Cynthia Selin
  Cynthia Selin
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  • Home
  • Research
    • Climate Design
    • Energizing Futures
    • Oxford Futures Forum >
      • Future Things Exhibition
    • Futurescape City Tours >
      • Finding Futures
    • Serious Play: Social and Ethical Aspects of Nanotechnology
    • Emerge >
      • Making Sense of Emerge
      • Redesigning the Future Exhibition
    • Plausibility Project
    • Solar to Fuels
    • National Citizens Technology Forum
    • City of Phoenix
  • Writing
  • Consulting
  • Bio

Design & Scenarios

The Oxford Futures Forum (OFF) is a triennial two-day meeting of practitioners and scholars geared towards nurturing new collaborations in research, practice, and education focused on scenario planning. Since 2005, the OFF has sought to confront scholarship from different fields with scenario practice to advance scholarly understanding of why and how scenarios work. In doing so, it fosters the development of new joint projects, publications, exhibitions, events and other activities. In the 2014 OFF, the authors, as co-conveners the event, proposed exploring the new theoretical terrain opened up through focusing on design, a field that is becoming more theorized and also emerges from practice. In addition to open space dialogue, the curated exhibition, Future Things, enabled greater generative dialogue by providing examples of visual and sensory means for conceptualization and interaction that represent futures in novel ways.

“The
Oxford Futures Forum was designed to enable generative dialogue, productive collaboration and deep reflection on the connections between scenario thinking and practice and design – particularly the scholarly study of design,” said Rafael Ramirez, Fellow in Strategy at Saïd Business School and Director of the Oxford Scenarios Programme. “The fact that many designers must first design before they can describe, while scenario planners must first describe before they can design ensured a creative tension that ran throughout the forum. Participants all contributed exciting ideas and intriguing – if sometimes disturbing – images that will resonate with us all for years to come and, I hope, be the start of creating new knowledge in these different yet complementary fields.”

Oxford Futures Forum was co-hosted by Yasser Bhatti, Lucy Kimbell, Rafael Ramirez and Cynthia Selin
and brought together by Saïd Business School, Green-Templeton College, the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives from Arizona State University and benefited from scholarships generously funded by the Global Business Policy Council of AT Kearney.

future-oriented scholar and practitioner