Exploring and Developing Societal Agency By Teaching Futures Studies: Experiences and Theoretical Reflections

Over the last decades, programmatic statements have called for the early integration of social perspectives in technology development and design projects. Programmes like user-driven research, ELSA (ethical, legal, and social aspects of emerging sciences) or, more recently, Responsible Research and Innovation were formulated and integrated as principles of funding schemes. They met with an increasing interest on behalf of new generations of engineering students who had been exposed to discursive environments where ideas like sustainability, green transformation, and even de-growth were widely discussed.

In search of a suitable didactical approach for this audience, we found that experimenting with different techniques of Futures Studies resulted in increased perceptions of agency (in particular, self-efficacy) among students and a perspective on the future that is neither utopian nor dystopian. In the proposed paper, we report experiences from two different teaching environments: an elective course at a European university of technology and an international gathering of European engineering students. In these environments, we used (a) a political Role-Playing Game that had students simulate the course of controversies around a particular technological innovation and (b) the technique of Futures Wheels to have students identify potential consequences of technological innovations.

The skill to systematically think about possible futures recently gained prominence as Futures Literacy (cf. Miller 2018; de Boer et al. 2018), promoted particularly by UNESCO. Reflecting on the aforementioned teaching experiences, we formulate a fundamental critique of this concept. While we did find positive effects on students’ perception of agency, we also found effects that contradict the theories and assumptions underpinning Futures Literacy. We conclude that Futures Literacy does not translate into a useful scientific concept. We also emphasize that the Futures Literacy framework may implicitly continue a “modernization” agenda that stands in stark contrast to current social and political thought.