This status quo, however, may be subject to subjective interpretation. Īn analysis of the present status quo is a necessary condition for predictions about future developments. Since these decisions are subject to cognitive limitations, as well as insufficient time and information, they can only be considered partially rational.
However, deciding to believe in a path that future events might take and evaluating the importance of certain topic areas are inevitable steps to retain the ability to act upon the future. It is impossible to design a robust empirical test for those conclusions about future events and developments. Past events lead to conclusions about future events. Foresight as a tool for decision making and complexity reduction For a recent discussion about an attempt to define and to deliminate Foresight, take a look at the anthology Recent Developments in Foresight Methodologies from Giaoutzi & Sapio. However, there is still disagreement about the name and the contour of the discipline.
The scope of the term Foresight extends to both normative and explorative approaches to Futures Research. The term Foresight is used in academic discourse to delineate from Forecasting and emphasize the explorative nature of the processes involved. Until today, those ideas have a profound influence on common methods of Futures Research (such as the Scenario Method, Delphi Studies, Roadmapping or Future Workshops). His goal was to generate a deeper understanding of social developments, behaviors and processes to advance and enable collaborative action upon the future. The recent academic dialogue about Futures Research in Europe has been coined by the concepts of participation and collaboration: Bertrand De Jouvenel was one of the first to formulate the idea of an open and non-deterministic approach to Futures Research in 1964 when publishing “L’art de conjecture” and calling upon practitioners to use “previsionary forums” where “experts from very different disciplines contribute their individual foresight, resulting in harmonized depictions about possible futures”. Introducing and discussing the term Foresight 2.0 is therefore a way to take a novel perspective on how Foresight processes change qualitatively and quantitatively when they are built on the backbone of a large-scale IT infrastructure that is broadly accessible. Inversely, any application that does not make use these potentials could have been modeled prior to the introduction of the consumer internet. The reason for choosing these two criteria as a narrowing focus is the following: while Foresight methods have enjoyed a long tradition, the potential to include several hundreds of participants remotely in a real-time Foresight experiment has only been emerging through the large-scale adoption of internet access that happened over the last 15–20 years. The initial empirical data base for this are features of web applications that explicitly or implicitly aim to support Foresight processes The main focus of this paper will be to introduce and discuss the umbrella term of Foresight 2.0. Major early institutions in the field (such as RAND or the National Bureau of Standards) used novel sociological and economic models together with computer simulations to build the theoretical foundation for putting controversial futures into the hands of many participants instead of a few. Ever since Futures Research has been established as an academic discipline in the 1940s, the concepts of participation, interdisciplinarity and dynamic feedback loops have been fundamental to the development of its methods.
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