Imagine letting your community dream wildly of the world to come.
Imagine collaborating on a future history spanning millennia.
Imagine turning public space into something that was wondrous and strange.
As part of our time-travel themed festival of weirdness, storytelling, art and science at Ann Arbor District Library, we asked visitors to write postcards from the future.
We collected over 80 tales stretching from 2018 to the year 5000.
I tell stories and I always want to push myself to develop my storytelling skills. New challenges, new audiences, new ways of getting a tale onto the page or stage or screen.
I’m interested in memory, too: how we make it, preserve it, remake and share it.
Tonight I’m embracing both of those things with a session as guest storyteller for Brisbane improv troupe Big Fork Theatre.
Big Fork run a series called “Cool Story Bro”, where a storyteller recounts tales from their life in response to shouted audience prompts. Those stories then become the basis for skits improvised by the performers.
I’m just back from a week delivering training and community engagement for Ann Arbor District Libraries, an acclaimed public library service in Michigan, USA.
The micro-residency culminated in an all-ages half-day event called “Wondrous Strange”, blending play, history, prophecy, technology, art, craft, science fiction, time travel, and storytelling.
Wondrous Strange was an opportunity for the Ann Arbor community to venture into an imagined world blending fact and fiction, and to create their own shared stories and experiences stretching from recorded history into the distant future.
More on my Michigan visit soon, but for now here’s a short video from last Sunday’s session.
This week in Michigan, I’m leading a series of talks, workshops, and pilot sessions on immersive play and live-action experiences in libraries and other community settings.
To tie in with these sessions, I’ve written a little piece about Hope and Holodecks – incorporating Blade Runner, Star Trek, Captain America….and Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.
Look, I think one day we’ll get holodecks.
That was what Star Trek: The Next Generation called the interactive, fully immersive spaces where crew members could conjure ultrarealistic, AI-driven virtual experiences of play, sport, storytelling, historical research, or even technical experimentation.
I think one day they’ll arrive.
I think that whatever the library becomes or is replaced by in the future will look a lot like the holodeck. Instead of summoning information in containers like books or web pages, it will feel like an immersive, flowing sensory and social experience.
It won’t be libraries or other knowledge institutions that develop them, though – it costs too much money.
What’s interesting about how Star Trek imagines that experience is not the pseudoscientific technology behind it. It’s how fluent all the characters are in its use.
They walk into that magic space, summon a story or game or simulation, and tailor it to their requirements. Read more
From Christian evangelists in Kazakhstan to coming out over burgers in Brisbane, this month’s Marvellous, Electrical listens to stories from Australia’s marriage equality debate.
September’s Marvellous, Electrical newsletter tells the story of Jay, who found himself running the sole pub in a country town of twenty thousand during a year of renovations.
We come to the final instalment of this series on the forgotten but brilliant science fiction writer John M. Ford.
Over the last few posts, we’ve looked at how he made nifty comedy out of the Star Trek franchise, and how his interest in games allowed him to lend nuance to the usual goodies-vs-baddies-in-space shenanigans when he was playing in other people’s universes.
We also thought about why thinking science-fictionally matters when we try to find new ways of doing things for our communities, our organisations, ourselves. And we considered how good ideas move between the world on the page and the world beyond it.
I wanted to end by coming back to Ford’s actual life in Minneapolis. Read more
I started reading obscure author John M. Ford’s Star Trek books recently and I was blown away by how good they are.
I mentioned this online and other Ford fans started coming out of the woodwork:
Then I picked up a rulebook for a roleplaying game – GURPS Infinite Worlds – to research a time-travel-themed event I’m working on with a client.
Of course, whose name did I find among the co-authors?
Ford wasn’t just a novelist or poet – he also worked on role-playing games, devising scenarios and background material that other people could use to play out their own stories.
The past couple of years I’ve been working on ways to use such games for professional development, so I was pretty excited to have Ford come back into my life so soon.
Not only did he work on Infinite Worlds – a time-travel/parallel universe setting which, as the title suggests, can encompass almost any other scenario or genre – but he created an award-winning caper for the game Paranoia, and a manual for people who wanted to play as the traditionally villainous Klingons in the Star Trek game.
And here’s where we come back round to Ford’s novels, and to the making of fun and brilliant things in the cracks and spaces of big-money enterprises.
Here is where we talk about The Final Reflection.
Life is messy. The structures and services we design need to reflect that.
Creative responses to the world resist programming and procedure. You have to be flexible when you seek to address the challenges of this uncertain, unpredictable existence.
And if you’re going to plan and scheme a better future, that process should be intellectually stimulating, exciting: fun, even. Because if a vision of the future doesn’t engage, convince, and inspire, how are you going to make it work?
Let’s talk about Star Trek.
I’ve been thinking about where we go next.
It’s a big part of my job, which essentially has two sides.
One of them is connecting and coaching people to bring their own bright ideas to fruition: finding resources, partners, and opportunities for them to realise marvellous initiatives.
Another part is scouting out the unmarked territory, the unknown spaces beyond service models and strategic visions, the opportunities we hadn’t even considered yet.
That includes using speculative fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy as a way of thinking about how things could be different…and what comes next.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 