Provocations
Provocations
At Bali Futures Forum, the sessions, their sequence, and their depth are shaped by participants. We welcome your input on what themes feel most urgent to explore.
Future Themes
These potential themes offer a glimpse of the kinds of questions and conversations that might emerge at the Bali Futures Forum. They are intended as open provocations. We invite future participants to consider the ideas, experiences and perspectives they may wish to bring.
What does it mean to practise futures well? This session explores foresight not as a methodology but as a discipline of making, one that develops over time, through failure, through iteration, and through the particular intelligence that only experience can build.
The field is increasingly asked to move fast, deliver at scale, and produce clarity in conditions that resist it. What gets lost when we accelerate? What would a more deliberate, more patient practice look like?
Batik, the resist-dye tradition of this region, is built through layered, repeated, unhurried gesture. Each immersion builds on the last. It cannot be rushed into existence. This session uses the craft as a provocation: what futures practices share this quality, and what might we learn from them?
Stuart Candy's work proposes that the most effective way to engage people with possible futures is to make those futures felt. Through artefacts, installations, and immersive environments, experiential futures collapses the temporal distance between now and what might be, making futures tangible enough for the body to take seriously. What do experiential approaches make possible that a scenario document cannot?
Language shapes what futures we can imagine. This session explores the relationship between how we write, speak, and narrate possible worlds, and what those choices foreclose or open up.
The gap between the foresight work practitioners actually do and what gets communicated upward, outward, or published. What do we leave out, and why? What would it look like to say the quiet part out loud?
Bring something we can see, touch, smell, hear, or taste that tells us about you beyond your futures practice. Weirdly specific hobbies and obsessions welcome.