Positive Futures

Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy

Needs instigate positive fantasies of idealized futures

One form that mental time travel takes is fantasies about the future. Research to date has not established when people generate fantasies that depict an imagined future as particularly positive. We identify need state as a variable promoting positive fantasies about relevant stimuli (i.e., those that could address the need). In four studies, people with an aroused need (or with a stronger need)...

Integral Futures: An approach to futures inquiry

This paper sketches the broad outlines of the philosophical and methodological foundations of an emerging approach to inquiry — ‘integral inquiry’ — and how this form of inquiry may be applied to futures studies, leading to an approach which has come to called ‘Integral Futures’. A version of this paper appeared in: Futures, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 190-201, 2008. Special Issue Title: ‘Integral Futu...

Metaphorical Futures

This paper argues that temporal concepts that appear to involve a relation between an individual and a future event are not, as has often been claimed, directly structured in terms of locations in space and/or motion through space. Instead, the positioning of reified events in space is used to describe the degree of epistemic detachment holding between the individual and the event. This brings ...

Futures Learning

Futures Learning (F-Learning) is a proposed approach to learning and education in the human life-world within the dramatically changing areas of future society. Those areas of change include globalisation and internationalisation and their economic and socio-political impacts, changes in working life, new visions of human resources management, and many other phenomena, often called in futures s...