Nordic social model – matt finch / mechanical dolphin

This week, I caught up with Martin Kristoffer Bråthen. Martin’s head of innovation at Biblioteksentralen, the cooperative business which supplies libraries across Norway with collection materials, equipment, and services.

Martin was a participant in the recent scenarios for the future of Norwegian schools project, and previously talked about ‘the Future Sound of Libraries’ on this site in 2018.

This time, we got together to talk about physical versus digital library services; curation, content, and filter bubbles in the age of Netflix; and, inevitably, the pandemic.

In fact, that’s where we started. I asked him how things were over in Oslo. Read more →

In 2019, the University of Oslo contracted me for a short foresight project exploring the future of education in Norway, with a focus on digitalisation of learning.

We convened a small group of researchers, education professionals, and other stakeholders to create three scenarios: plausible visions of 2050 which challenge current assumptions about the futures which might await.

The scenarios explored questions of self-directed learning, hypersurveillance, financial and ecological collapse, as well as shifts in politics at all levels from the global to the local.

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After the scenarios were produced, scholars from Norway and overseas provided responses, examining present-day issues which were highlighted by our visions of the future.

The aim of the scenarios was to enrich the futures thinking of two projects at the University, one exploring Screen Cultures, and the other investigating the Nordic Social Model.

You can download the full scenario document as a PDF file here, or read a short slide deck summarising the project, also as a PDF, here.