Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future
Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future, hosted by Arizona State University in 2012, united artists, engineers, bioscientists, social scientists, storytellers and designers to build, draw, write and play with the future. Over three days, and in nine different workshops, participants created games, products, monuments, images and stories in an effort to reveal the texture and feel of emergent futures. These experiments in future thinking aimed to prompt ethical reflection, asking: “In what directions are science and technology heading? What kinds of societies, cities, homes, even people will they lead to? And, most important, is that what we – the people – want?” The Emerge event kicked off with nine presentations about emerging technologies such as nanotechnology and robotics that then served as fodder for nine 1.5-day workshops, in which participants used future-oriented methods to consider the implications of such research.
The novel methods deployed during the Emerge workshops drew on the narrative strength of scenarios but ‘mediated’ the scenarios by, for instance, visualization techniques, simulation models, material prototypes, gaming architectures, or facilitated experiences. The Emerge workshops, designed as social science experiments by the Center for Nanotechnology in Society, led to presentations on the third day of Emerge to a large public audience. In this Saturday event workshop report-outs were complemented by keynote speeches by world-class future-oriented thinkers: Stewart Brand (The Whole Earth Discipline), Bruce Sterling (The Difference Engine, Beyond the Beyond), Sherry Turkle (Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other), Bruce Mau (Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, Massive Change Network), Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Reamde) and ASU President Michael Crow. The finale to Emerge, titled Immerge, involved an evening of performances and installations that brought the themes explored in the workshops to life through an immersive, carnivalesque glimpse into the future created by audio, theatrical and visual programming that shifted with the ebb and flow of audience participation. Over the course of three days, Emerge engaged over 700 faculty, students, professionals and members of the local community in an exploration of the future of technology and society.
Lead developers of Emerge
Sponsors and Partners
The novel methods deployed during the Emerge workshops drew on the narrative strength of scenarios but ‘mediated’ the scenarios by, for instance, visualization techniques, simulation models, material prototypes, gaming architectures, or facilitated experiences. The Emerge workshops, designed as social science experiments by the Center for Nanotechnology in Society, led to presentations on the third day of Emerge to a large public audience. In this Saturday event workshop report-outs were complemented by keynote speeches by world-class future-oriented thinkers: Stewart Brand (The Whole Earth Discipline), Bruce Sterling (The Difference Engine, Beyond the Beyond), Sherry Turkle (Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other), Bruce Mau (Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, Massive Change Network), Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Reamde) and ASU President Michael Crow. The finale to Emerge, titled Immerge, involved an evening of performances and installations that brought the themes explored in the workshops to life through an immersive, carnivalesque glimpse into the future created by audio, theatrical and visual programming that shifted with the ebb and flow of audience participation. Over the course of three days, Emerge engaged over 700 faculty, students, professionals and members of the local community in an exploration of the future of technology and society.
Lead developers of Emerge
- Thanassis Rikakis, director of the ASU School of Arts, Media + Engineering and the Digital Culture Initiative in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts
- Joel Garreau, Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law
- Cynthia Selin, assistant professor, Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes and the School of Sustainability
Sponsors and Partners
- Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts
- The Center for Nanotechnology in Society
- ASU Office of the President
- Intel
- The Prevail Project of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law
- School of Sustainability
- Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering
- ASU LightWorks
- ASU Art Museum
Media on Emerge 2012
See here for more information about Emerge 2012, including a feature on Horizon.
Emerge @ ASU
Emerge continues to do so; it has become an annual event at ASU, with the 2013 edition focusing on "The Future of Truth”, the 2014 event on “The Future of Me”, and the 2015 edition looking at “The Future of Choices and Values”.
Researching Emerge
Emerge was a public event, a spectacle, a gathering and a research project. See here for research articles focused on Emerge.
future-oriented scholar and practitioner