Matthew Spaniol and Nicholas Rowland just presented a paper, “Intersecting Futures Studies and STS” at the Futures & Foresight Conference in Warwick 10-11 December (presentation here). The conference was only the second of its kind in the last decade. There were 80 participants, double over the 2015 conference. This year it had expanded for just Scenario Planning to include Foresight.

This conference has a strong focus on methods to produce futures in the present, and tools to make assessments of them. STS comes with complementary insights to this effort. See the slides from the presentation here. You can also see the video that Matt produced about the last paper presented, in short, quick version (here) and a detailed, extended version (here)..

The keynotes included René Rohrbeck (Aarhus University), leader of the Strategic Foresight Research network and Thomas Chermack (Colorado State), the director of the Scenario Planning Institute. The conference is inviting papers into special issues of Technological Forecasting and Social Change, as well as the new journal, Futures and Foresight Science.

Warwick is considering hosting it again in 2020, pending participant feedback. The crowd was hooting and hollering already at the suggestion.

*image from: https://www.jeduka.com/united-kingdom/coventry/coventry/warwick-business-school-university-school-college