The Museum of the Not-Yet-Possible reunites the production of two iterations of a Futures Studies course in Tamkang University, run by Dr. Nur Anisah Abdullah. The first iteration took place during the Spring Semester 2021 and the second during the Fall Semester 2022.

“The objective of this course is to have students use futuring tools and methodologies to understand, challenge and develop images of the future economy and/or a better society that are more sustainable, equitable, fair & just, and simply liveable than the present or the past.”

Educational goals in a university context

Dr. Nur Anisah Abdullah designed this elective course with the will to develop the thinking abilities of her students. She told us in an interview that she feels that foresight is dominated by consultants and used in commercial (money-driven) settings.

She advocates for futuring methods to be widespread and to enable critical approaches outside of the domain of strategic planning.

However, her students were not used to working on open fields of reflection. She had to overcome several challenges to engage them in the project. One of the answers was to make them work in groups. According to her, thinking about a future world is too much for one person and interactions expand the possibilities. Moreover, collaborative learning is very rare in Tamkang University. Team work became a core element of her pedagogical approach.

“Such learning can be arduous for students who are used to being asked to find an exact answer to the question, ‘what is’ rather than to explore and learn about the questions, ‘what’s there’ and ‘what if’. So, the strategy of getting students working in smaller groups where they can research, analyse, explore and discuss issues together makes learning futures studies something more do-able and possibly, fun.”

Learning Futures Studies Collaboratively 

Imagining the future was also made funnier and easier with the use of multiple tools guiding the exploration. Mainly working on online whiteboards, the students explored contemporary challenges through a great variety of guides : S-Curve (evolution of trends), Futures Wheel (emerging issues and their impacts), Futures Triangle (pull of preferred futures, push of the present and weight of the past) and Causal Layered Analysis (students’ worldviews, current reality and transformed reality).

Students also experimented with the material dimension, to expand their creativity by crafting the future. Once their scenarios of preferred futures were elaborated, Dr. Nur Anisah Abdullah used the Futures Bazaar toolkit to make them create artefacts from these futures, called Artefacts of the Not-Yet-Possible. Most of these artefacts were displayed on the Instagram account @notyetpossible, the use of social media thought to be a place of interaction and discussion around the project.

Technology facing a plurality of concerns

While browsing through the students’ works, a striking element is the ubiquity of technology in the narratives: AI, hydrogen-fueled cars, brain-inserted micro-chips, flying vehicles, virtual reality, robots… Technological development is seen as the answer to the vast majority of problems encountered, sometimes solving global issues by the wave of a magic wand.

The exercise was not particularly focused on environmental issues, but some elements referred to them. There are several mentions of air pollution, and the necessity of “cleaning” it. Their scenarios also wish for clean water and clean land that are polluted today by plastic and chemical components. Another frequent element is the issue of energy sources: which to use, how to produce it?

“In 2050, we hope that through genetic modification, plants can absorb chemical substances that are harmful to the environment in the batteries. In addition, the plants can decompose harmful substances by themselves through photosynthesis which will not hurt the insects that eat the ecosystem and can embellish the environment.” (extract from the students’ project “Battery Issue Solution”)

“Now how does a self-powered generator that emits cleaner air and produces enough energy to power buildings, homes, business, communities? Coming into power the world, we introduce INFINITE. A power source that’s able to power itself and regulate how much energy is being poured out, and can also convert external sources of energy such as solar, wind, hydro, and thermal.” (extract from the students’ project “INFINITE”)

As Dr. Nur Anisah Abdullah expressed in our interview, the students are conscious about climate change, and they talk about it. However they lack some Climate literacy, they have a limited knowledge about its causes and effects. They also focus on the consumer's pollution and not the producer’s pollution (they would address the subject of the plastic straw but not the industry behind it).

“In the year of 2041, global warming has finally disappeared and there will be no climate issues anymore. Transportation will be more eco friendly and use alternative resources as fuels, just like the Supersonic Train Cube that uses electricity or solar power instead of diesel. Since the air quality is better and there’s no pollution, people will live in a clean environment with fresh and cool atmosphere.” (extract from the students’ project “Supersonic Train Cube”)

Nonetheless, the narratives express diverse concerns. Whether related to climate change or not, the students want progress to be made on health (healthier lifestyle, medical innovations, mental health, pandemic, smart health). In another domain, the issue of a low birth rate seems to be very important and various projects proposed solutions to increase it.

Safety (online as well as global) is also addressed, most frequently as a side benefit of their inventions. Additionally, some stories mention the issue of social inequality (gender or economic) and try to bring some propositions to improve these situations.

Finally, regarding the ways to implement the technological devices they designed, the students call on two major actors: the government and the private sector. The role of the government is to set up coercive policies, incitative taxes and to fund the projects with subsidies. The companies, for their part, are responsible for innovating and above all communicating the solution for the population to change their behaviour.

Initiators/Porteurs: Dr. Nur Anisah Abdullah
Country-ies/Pays : Taïwan
Year(s)/Année(s) : 2021-2023
Web: https://www.instagram.com/p/CI8F4hNDIbL/?img_index=1