Deep Dive | Future Screenshots

“I can’t see a future.”

On October 7th, 2023, we, whose homes and lives are located between the river and the sea, found ourselves in a present we could no longer recognize. Since then, too many of us lost our homes, too many of us lost our lives, and most of us found ourselves no longer able to imagine a future.

I was similarly lost in the suffocating darkness, grieving and fearing for my loved ones as I saw my homeland lose itself in a dark spiral of fear, hate, racism and violence. Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope In The Dark provided essential guidance. The darkness Solnit writes of is not a sad and desperate place, but instead she argues that the only place where hope can actually be found is within the darkness of uncertainty:

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”
—Rebecca Solnit

Solnit encourages us to look for hope beyond the lamplight of the certain. Hope therefore is used not as a noun, but as a verb — it is not something you get or something you lose, hope is something you do. It is something we, who have been committed to a just and equal future in our shared homeland, have to get better at, and it requires practice.

Since the war broke, even more urgently than before, we at the Israeli/Palestinian peace movement A Land For All — Two States One Homeland, try to practice and teach that stubborn hope in the dark. With that in mind, over the past few months, I have developed a new methodology for political imagination. It revolves around a simple exercise inviting participants to quickly capture diverse images of futures in the form of scribbled on paper mobile-phone-shaped “screenshots” and then map their potentialities together.

I have used different adaptations of this workshop with a wide range of participants: Israeli and Palestinian peace and climate activists, designers, urban planners, artists, policy makers, community leaders, members of parliament, academics, youth, etc… At this point more than a thousand participants already experienced this workshop which we found ourselves running almost every week for the past few months. There seems to be a demand for political imagination.

Inspiration

On a Novemeber morning in 2008, I was climbing the stairs out of the subway station in Manhattan. It was only a week after Barak Obama was elected for office under the banner of “hope”, and I was handed a free newspaper declaring: “IRAQ WAR ENDS”. It was a special edition of The New York Times, dated 8 months in the future (July 4th, 2009) and in it every story, every letter to the editor, every correction and every ad represented a world transformed for the better (from a progressive standpoint): “Maximum Wage Law Succeeds”; “Nationalized Oil To Fund Climate Change Efforts”; “All Public Universities To Be Free”; “National Health Insurance Act Passes”; etc… It was “all the news we hope to print”, as the Times’ famous motto was wittily subverted.

This project by The Yes Men, Steve Lambert and others, serves as a great inspiration. The textual format of the news story maintained the appeal and accessibility of short-form science fiction (or speculative fiction) writing. At the same time, the newspaper as a familiar yet strange object and the performance of spreading and reading it in public space functioned as a work of design fiction. As writer Bruce Sterling framed it:

“Design fiction doesn’t tell stories — instead, it designs prototypes that imply a changed world.”

The New York Times Special Edition (NYTSE) provided both stories and a prototype that demonstrated what it would be like for these news to hit the streets. Like an archaeological artifact it required imagination to piece the reality around it. Yet, the production of the NYTSE took a lot of time, effort, skills and funding, none of which fit the context of this workshop.

Today fiction (and occasionally some truth) is wirelessly delivered straight into our pockets. The mobile phone is the channel to our imagined worlds whether they are based on an objective reality or not. A mobile screenshot freezes a fleeting moment in time with very limited space for information and context. It can serve both as a minimal format for text-based fiction and as a piece of design fiction, an artifact of future archeology.

Screenshot templates

The mobile screenshot format serves as a reference for the paper format we use in the workshop. I designed 6 printed cards as screenshot templates to be written and scribbled on:

• Social media post from a future: what would someone want to publish to the world in that future? Who is that someone? (Monologue)
• Chat between two or more people in a future: what are they talking about? Who are they? What is their relationship like? (Dialogue)
• Notification sent in a future: it could be from a news app with a title, but also a fitness app, a calendar event reminder, a language app, etc… (Alert)
• Question for a future AI agent: in this case we’re more interested in the human questions than in the artificial answer. (Often used for inner dialogue)
• Map of the region in a future: what layers are significant to draw above the geography? (I also used street maps when we focused on defined urban contexts)
• Picture taken in a future: what would make people want to document a moment in a photo? What are they witnessing? (sketching and stick figures are encouraged for both accessibility and speed)

Transition Bar

The bottom of each template features a bar indicating a transition period taking place in the future that this screenshot is taken from. These transitions represent a future time period of change that distinguishes itself from the present we are currently in. This could be “peace process”, “regional war”, “elections”, “pandemic”, “flood” or even something personal like “immigration” or “pregnancy”. The transition could be long and gradual or immediate and swift, clearly defined or ephemeral. The wording of the transition is up to each participant but should be short and comprehensive — ideally one or two words.

Several axes of change, from top-left: ‘Opening borders and changing laws of physics’, ‘Nuclear war’, ‘Levant Unification Agreement’, ‘The War’, ‘Relocation’, ‘Real estate revolution’, ‘Transfer’, ‘Calm and arrangement at the Temple Mount’, ‘Attempt at a two-state agreement’, ‘Coming of the Messiah?’, ‘Legal revolution’, ‘Rising seas’, ‘Cessation of operations to stop climate change’, ‘Liberation of Palestine’, ‘Drought’.

Next we circle whether the screenshot was taken either:

• Before the transition — hence closer to our present and possibly leading towards or attempting to prevent the transition (ex: before the civil war)
• During the transition — representing how it feels to live through it (ex: during global isolation)
  After the transition — in a possibly changed reality following that transition period (ex: after regional treaty)

It’s a good opportunity to mention we do not talk in dates and years, only in relative time periods. We try to focus on how time periods are experienced and constituted in time as social realities. Objective time measures like years and exact dates are mostly counterproductive in the context of this exercise.

Note: This part about relative time periods is worth explaining well as it is slightly more abstract than the screenshot templates that most participants find quite straight-forward. Some participants had to be reminded to add the transition period and mark the screenshot’s relativity. Most used the bar quite technically, marking a relative period that could also be understood from the context of the screenshots. Some did manage to use the transition bar creatively, in a way that adds context and depth to the screenshot.

For example take this chat screenshot provided by Maya Van Leemput in the online workshop on MediumDay:

A familiar human correspondence containing an unusual detail, and understandable only after reading the additional information on the axis of change.

Maya: Congratulations on becoming a granddad! Funny that the little one came at night. How long before you saw her face? Rony: I am over the moon. I saw her as soon as they carried her out of the delivery room. The glow of the candle light made her look beautiful and soft. ( pre -> Solar Flare -> post )

The familiar personal human exchange is only fully understood once you read the transition bar. The bar discloses that Rony’s granddaughter was born after a solar flare. We are left to imagine how a personal human moment like childbirth may be affected by the potential cosmic phenomenon of a solar flare. In a workshop focused on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict it called into focus both the human/personal and the planetary/cosmic contexts that persist in parallel to the conflict. And finally, this specific screenshot challenged the assumption embedded in the screenshot templates themselves — that mobile technology as we know it today will remain available in our futures going forward. 

Themes and Variations

Unlike the NYTSE, we did not limit this to preferred futures and in fact actively encouraged participants to express both their hopes and their anxieties. This framing allowed participants to sincerely imagine both.

Of course the screenshots content and the use of the transition bars depend on the theme of the workshop. In a workshop focusing on the futures of shared society in Jaffa we got less screenshots having to do with technological shifts or climate change and more concerning housing and local community issues. And in a workshop about Partnership Based Peace there was much more focus on wide societal shifts, education and diplomacy.

I also ran a workshop with opposition MPs where we decided to fix the transition bar on three states: opposition / election / coalition (acknowledging these states may not necessarily follow chronologically). And in a workshop focused on urban policy regarding the futures of the Tel Aviv bus station megastructure we fixed the states on: planning / building / using.

Hope is not a ‘thing’, a noun, but rather a conscious action, it is not something to receive or lose, hope is doing | ‘Hope’ in Barack Obama’s election poster, in New York, October 2010 | Photo: ChameleonsEye, Shutterstock

Working Individually

We take about 10 minutes to generate the screenshots. Each participant works alone and is encouraged to generate at least 5 screenshots and consider both “preferred” futures and “prevent” futures. They often try different templates, and different relative transition periods, as well as different degrees of potentiality (more on that later).

When the time is up each participant is asked to make sure they titled the transition period and circled the relative time of the screenshot capture.

To make sure we have full documentation and credits for each screenshot card, I ask each of the participants to photograph their screenshots and share themes to a chat group (for that, sharing a QR code for joining a WhatsApp group has proved useful). 

The Futures Cone

Anticipation is something we do in the present. We consider alternative futures to evaluate the potential of the current moment given our experience of stability and change in the past.

We often imagine a timeline stretching from the past to the future with the present marked as a point in between. This visualizes the future as already determined and the present passively flowing along.

But “The Future” does not exist. There is never one future, what we (should) mean by the future is a hyperobject of possibilities. Futures are always potentially endless possibilities, but they are not all equally probable. When we say “the future” and represent it as a single line we often project the patterns of the past into the future. Tomorrow the sun will shine, the world economy will not crumble and no peace treaty will be signed between Israel and Palestine (I can’t wait for this example to grow old). We conveniently surrender to determinism and minimize our own agency from the image of “The Future”.

The field of Futures Studies often uses the iconic diagram of the Futures Cone, developed by Josef Voros. It represents futures, not as a single deterministic line and not as an unimaginable chaotic void, but as a cone of possibilities with varying degrees representing adherence-to or divergence-from the patterns of the past.

In the workshop we use Voros Futures Cone with slight variations as a physical visualization. 9 strings are stretched from left to right (between columns, poles or tripods). They represent four overlapping cones and a straight line in their center (see image).

The Cone of Futures, Beit Radikal in Tel Aviv, October 2024.

The strings are marked:

• Projected: The central straight string represents a single “projected” future — the most certain forecast — the future previously known as “The Future”.
• Probable: The two slightly angled strings above and below the projected line represent a narrow margin of error around the projection, they allow some variation but are still quite safe predictions.
• Plausible: The next two strings above and below represent futures that may not be the first idea that comes to mind but do not stray from our general image of what the future would look like. They are not the most predictable but at the same time they are not surprising.
• Possible: The next two strings represent unexpected and unlikely futures that nevertheless cannot be labeled as impossible. This degree of potentiality is of extreme interest to us and often attracts many interesting screenshots.
• Preposterous: The outermost two strings represent impossible futures. It is interesting to reflect on how much of science fiction is focused on this degree of potentiality and how dismissing something as “impossible” defuses much of its political threat. At the same time especially today between Israel and Palestine it is exactly those extreme preposterous messianic and genocidal images of the future that set the tone and fuel the flames on the ground. At the same time those of us promoting partnership and peace are discredited and labeled as “delusional”.

Hanging on the futures cone

After they share their screenshots on the WhatsApp group, participants are invited to step forward, one by one, and choose one of their future screenshots that they feel most strongly should inform our anticipation in the present. They introduce themselves briefly and present their screenshot to the group by reading, showing or describing it.

The facilitator then offers them a choice: either choose the blue clip marking this future as “preferred”, or choose the red clip to mark this future as “prevent!”. Using both clips is also allowed to mark ambivalence.

What would you choose? A blue pin symbolizes a ‘preferred’ future, a red pin symbolizes a future ‘to be prevented’, from a workshop at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, October 2024.

The participant chooses a degree of potentiality from the projected to the preposterous and hangs the screenshot on the string of their choice. The upper strings are reserved for the preferred futures (blue clips) and the lower ones for the prevent futures (red clips). Ambivalent screenshots can be placed in either one of them, and the projected string is used for all preferences.

The horizontal positioning is determined by the before/during/after circling of the transition bar. Screenshots taken before the transition will be positioned further to the left, closer to the present. Those taken during the transition will be placed in the center. And those marked as after the transition will be placed on the right side, furthest from the divergence point of the present. It is important to mention that each screenshot is individually positioned relative to the cone, not relative to other screenshots that represent other independent futures.

After everyone has had a chance to present a screenshot, the group is encouraged to clip any other screenshot they made and believe deserve our anticipation to the futures cone. 

Evaluating Screenshots with Stickers

This is a good time for a break. During the break, participants can review the screenshots individually. Each participant gets a few colored stickers to mark the screenshots that most convey futures deserving of further investigation. This is also a way for them to explore and evaluate screenshots that were not presented to the group. It naturally also invites curiosity as participants want to know whether their imagination resonated with others. Finally, depending on the purpose of the workshop, these sticker-votes can inform the next steps. 

Part 2: Diving Back into the Present

I had the chance to run the future-screenshots workshop in diverse contexts, with diverse groups and for diverse purposes. In some cases it was a short interactive introduction to political imagination, an exercise in what I fondly describe as “Unlearned Helplessness”. These last from a minimum of 60 minutes to 2:30 hours.

In other opportunities it was followed by a dive back into the present. I’ve been experimenting with 3 types of present-focused part-twos, diverging on different contexts and expected outcomes:

Activism and strategy — used when the group attempts to evaluate its potential impact on a complex present and an uncertain trajectory. The future-screenshots’ potentials are then evaluated through the dominant, disruptive and diverging flows in the present, and how those may influence the futures (both positively and negatively). The friction points between these flows are then mapped to an affordance map. The group evaluates its capacity to influence the friction points through actions in the present. In the final stage, each participant in the workshop created a new screenshot, this time, depicting a plausible action they intend to take in the near future.

Policy and design — where a policy or a design project are in early exploratory stages and we need to evaluate their potential future impacts as an initial step of co-design. The future-screenshots are then used to identify needs, audiences, challenges and disposition in the present. The methodologies used involve an unorthodox mix of Job Stories + stakeholder analysis + How Might We + Assumptions Mapping + Prototyping.

Storytelling and artistic expression— where creative output, world building and playfulness are the main motivation for the exercise. In these cases we emphasize the difference between the present reality and the potential futures we anticipate and how comparing them may inform our creative work. The methodologies used involve identifying signals in the thick present + The Thing From The Future (modified) + optional sketching using generative AI.

This is still a work in progress. I intend to write a few more follow-up articles to expand on these methodologies and maybe offer an additional post for general reflections. Feel free to contact me directly or in the comments if you have a specific interest in any of these or if you have any questions.

A futuristic screenshot from a workshop attended by Palestinian and Israeli peace and climate activists in Larnaca, Cyprus, September 2024.

Thank yous

Many people have been essential to this long journey, which is both coming to fruition and is continuing to evolve. This list is far from complete, and I hope to keep it growing. My heartfelt thanks go to:

• Game designer Shalev Moran, who, as part of the Speculative Tourism project, helped develop the Sea Change project and the Chronomaps platform that form the basis of the screenshots methodology;
• Critical Futurist Maya Van-Leemput, my personal guide to the futures, a colleague, a friend, and a mentor for the paths ahead;
• My Israeli and Palestinian partners at A Land for All — Two States, One Homeland, and mainly Eve Tendler and May Pundak, who exemplify the power of political imagination, inspire my work, and co-resist this present while co-creating critical hope for shared futures worth fighting side by side for.

Additional thanks go to friends and collaborators whose crucial input and guidance have been invaluable along the way: Ofricnaani, Adam Kariv, mo husseini, Eran Nisan, Libby Lenkinski (& Albi), Carmit Galili (& Magasin III), Steve Lambert (& C4AA), Jacques Servin (& The Yes Men), Astra Taylor, Niels Ten Oever (& the Critical Infrastructure Lab), Tom Kerwin (& other colleagues at the Cynefin community), and my Futures Design Lab students at Shenkar College.

Futures cone (on the right) and possibility map (in the center) from a workshop for the staff of ‘Bimkom’ organization held in Philbeit, Jerusalem, November 2024.