roles and careers they want to take, it was focused on sustainability.
Our guest actually runs an industrial design studio totally focused on using materials that are regenerative. She said, “I don’t even want to call it sustainability, because already there’s a mindset that there’s going to be lesser than versus introducing students to what’s possible now to create with mycelia, or how we might be walking around in clothing made from algae that’s capturing carbon in the air, and how compelling those stories are with a purpose to want to work towards it versus feeling like we’re already behind.” I often think that the psychology of futures isn’t talked about enough.
You mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson, whose book, Ministry for the Future, I think probably did more than any climate report, to get more people talking about the real possibility of what happens when the earth heats up. I remember hearing him say like, “I am a fiction writer. If I’m getting asked to be the expert at the climate change conventions around the world, we need to investigate that.” Again, speaks to your angle and why it’s so important.
I want to build on that, Ruth. I know you’ve been a part of a lot of projects that take things like Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, and turn it into curricula for teachers to bring more concretely into their classrooms. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of that work.
Ruth: Yes, I think it’s a great opportunity to talk about work that a student, Nicole Oster, did. Actually took stories from the book that Ed mentioned and created curricula designed for middle school and high school teachers, so that they could use those stories and the themes that emerge from those stories in their classrooms. This idea, I think it gets at some of the conversation we’re having. That stories can be a great way to engage people on topics that they might otherwise either be too fearful of, or not feel like they have the expertise, but like with the Frankenstein project, stories bring people in. They want to learn more. Stories and art.
A lot of our projects, you mentioned the beautiful cover of the book, a lot of our projects, we also work with great artists, because people see that and they want to learn more. They want to find out what it is and what’s going on. We use stories and art, and recently been building a set of curricular tools so that this can go into classrooms and we can be working with teachers and young people to inspire that imagination, to start building them as futures thinkers, and to really change the relationship with the future away from one where they just are reacting to whatever’s coming, to one where they feel like the things that they do, do matter.
A greater self-efficacy towards the future. All of this is important, and it’s important to start as young as possible, and it’s work I’m really proud of.
Lisa: It’s amazing. Really want to encourage people to check out the Solar Tomorrows curricula. Even just the naming of it is so cool. You guys are so good at naming. Your climate cards. I’ve personally used your Postcards from the Future method as a warm-up, where I just have students create postcards from the future. Ruth, you’ll love. I remember this. A couple years ago, I taught a class called Flights and Futures, around imagining new stories. We kicked off class with that exercise. One of my students made the most beautiful postcard from France in 2040.
“Greetings from heated Paris, where we’re sitting under these gorgeous canopies that our ancestors planted for us so that we could have a little relief from the heat.” I just felt like it doesn’t have to be hard. It could just be that little trigger. Like, “Oh, now I’m going to look differently at who’s doing that kind of investing for the future. What are cities doing? What could I do to get more involved?” Again, I just love your attention. I’ll also say that not only do you create these resources, but you also continue to work on a number of other publications with some of your colleagues like Corey Pressman.
A rewilded imagination is required reading for my class. The idea that our imagination has been domesticated and it is up to us to rewild it. Again, that self-efficacy and agency. So many publications that can really change the status quo in powerful ways that don’t require a lot of money. [chuckles] Just a lot of intention. I want to pick up on that and go back to another series that I love so, so much, called Future Tense. One of the things that we’ve been talking about, but just to name, that you do so beautifully, is to invite diverse perspectives, which is such a core part of futures work.
That it’s not one future from one voice, it’s multiple voices. I think as you’ve gone about growing your collection of science fiction stories, I know you’ve been super, super thoughtful about the kinds of authors and perspectives that you’ve brought in. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the Future Tense series and just what that experience has been like for you.
Ed: Yes. This is another project that I feel really lucky that we have been able to do and keep doing. Future Tense has been around now for a long time. I don’t know. It’s possible it’s even 10 years. I’d have to go back and check, but it’s been a while. It started as a one-off experiment where we published a short story by Paolo Bacigalupi, the author. It was called Mika Model. We published it in Slate, because ASU had this partnership with Slate and New America, called Future Tense. We’ve now published, I want to say, close to 100 stories through that project.
Slate left that partnership last year, but we are now publishing these stories with Issues in Science and Technology, which is an amazing new venue. That’s the house magazine of the National Academies of Science. So it’s a wonderful place to be sharing these stories. The ethos of the project is still very much the same. We’re publishing not just original speculative fiction that’s set in the near future, and is exploring all sorts of different narratives and possibilities, social change, technological change. We’re also publishing an original piece of nonfiction that goes along with each story, by some kind of expert or really thoughtful, well-informed person, to explore the real-world consequences of that story.
Where are we now? How does this change how we might think about what we’re doing? Most importantly, we also publish original artwork with each story. We have this wonderful archive now of these little packages of futures. They’re great for teaching. They’re great for inviting somebody into a future. Throughout the project, we’ve really thought about Future Tense as a way to use science fiction and the power of great stories about the future to invite people who might not think of themselves as science fiction fans into these possibilities.
That’s one of the things that has been most useful as we’ve gone along, is to realize that the stories are helpful not just to engage the public, but even all the people who might think that they’re experts in particular elements of this. To quote Neal Stephenson, from our Hieroglyph days, a great science fiction story literally puts everybody on the same page. Can save you hundreds of hours of PowerPoints and meetings. In the same way, when we’re doing one of these speculative fiction stories, the data scientist says, “You know, I don’t do ethics.” The engineer says, “I don’t understand what this political argument is about.” The politician says, “I can’t read these charts.”
Everybody can look at this story, and now have a shared vocabulary to have a conversation about the future. All of those experts can talk to one another in a more open way, and anybody else can join that conversation, too. Now you have a description of a room with a couch in it, and you can decide, “Well, where does this couch go?” Future Tense has been a really great way to build this, really, an ongoing conversation about the future, and we’ve gotten to work with all sorts of amazing writers.
People who might think of themselves as speculative fiction authors and others who maybe are a little bit more exploring other genres, people from many different parts of the world and perspectives. It’s such an adventure. It’s one of the best things we get to do, and we have this amazing editorial team to make it happen. So, you should all come and check it out.
Lisa: I love this series so much. I wish every middle school or high school science or English teacher, there’s so many entry points to it, just like you were saying. Just to really put a fine point on the juxtaposition of, write a science fiction story, now look for science fact, and help you understand which about that story are things you need to investigate further. What would be great if that happened? What would be terrible if that happened? Practice the future before you get blindsided by it. You can do that through stories. Just the invitation to be in a discovery mode of wonder, as opposed to an opinion mode of judgment or defending.
It reminds me a little bit when I used to teach Inventing the Future at Stanford. We would have our students do these 50-year utopia and dystopia debates on an emerging technology. The point was not to beat the other down, like traditional debate pedagogy, who won, but to surface these questions. My favorite part was that we would invite an expert in the field, whether it was swarm drones or lab-grown meat, to comment on it, and to comment on the research happening now. My favorite part is that they would often leave with new questions that they were going to take to their colleagues, or to inform the research agenda.
There is this incredible synergy that can happen if you invite all parties. The last thing I’ll say, which I think is so brilliant, is that when you extend beyond a very near future, you can get into a different place of conversation. When scenario work is done well, you can see things that you can’t see when you’re so close in and you’re defending. It’s great. Okay, I have to ask both of you, because I know that you’ve been involved. Do you have a favorite story? I know you love all the stories, but is there one that really captured your imagination?
Ruth: You’re just going to get us in trouble now, Lisa.
Ed: [laughs]
Ruth: If you ask us-
Lisa: We won’t tell. We won’t tell.
Ruth: This is the off-the-record part?
Lisa: This is the off-the-record part.
Ruth: Well, I have one. I said I wasn’t going to share, but I still go back to Annalee Newitz’s story, Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis.
Lisa: That’s one of my favorites.
Ed: You stole mine. I really like that one, too.
Ruth: That’s why I had to go first, Ed, it’s because I was worried that was going to be your favorite. It’s so playful, it’s so interesting. It’s about this CDC drone that starts working with this intelligent group of crows and this young scientist. I just remember reading it and feeling that hope that we’re trying to inspire, and this idea of technology and nature coming together and solving a problem. It left me feeling better. I think that a lot of the things that we do at CSI, we’re trying to give that hope. We’re trying to give people new perspectives.
One of my favorite parts of bringing together interdisciplinary groups is, like you were saying, Lisa, they ask each other questions that they haven’t been asked before, and they’re able to tackle these challenges in new ways, in non-threatening ways, because stories are fun. Stories are playful. I just really liked that one.
Lisa: It’s so good. It’s so good.
Ed: Okay, before I tell you one of my other favorite stories, because they’re all my favorite story, but I’ll tell you that one, I want to say I knew we were onto something with Future Tense, just to connect to what you were saying a minute ago, Lisa, because the response for the first story by Paolo Bacigalupi was by Ryan Calo, who’s a legal scholar. In this essay, he said, “This story made me think about this whole legal question in a new way that I hadn’t thought about before.” That, to me, was the signal we look for. That someone interacts with our projects and our work, and now they’re thinking about the future and their own work, their own relationship to the future, in a different way.
This story that I will nominate today, even though I love all the stories, is a little bit like When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis, because it’s also got a little bit of a cozy vibe, even though sometimes there are dark things that happen in the future. This story is called The Skeleton Crew, by Janelle Shane. It imagines a group of people who’ve created a haunted mansion-style, spooky ride, but it’s also gig work, and there’s this faceless corporate overlord, and they’re making it all work. It’s a great story. It, again, finds the human element.
Really, the central thing that makes Future Tense tick is that we can’t just think about the future. You have to go beyond a sterile report or a scenario that’s only a paragraph long. You need to get into character. You need to get into an extended narrative world, and that’s because we can’t think without feeling. You have to feel the future. You can’t just think about it. These stories really invite you to inhabit this future in an empathetic way, and that’s really powerful.
Lisa: I’m so glad you brought up empathy, because certainly what I know Annalee Newitz does so well is help you have empathy in a truly expanded way. This idea that the robot can learn to speak crow. Now, all of a sudden, you’re like, “Wait, crows talk to each other?” We know crows talk to each other, and we discount it because we don’t speak crow, but the robot learns to speak crow, and together, they help save humans by their understanding that something is happening and using their superpowers together. It is such a powerful story. I know it’s won a number of awards.
We actually invited Annalee Newitz to come and speak to the d.school, to talk about their work. Also, I think Annalee is one of the prolific writers about interspecies communication like that. That’s a theme in the writing. One of my colleagues, this is one of my favorite moments, she admitted to Annalee that because of that story, she now says good morning to every crow that she sees.
[laughter]
Lisa: Because she’s like, “You just don’t know. You just don’t know what they’re able to pick up.” We recently got a dog, and who knows if the dog can understand us, our sweet dog Pippi, but every now and again, I’ll just whisper into her ear, “We really love you. Thank you for being a part of our family.” I think it’s inspired by that story of maybe we pick up on more and that we’re capable of different kinds of empathy.
Ed, you said something important in passing, where you talked about it as cozy fiction. I think you all helped put that idea on the map. That, again, the stories we read really can inform how we feel about the future, and it’s important to recognize that. I want to say that Annalee Newitz, they recently ended it, but their podcast with-
Ed: Charlie Jane Anders.
Lisa: Yes. Right. Our Opinions Are Correct. It’s just a fantastic deep dive into the connection between science fiction, science fact, and-
Ruth: Picking up on that, we’ve been doing some work lately where we’re inviting people to reflect on what they’re consuming, and the futures they’re consuming, because we are being presented with them all the time, but we’re often not reflecting on where they come from. Whether this is in TV shows or movies or books or even advertisements, they often depict some sort of future. We have created an exercise where we invite people to talk about and look at and think about what futures they’re consuming that are informing their own thoughts. The values that are depicted in those futures, how those resonate with their own, or how they differ.
Again, it’s not about a right or a wrong. It’s not that you’re consuming the right futures or the wrong futures, but to be more intentional about it. We also ask people to place them on an axis of, is this a hopeful future or a dystopian? Is this one where you feel like you have agency or no agency? Again, just as a reflective exercise, if you are happy with how you’re thinking about the future, great. Don’t change anything. If you are trying to change your relationship with the future, then maybe start looking for what you’re consuming and how that influences the way that you think.
Lisa: Oh my gosh. This ties into another conversation we’ve had on How We Future, with Aditi, about democracy. She is the founder of a project called Democracy 2076. She does a lot of this research with other groups, like Harmony Labs, to understand, where do our visions of democracy and what civic futures look like? She did this great work, Ruth, to your point, about understanding that a lot of people outlaw, making it okay to-- come from watching Reacher, or these unexpected heroes that are under the law or outside the law. Just to exactly your point, like pausing, to say, “Wait a minute, why am I okay with this?”
I think she started that work understanding scandal. For six years, we watched stories of a president doing things that were illegal or under the radar and was wildly popular. What we watch influences what we then perhaps have in real life. We don’t need to go into that detail. It’s just interesting to pay attention to those images of the future, for sure. Ed, I want to talk to you a little bit about the fellowship that you helped start, around imagination, to help spark more people doing work connected with the Center, but also in their independent. Can you just share a little bit about that program?
Ed: Yes. We’ve had several different fellowships. Actually, we’ve just launched a new one called the Community Climate Fellowship, which is tied to the Climate Imagination book. As I said before, all of our projects just keep [chuckles] going. Like Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s monster is a really good metaphor for a lot of the work that we do. Once you bring it to life, it never stops. We have several different fellowships. This new one is to invite people around the world to engage in acts that are in the same spirit of the Climate Imagination book.
Projects that they might work on, they could be artistic or community engagement projects. We’ve been sharing about them. We’re releasing videos, over the next several weeks, for people to learn more about those fellows. We have also had several cohorts of ASU-Leonardo Imagination Fellows, with the Leonardo Art Science Organization, which are wonderful partners. ASU hosts them as well, but they have a journal and a book series and all sorts of networks of events all around the world. Those have been fellows working at the intersection of art and science, including a couple, by the way, doing interspecies translation using machine learning and AI.
Annalee’s story was so incredibly prescient in terms of people thinking about pandemics, the CDC being dismantled, and interspecies AI-powered communication. We’re not in the prediction game, but sometimes it comes around anyway. That fellowship, it’s currently on pause, because we’re all navigating the funding challenges of this current era, but we’re hoping to bring it back maybe next year. We also have our own imaginary college, which is a way that we recognize people all over the world who we have worked with, or we have aspirational relationships with.
Occasionally, we have people here at ASU who are fellows, but it’s really, I think, more powerful and meaningful to connect with people out in the world, who are doing something and they’re affiliated with us. Sometimes they’ll do a project with us, or the fellowship becomes a way for us to work with them. It’s been a wonderful way to visualize and celebrate the network of people that we’ve gotten to work with over the years.
Lisa: Such a powerful part of, I think, futures work, which is, how are you learning? Are you learning wide? Are you learning broad? How are you circulating ideas and empowering people? One of the things I’m increasingly focused on is the mindsets of agency and thinking about abundance over scarcity, as an example. That strikes me as a real abundant approach to uplifting the community of practice, as well as projects, as well as people. That just has a net positive effect for everybody. I so appreciate that you are not a huge group, but your impact is so wide because of the care and the intentionality you put in those relationships.
I want to talk about one more relationship that I know you were so foundational in bringing to life, which was with the Smithsonian Museum. Your participation in the, unfortunately temporary, I think it should have been permanent, but temporary exhibit at the-- is it the Arts and Sciences building? Back in 2022, I think, 2023. Ruth, I know you were a huge part of that. Maybe you could share what that project was and just some of the impact that came out.
Ruth: Yes, that was a really exciting, again, email to get that sparked a great collaboration. We were invited to put together an exhibit for, I think it was the Arts and Industry buildings, but this is where we’ll need to fact-check it.
Lisa: Yes, I think that sounds right.
Ruth: At first, we came up with this great idea where we were going to go to D.C., and we were going to collaborate with the different researchers and scientists at the various museums and research institutes and do futures thinking and imaginative world-building together. Then COVID happened. So they said, “Well, can you still do this online?” My first reaction was panic. Then we thought, “We can do this.” We took one of our favorite activities, which is a collaborative world-building game called Futures by Chance, Futures by Choice.
We had a series of Zoom calls where we worked with a museum or a research institute, experts from those fields, invited science fiction author, and a graphic artists to be part of that as well. We did this collaborative world-building. Then after that session, the science fiction author would write a short story that depicted a future that the team had come up with. The artist would create almost a museum exhibit poster from the future.
We were thrilled that when you first walked into the building, one of the first things you saw was this wall of all eight of these future museum posters, and links to the stories that were on Slate, and that it was such a great way to reach such a broad public and talk about the work that we’re doing, to imagine really interesting and wild futures with just the best experts who have such a rich history in this space. Some of my favorites are this one where they imagine, what if mosquitoes were genetically engineered to administer vaccines to livestock.
Again, the idea isn’t to say that this is what we think should happen, but to inspire these questions of, “Oh, what could go wrong? Who would benefit from this? Who would lose out in this?” The idea that a science fiction story can be a really cheap way to prototype these ideas and, again, engage people from all different fields to reflect on it. That was really exciting. I think being in the museum itself and seeing that work is one of my proudest moments.
Lisa: Yes. I got the chance to explore that with you, Ruth. That was so fun. Then we actually d.schooled, so my colleagues got to do a workshop as part of it, where we helped educators and young people imagine their future descendants in an interactive way. The thing that I really appreciated that I know you had a heavy hand in is really ensuring that exhibit was human-first and empathy-first. You can imagine that the Smithsonian might have done a souped-up version of the Computer History Museum. Just looking at technology for technology’s sake.
It was just so thoughtfully curated to be invitations to explore our agency. I’m just so delighted to know about that work, and that your stories had such a lasting impact on all ages. Smithsonian is the largest research museum complex in the world. Again, validating this work, that it’s important. That’s what makes me a little sad that it’s not a permanent collection, but we’re going to share it. We’re going to keep it permanent.
Ruth: I love that you brought up that human element, because I think that’s also one of the really strong, powerful points about it being a story, is that the story talks about science, it talks about the technologies, it talks about the context, but ultimately, it puts the humans first. That’s what makes it so special, and that’s what makes it engaging, and that’s what makes it a really great reflective exercise.
Lisa: Absolutely. All right. I could talk to you two all day long, but I want to end with one question for each of you. We’re going to share tons of links to the work you’re doing for educators, even for parents, but for folks that are listening to this and say, “Yes, I want to get started, I want to do something.” Do you have any just maybe smaller way, an invitation to start to open up a futures lens? Ruth, I’ll start with you.
Ruth: Well, I think that I would love for folks to visit the website. As we’ve been talking about, being at a public university, one of our goals is to make as many of our resources freely available. We have a link off our websites for teachers and other learning resources, the stories from Future Tense are available on Slate and now Issues. If you have trouble finding something, reach out to us. I want to echo what Ed has said earlier about we see our role and the work that we do as an invitation to engage more.
If something we have said is thought-provoking, if you have ideas, if you have ways that we could be doing things better, we invite you to email us and reach out, because also, I think a theme of this conversation is that we very much welcome input, we welcome the emails, we welcome the collaborations, and that’s how we do the work that we do. I think that we work a lot with teachers and educators and the importance of working with young people. Very much, please reach out if you have thoughts or ideas or would like to learn more.
Ed: That was great. The one thing I’ll share is, we put a lot of our things online for free, as Ruth said also. We have this huge archive of books and projects, but we also have some videos. We did a video series, a couple of years ago, called The Imagination Sketchbook. That’s a playlist on YouTube. We made a few little activities that go along with it, so you can do an imagination inventory, you can think about the science fiction feedback loop and how stories about the future change the future that we actually get, and do a little futures timeline. Those are some very short, accessible activities if you want to learn about how your own imagination works. That’s a nice way into the way we think about all of this stuff.
Lisa: I love it. Such an abundance of options. I will share one of my favorite projects that we didn’t get a chance to go too deep in, was your Science Fiction TV Dinners. Just even maybe having a dinner conversation to say, “Hey, what story resonated with you?” No story is too small, or whether even it’s a comic book. Just the idea that you’re just shrinking the gap between what we can all do and what’s out there to help spark our imagination. Listen, I’ve yet to really see an AP test on imagination or expression in these expansive ways.
I just really want to thank you so much, Ed and Ruth, for spending time with us today on How We Future, and really for the work that you’re doing to really lift up a global community of practice, starting as young as kindergarten, to flex our great human gift of being prospective, being expansive, being capable of imagining and shaping better futures. Thanks so much for being here.
Ed: Thanks for having us. Kindergartners are great at imagination.
Lisa: So good.
Ed: We can all learn from them.
Ruth: Exactly. Thank you so much, Lisa.
Lisa: If you were inspired by this episode with Ed and Ruth, here’s something simple you can try this week. Notice what futures you’re consuming in TV shows, movies, ads, or books. Do they leave you feeling hopeful or hopeless about the future? Just noticing is the first step towards choosing different stories. All of CSI’s resources are free and available on their website. Check out the show notes for links to some of their amazing materials, like Future Tense Fiction, Climate Imagination, and so much more. I’m Lisa Kay Solomon. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time on How We Future.