The Shameless Collective won the award for the Best Masters group work in 2023. They discuss their work on the Future of Sex and Intimacy.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
References
Transcript
Peter Hayward: Since 2011 the Association of Professional Futurists have recognized the best work of students studying Futures and Foresight at university. I find it exciting to hear and meet talented and enthusiastic people who find the futures and foresight community through their studies. And I love to hear about the futures that those people wish to bring into being.
Ingrid Furtado: It's not easy to find a channel to speak about sex, about intimacy, about emotions, right? Thank you for that, for this opening. What we learned after our workshops, every time we do it, we debrief with the people and one thing that caught our heart and attention was what one person said, “Don't let the discussion die. We all need that.” And thank you for not letting the discussion die.
David Geye: We're all better for having done this; for having come through the other side of it. We all want to see better futures. Not just about sex and intimacy, but about all kinds of things. And this has only fortified that desire within us. It's also told us that it's okay, and it's necessary, to have hard conversations, because even in the best, most aspirational future, there are still going to be hard conversations.
Peter Hayward: Those are two of our guests today on FuturePod. Ingrid Furtado and David Geye and the rest of The Shameless Collective who won the award for Best Masters group work in the APF awards this year.
Welcome to FuturePod, Ingrid.
Ingrid Furtado: Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Peter Hayward: You're part of the Shameless Collective that won the APF Best Master's work this year. So congratulations to you and the rest of your team.
Ingrid Furtado: Thank you, Peter. Yes, I'm part of this amazing group. We are five in our group. And we are very honored to be here to talk about this amazing topic. Fascinating topic. And yeah, thank you again.
Peter Hayward: So we are going to hear from all the group, but let's start with you, Ingrid. Now, if you know anything about FuturePod, you know that when we do our guest interviews, everybody gets to tell their story.
So I'm going to ask you and we'll hear from all the others. Can we have a quick little Ingrid story, how you became a member of the Futures and Foresight community?
Ingrid Furtado: Yeah. I decided I was very like in, in between careers, right? My background is in journalism and I moved to the U. S. (from Brazil) and I always wanted to go back to school, after my, my bachelor.
But I was very like, I didn't want to do, to keep on the communication field. I was really willing to do something different, but I haven't found something different. Until a friend of mine from my work, she was doing the program, Foresight program at U of H. And then I was like, wow, this is different.
It caught my eyes, caught my heart too. And then I decided to follow this as my path. So that's how I started, during COVID, my path in Foresight.
Peter Hayward: And so how far through the Master's course are you?
Ingrid Furtado: Oh, I'm almost graduating. Woohoo! Finally, I'm very happy. The date, right?
I am planning to graduate next spring,
Peter Hayward: okay. Yeah. Have you got work lined up? In the futures and foresight area?
Ingrid Furtado: Thank you for asking that I not yet exactly one thing that I've been learning very well, it's about uncertainties, right? Foresight is quite new for certain industries. And I am really trying to open space where I am right now if I have this chance. I don't have a clear line, path for foresight for me right now, but I think we create the path too. So I'm working on that.
Peter Hayward: Okay, so you're working on the future of Ingrid.
Ingrid Furtado: We are always working, right?
Peter Hayward: So can we meet one of the other team?
Ingrid Furtado: Yeah can I pass on to Hauson?
Hauson Le: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Ingrid. Yeah, my name is Hauson Le. How I found Foresight. Was really through I think by chance, like a lot of people, but I always had this intention of. Expanding agency at scale and because I had a good friend do the same for me where I was really I had way more choice and say in how I live my life.
And so I had a background in data analytics and leadership development throughout college until I was paired up as a mentor with the head of H. R. Disney, Richard Ramsey. And he gave me a choice. He was like, do you want a mentorship in data analytics or foresight? And I was like, data analytics is pretty developed.
I don't know. He didn't even say foresight. He was like future thinking. And so I was like, Oh, let me try the, let me try the future one. I can always figure out data analytics later. And so we did three, six hour sessions. And the first session I ended up crying because it was just like serendipitous or crazy to be able to sit in a room and find something that has that great of a fit with, to be able to impact and empower people at scale.
It's like exactly what I want it. at The end of that session, at the end of those sessions, he was saying. He's oh I'm 60 something housing. You're 19. This was like three, four years ago, five years ago. And he was like, you can do anything you want with this work or not, whatever you wanna do.
And I definitely wanted to do something with it. So my goal was to my fir my first job was to be a futurist. And so I went to Catch the Future School. Landed at U of H, and now I work in local government as a futurist.
Peter Hayward: Cool. So yeah, again, a lot of people meet Futures in Foresight and feel validated. They feel found. They feel met. That's a pretty common story, mate. Thanks for that. Can we meet someone else on the team?
Hauson Le: Yeah, I'd like to pass it on over to Elizabeth. She is amazing. Go ahead.
Elizabeth Herfel: Thanks Hauson.
I'm Elizabeth Herfel. I found Futures in Foresight through industrial design. I, for my undergrad, I went to the University of Cincinnati and while I was there, I took a speculative design elective and I was just super into the research aspect of the project and it was just. It's really exciting for me, and my professor told me that, if I'm into this, I should check out the University of Houston, and I put that idea on the back burner for a little bit, and then the pandemic started, and we were just You know, all hit in the face with there's this huge need for, thinking about the future and handling change.
So yeah, I decided to apply and go for it. And yeah, I just graduated from University of Houston in this past spring. So that was really exciting for me. And now I'm doing foresight research at SAP.
Peter Hayward: Excellent. Excellent. So yeah, the we just, I just did a podcast with the individual masters winner, and she also came out of an engineering design background as well. Design thinking. Was something that actually was in your project too, wasn't it?
Elizabeth Herfel: Definitely. Yeah, I think there's a lot of overlap between design thinking and futures and foresight work. I'll pass it on to David.
David Geye: Hi everyone. I'm David. I am a little bit of the… I guess I'm an odd duck in this group; I am a soon-to-be-retired military officer. And, as I was approaching retirement, my wife said, you need to finish the master's degree before you retire. So, I began looking in earnest for a Master's degree. I was originally looking for something related to intelligence studies - that is my career field - and the University of Houston program showed up in my search and it caught my eye. I hadn't heard of the foresight discipline before, but when I looked into it and started poking around the website, everything about it just pushed all my buttons. This was like Intel, but grander in scope and scale and it was neat that it looked further than the next budget cycle or the next election cycle, but it also looked wider than just…war… and national security.
Yeah, yeah, those things are important, but there's more to life than just that and that's what really drew me to the program. I feel like it's a maturation of stuff I've studied for most of my life. I am in the last few months of my service, and I'm able to take advantage of an opportunity to take an internship. So I'm actually doing intern work with the Trends and Futuring team at Ford Motor Company.
Peter Hayward: Excellent. Excellent. That's awesome. And it's interesting too that, in the future, there is no age difference because the future hasn't happened. We all have ideas about what the future should, could, might, uh, might not be. And age doesn't really play a factor. It is the classic multi generational workspace.
David Geye: Oh, I like that.
Peter Hayward: You want to pass it over to the last team member, David?
David Geye: I will. I will pass this over to Mushfiqa.
Mushfiqa Jamaluddin: Hi. I'm Mushfiqa Jamaludin, and, um, it's interesting that you comment on that, Peter, around the multi-generationality of futures. I was just having a conversation the other day about this with one of the APF Emerging Fellows of just how cool it is that the field is so intergenerational and particularly in a time when we don't have that many opportunities in many other spaces of our life, it's pretty age segregated.
But to share a little bit about me, I am actually graduating from the program this December. So I'm very excited about that. I'm also a leadership coach and I support all types of leaders, but mostly I focus on social impact, intrapreneurs or entrepreneurs. And my pathway into futures was actually through integral theory.
I found Ken Wilber’s integral theory when I was in my mid twenties, early twenties. And it was just a huge paradigm shift for me. And ever since then I was on this journey of figuring out how can I bring a more holistic perspective essentially into whatever work I do.
And that's when I found Integral Futures. And that, that kind of sealed the deal for me. I was like, this is so cool. I didn't know this existed. Really echoing a lot of what everyone else said here. And so I started my master's program in 2020. And then I did my coaching program in 2021.
And I loved the intersection between the two. I found so much overlap and I think that futures is so relevant to what we work on within leadership coaching. And then I think a lot of the coaching and facilitation skills are so important within futures, especially when we're helping people think through very scary topics, often, like even thinking about dealing with their own mortality or as we'll get into a little bit later, other challenging emotions.
And so I would say I will I'll make this maybe a short little ad for the fact that I will be looking for a job post-December. And my work, I'll say is really guided bya fascination with relationality. And I think that's why I found myself at this intersection of coaching and futures.
So I'm really curious to explore, like, how do we harness that towards more inclusive futures?
Peter Hayward: So Mushfiqa, let's start with the project origin story. Can you just explain to the listeners? Give a little bit about how these projects happen, but also then start to drill into your project that your team looked at.
Mushfiqa Jamaluddin: Yeah, absolutely. So an observant listener would have gathered by now that we were classmates in the University of Houston’s Foresight program. And in the spring of 2022, we all signed up for Design Futures, which is one of our elective courses. And it's taught by Adam Cowart. In the class each week, we would go through and learn a different design framework or method and play around with it. And somewhere, in the beginning quarter of the class we knew that we were going to be creating some kind of a design futures project at the end of the semester. So as a class, one day, we brainstormed a bunch of topics and then we all self selected into the topic of most interest to us. And so what was interesting is that our group was formed around the topic rather than forming the group first and then deciding on the topic. And I think that really worked out quite well for us.
So we already started with knowing that we were all interested in a certain area. Looking at the Future of Sex, which then expanded into the Future of Sex and Intimacy. And then each week as we learned a new method, we would... play around with it, get a feel for it and then look at how, what does it look like to apply it to our topic? And like any design process, it was a very non linear, often frustrating process. Some weeks we had an insight, other weeks not so much. And that was cool and interesting and definitely a learning experience. And I would say that there was like... two significant leaps for us that really helped to shape the project. The first was the week that we, I think we spent two weeks on transition design. And this was a framework that's taught at CMU. And that was really where we started to imagine what would it look like if we lived in a world where there wasn't shame around sex, around the practices of sex, around our sexual preferences, if there weren't the same stigmas even around experimentation. And then the second turning point was when we were playing around with Brian David Johnson's five step process for sci fi prototyping. So in that process, you look at a technology as an inflection point and consider what results from that, and we took one of the leverage points from the transition design process, and used that as an inflection point.
And, so that was when the idea popped of, “Oh okay so if there wasn't shame and we were living in this world what would our kids be taught?” And I think that really resonated with everyone in the group because, most if not all of us, had a pretty abysmal experience with sex education in our school. So in some ways I think this was actually a healing process for us as well. It's like man what would it have been like if we actually could have conversations beyond abstinence only? And so it went from there.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, it's very interesting. You, you touched on a number of things there that the notion that, you've used the future, the idea of the future, because that's all it is, it's just an idea. But you've used the future and brought it back to your past and present. You used it almost as an integrator and a reteller of the story of you.
Mushfiqa Jamaluddin: Yeah, absolutely. And, I think that's interesting to me and the thing about futures that excites me most is the, we know that we can't really predict the future. We can't say what's going to happen. So it's all, we're all imagining it. But the power of it is how does it shape and reshape us now today and how can it help us craft new narratives.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I think, as I said, it is one of the misnomers of non futures people, that they think being able to forecast the future would be heaven, but of course, any student of philosophy would understand that a forecasted future is hell. Because it means you have no agency. There is nothing you do matters at all, because it's all written out. Yes, it's a paradox that we think we want control, but the very thing as humans is we do not want control. We want openness and emergence so we can practice agency.
Mushfiqa Jamaluddin: Yeah, that's one of the things that I think is really I don't know, tricky about futures and exciting is... I always describe futures as like the final step in futures work is to ultimately let go of control. And I think if we can get, when we can get clients to go through that process and then arrive at, they're thinking maybe, “Oh, we'll get a better handle on the future.” But ultimately they arrive at this point where you still have to jump.
You still have to surrender to it, and I think that's the coolest part.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Mushfiqa. I think we're going to move to Elizabeth next, because she's going to take up the next question. Great. Hi, Elizabeth. So Mushfiqa's talked a bit about the process that you followed and how a couple of methods, research methods and were quite pivotal. So you're going to go into really specifically what were the processes that, really meant the most to the work and explain some of those to the listeners.
Elizabeth Herfel: Yeah like Mushfiqa explained, every week in this class we'd go through a different design features method. And some of the bigger ones that informed our class were transition design out of Carnegie Mellon and sci fi prototyping from Brian David Johnson. And then some of the smaller ones we used to fill in the gaps included like Deliteralization, Thoughtless Futures. One that really sticks out to me is Gift from the Future. This was probably, I don't know two or three weeks after we had selected this topic, so we were still in a very fuzzy phase. But we developed characters for when we're in this future. We developed personas for this future and then we would give each other gifts based on this character that we'd created. And it was so funny, we were just giving each other really high tech sex toys, and all this crazy stuff. And we eventually moved away from the technological angle, but yeah, that one was really... Really fun for me. I also want to get into a little bit what the outcome of this semester was. At the end of the semester, we presented at University of Houston's Annual Spring Gathering. So we presented this mostly to our fellow students and alumni and friends of the program. But what it looked like was a Parent Preview night for Sex Intimacy in Society class in 2052. So we did a lot of work to make this classroom setting feel familiar. Like a, high school parent teacher conference. But also a lot more intimate so we had like classroom sex ed posters But we were also handing out chocolates and tea and flowers and we had we did have one prop Judy the inflatable sex doll who is handing out our persona sheets and I think people really enjoyed the coming into the experience part of it, and so once participants were in, we'd have an introduction where we did the history of our scenario, how we got to this future where we'd move past shame and sexual relationships.
Ingrid Furtado: Can I add one thing about the personas. I believe that the persona part is. It was very interesting because one of the methodology that we used was Ethnographic Experiential Futures. The personas helped a lot because sometimes when we talk about something so sensitive, uh, we didn't want to create More uncomfortable ability for people. So we create the personas in order for them to they were able to pick if they want to be themselves, if they want to be the personas. And and that created a very, a good transpersonal experience too, because we quite create like a portal of liberation, let me be this persona and let me speak up, right?
Peter Hayward: That's a good point, Ingrid, because that's, again, one of the ways to use the future, particularly when people are in a sort of drama or trauma of the present, is to use the future as a space when the drama or trauma has gone away. Future means you don't need to play you. You can play future you, or you can be a different you. You don't need to tell us how you've happened. It's just this person in the future relating this way. and that is the liberation, but that's also the pathway for how people can act in the present.
Ingrid Furtado: Yeah, the futures for us worked a lot as a cushion, right? Let's talk about it and it protected the audience, I would say.
Elizabeth Herfel: Yeah. we Also had a shamebreaker exercise, a bit of a play on icebreaker.
Peter Hayward: Think that one's interesting. So can you maybe just unpack both what it was you did, but also what you were trying to do?
Elizabeth Herfel: Yeah, so starting with what it was we did. We had people write down a shameful or guilty pleasure of yours in the past that has now become a shameless pleasure, and we had a lot of really great responses from that, ranging from, I like to eat candy in the bathtub to, really personal ideas about their sex life or their body. And we mixed up the papers and traded them around. And each parent would read another person's pleasure out loud. And we'd make a statement of acceptance for that person's pleasure. We affirm and appreciate One of them that we had planted, in case the people didn't want to share these was... I have a micro penis. And so we said, we affirm and appreciate your micro penis, and I think that really, uh, goes into what we were trying to do with that was to break the ice, make everyone a little bit more comfortable, and also, address some of the hard feelings about sexuality in a fun and playful way.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Thanks Elizabeth. So David, I'm now moving back out of the process and to you now as proto futurists. What did you learn, what have you learned and what has the group learned about the craft of doing this kind of work?
David Geye: Oh goodness, we've learned a lot. We've learned a lot of good things, we've learned some not so good things, and we've learned a lot about ourselves, each other, and some of our audience members, whether intentionally or not. We did a couple of run throughs during Spring Gathering, and we did a virtual walkthrough for the APF Next Virtual Conference later that summer, and then most recently we presented at the World Future Studies Federation 25th conference in Paris. And after that one, as we were hotwashing as a group afterwards to help process our own emotions a bit, the question came up: was our exhibit a futures thinking workshop or was it, like, an actual sex and intimacy workshop? And, we had to clarify the purpose, because none of us are really qualified to host an actual sex and intimacy workshop. We don't have that expertise. But, as we go forward, I think we're talking more with people who do have those skills because they're important. We've learned as we've gone through this that, the idea of experiential futures and adopting personas and playing a role, they're very powerful. They're very powerful transformative tools and the impact they can have on your audience is real, and it can happen immediately. You think you're easing into something, and then suddenly everybody's right there together. We've had to lean into developing skills as moderators and facilitators, and improvisation skills.
When someone decides to lean into their character and bring up sex in space, zero gravity, or virtual, you have to be on your toes to be able to take the conversation right there with them. And, it's always a surprise. Which is one of the reasons that we have to hotwash afterwards to go, okay, we were riding right at the edge of losing control of the audience - which is where you want to be in this situation - but you also want to keep them safe. We're talking about hard topics.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, it's true, David. It's one of the things that's been happening in the field. Experiential futures have always been part of the field. I would say more and more people are leaning into experiential because the research data is excellent, that this is actually a powerful way to help people. Prepare for and manage change. However, because there is power, there is actually responsibility for the people doing it. These are not toys. And so the professional responsibility for you setting these things up, there will be groups that you should not do this with. Or there are groups that you need to prepare to find out whether you think they're ready or they want to go there.
David Geye: We learned that not everyone's ready for the conversation, despite what they may tell you before they walk in the room. But, in spite of that, there's an interest, there's a growing interest and appetite for this topic, and it's worth exploring. But you're right, we have a responsibility to navigate safely through that uncertainty. And the fact that we're able to set it… 29 years, now - but originally 30 years out, that's a very distant time horizon, and as Ingrid said earlier, it's a cushion, if you will, to enable the discussion of harder topics. And, when we use the personas to help people displace into the future, that helps. It pushes the conversation past current litanies and puts them into a different space. And, we use some of the sci fi prototyping techniques to - really big air quotes here - "solve" some certain issues so that we can move past that. “This is now off the table. What do you want to talk about now?” Because if we didn't do that, the conversation would just churn right there, and that's not what we want. We want to be able to get past that and see what's beyond it.
On a more humorous note, I think we've all learned that if you want to see a future without shame, or with less shame, about sex and intimacy, you’ve got to be pretty shameless about how you talk about it. When we've been talking as a team, I'm very sure we have startled people who were sitting around us or walking by. Our Zoom conversations are even better; they are chef's kiss.
Peter Hayward: was just going to make the point, David, that one of the things when you are working in organizations and it might not be sex and intimacy that you use, but taking a group to wrestle with a difficult question and giving them the experience of them handling it well has built a level of trust and relationship that the group can take on other difficult questions. And so there's actually a scaffolding process that you can build with people where people become confident in themselves, confident in the others. And, as you said, there is a real hunger for people who want to tackle difficult questions. There's also naturally a fear that I don't know how to do it. So a developmental approach in organizations with groups to just give them both technique and confidence that they can continue to tackle more and more difficult things by using ideas like displacement and that kind of thing. So yeah, congratulations.
David Geye: Thank you. We're all… okay, I'll speak for me: I feel I'm much better as a futurist - even though I'm still nascent, I haven't graduated. I think I can speak for the group here: We're all better for having done this; for having come through the other side of it. We all want to see better futures. Not just about sex and intimacy, but about all kinds of things. And this has only fortified that desire within us. It's also told us that it's okay, and it's necessary, to have hard conversations, because even in the best, most aspirational future, there are still going to be hard conversations.
Peter Hayward: Cool. Thanks, David. So moving on Ingrid. As you were working on this project and having these wonderful, shameless conversations, I'm sure you started noticing things happening around you in the world. The future doesn't wait for anyone, does it?
Ingrid Furtado: Ohhh. Peter, thank you for this question because yes. And we saw trends in the more positive sides, negative sides, and they helped us a lot for us to build the personas because every single detail or (future) artifact that we created was based in research, right? One that we found is the loneliness epidemic. We noticed that the solitude can, it's trending sadly to occur more in any time of your life, any age. And which can lead to a growing demand for mental health support.
The other one was the increasing interest for neutral names, genderless names. And we use those names, we made sure to use those names on our personas.
Longevity and also intergenerational households. So we noticed too that it tend to be harder for having a relationship in the future. Why? Now we are living longer. And the tendency to the younger generation to take care of the elderly we saw that. And the hard time of economics on that we also noticed. The other social behavioral one was non traditional relationships. So we noticed a growing acceptance on exploration of non traditional relationships like polyamory, open relationships in general, consensual non monogamy. This was a strong one too. And another one was open communication about sex and intimacy and parts of your body.So under technology trends, we noticed also a transition change in the industry and semantic idea from sex industry to wellness industry. So which would help and foster sexual wellness and self care, diversity, also through pleasure, like naturalizing pleasure. This is one that we saw. Humm.. a higher interest in female industry of self care and sex tech products. We see a very visual difference between sex tech toys for more gender-like, humm, more designers, women designers for sex tech in for toys for female audience.
And of course COVID was a driver of this one that I'm about to talk, which is the long distance intimacy solutions, right? We are seeing innovations in technology and platforms facilitating that connectivity, right? So we see long distance kissing machines that you link to your cell phone and you can feel the vibrations, from the other person.
Another one that is not that nice, it was cyberbullying, a trend for... cyberbullying and online harassment. So offensive name calling, deepfake, AI use for uh, damage another person, receiving images without consent, or even sending images without the consent of the person.
Peter Hayward: Ingrid. One of the things that when I was working as a scanner and a trendspotter, one of the things I learned, and I often had to bring to organizations was taboo areas like sex is traditionally societally a taboo area are some of the fastest adopters of alternative ways of doing things. And I actually, as a scanner, I learned to pay careful and detailed attention as to what taboo topics were going on. Not that the taboo topics themselves were that interesting, but they were the people who were most creative in adopting early adopters of things. And I wonder whether that's an experience that, the team has learned that while they may not go on and do work in this space, they are going to pay attention to this area because it is so dynamic.
Ingrid Furtado: Super dynamic. Super. And it's always changing. Like we, we have a little (chat) group and we are all the time, like sending, sharing scan hits because this area is organic. Like we are humans. We are organic. It's changing all the time. And these reflect on our project because so far, we presented this project three times during (UofH) Spring Gathering and in Paris right now and a virtual (APF) presentation. So in all that we are adjusting, we needed to add something. We needed to pay more attention in certain times of types of trends. So you're completely a hundred percent right. We are watching it, and we are adjusting it, because we have to.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Ingrid. The communication question, Hauson you're the one talking about sex, isn't that a fun topic to have conversations about? So what did the group, and what did you learn about the way that we need to communicate so people can have these kinds of challenging conversations.
Hauson Le: I think, yeah, I think that's a great question, honestly. And I think the way that we designed this experience was so that we can have these kinds of challenging conversations in really any setting, right? So the way we approach the future of sex and intimacy was using the topic as a vehicle for participants to go through these emotions of disgust, embarrassment, and fear that they'll have to inevitably go through when they create change themselves. So this is distinct, right? From shaping the futures of sex and intimacy itself. So it's we're talking about it. A few days ago, and it's like opening a fridge and seeing the Grand Canyon, right? So they go in. expecting and then actually talking about sex and intimacy, but they walk out having built that trust and confidence that you were talking about in being able to navigate those difficult emotions.
What we've learned is that there's a lot of powerful emotions that come and reside. In the realm of sex and intimacy that can actually create the conditions for participants to be able to have these conversations, even if it's, even though they're adjacent to what they might actually need to talk about in the boardroom, for example or when they're engaging with communities. One of the contributions that, you know, that, like practitioners or really anyone might. Might have from from the, from this project is to really reconsider how framing a project, um, might actually create a stronger resonance between participants in the topic, right? So these future of work or roads or waste management, those are all important topics, but oftentimes it doesn't really hold that same energy that sex and intimacy does and so being able to frame those, how do you frame those and maybe reconsider the way we've been framing them to create that connection is something that we've definitely learned through this process.
Peter Hayward: Open futures that are important to people have a strong emotional connection. And those emotions can both, I think what you're saying is they can both get in the way of people ever, being able to talk about them. But if you can find a way to frame those emotions they don't just let you get past the ability to talk about it, they actually become part of the mechanism for how you actually achieve sustainable change. Is that what you're saying?
Hauson Le: Yeah, absolutely. It's an access. It's an access to real change, right? Going through that experience. Like when we feel those powerful emotions, it's something we don't forget. We create memories and we create partnership when we share that with people who maybe sometimes we haven't had the best relationship with or we haven't really had the chance to partner with.
So that's really at least to me, like one of the things that yeah. Our our project can continue to build on and impact communities around the world is really like surfacing and transforming this previous emotion or previous experience. Like previously, traditionally, like not great things to feel as something as an access point rather than a barrier. So yeah that's, you're totally on, I think we're on the same page, Peter. Yeah.
Peter Hayward: Have you got any, I won't say tips and techniques, but you talked about framing questions so emotions can be surfaced, but also not getting in the way of having the conversation. If someone's going into an organization to talk about, it might be waste. It might be, what's happening in a local government. There can still be powerful emotions, but you talk about framing. What are some of the ways you can reframe something so you can make emotions work for you and not a blocker?
Hauson Le: I think as it relates to this project, I think one of the things we did is we framed the experience as sexual education in 2052. And what that does is it creates a learning environment or a learning context in which, you know, when these emotions come up, that's that's the context in which they experience that emotion is, okay, learning. Now... that we've had moments that are of really high tension where sometimes it's so strong that it breaks kind of the experience. That's where the iteration piece comes in. The second thing that I would, that I think might help reframe that is within this sexual education design. We have curriculum that are basically activities for participants to go through. And so we can, depending on the context that we're presenting in, we can, create these activities to add some guardrails or, add some design the activities in a way that. Or create a propensity for them to shift the way that these emotions occur for them.
Yeah,
Peter Hayward: I think a couple other things I heard, and I'm not saying these, you should use these all the time. But you used humor, so you used the sex doll, and again, won't always be the thing to do, but sometimes humor can shift it, and the other one you did was the thing that Elizabeth described where you used the bowl with the shame, where people write down something that was shameful that is now a pleasure, and then got people to read other people's out. So they, they didn't have to defend theirs. someone else defended theirs, they defended someone else's and that, that notion of displacing and deconnecting objections and emotions can be very powerful. So I applaud you for both those two. So yeah. Well done.
Mushfiqa Jamaluddin: If I could share one, one more element of it is like with the shamebreaker activity when we seeded certain statements, certain shameful statements that are no longer shameful it brought it into the room, right? So now, for all the participants know, it actually was someone who wrote that and now you're at, you're engaging with it in a very real embodied way, as opposed to a concept out there, and I think that, that was also quite powerful.
Peter Hayward: Oh, look, you, as soon as someone wrote down something, it was named, and it was named by someone you don't know in this room. So the next thing I say... I have to be careful what I say next because that person who wrote that is listening and people are smart enough most of the time to understand that I won't say something hurtful if I don't know who I'm going to hurt. It's a tightrope, but beautifully done. Beautifully done.
Ingrid Furtado: Yeah. And and that, just adding on that, like in the end of the day, we also exercise compassion, because again, like you we created like a safe container, but also people reflect upon putting themselves in the other people's place. Like even if it's just a persona and we exercise that sentiment, right? Which I think might be the key for a shameless society to maintain a shameless society.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, compassion is. It's the ability to have someone else's emotions. That is compassion. So we'll wrap this up. Ingrid you've got the, you've got the microphone for the last part.
Ingrid Furtado: Okay, I would like to thank you, first of all, for this opportunity, because it's not easy to find a channel to speak about sex, about intimacy, about emotions, right? And thank you for that, for this opening. What we learned after our workshops, every time we do it, we debrief with the people and one thing that caught our heart and attention was one person said, “don't let the discussion die. We all need that”. And thank you for not letting the discussion die. And we have this intention to contribute for the normalization of this conversation. And we are open to even if any other stakeholders are interested in talking about that and see or watch our workshop. Why not? And yeah, I would like to say thank you and open up a little bit of space for this amazing team to say that last words as well.
David Geye: During our Paris presentation, my son, who is stationed in Europe, was able to take leave and come visit with me while I was in Paris. So, he attended our workshop. And no, it's not awkward, he's an adult, he's a soldier. But, he participated in one of the exercises and he was telling me about it later. I got an extended debrief because we're walking the streets of Paris. His exercise scenario involved gender change, which in 2052 we have decided is an over the counter, medication-driven procedure. It's non-surgical: take these pills and a week later you're a different gender. And you can change back. It’s infinitely reversible. We've taken it off the table as a contentious issue. He was working with his companion, and at some point they said, wait a minute, I've changed gender from male to female, and the change is complete, and I've become pregnant. Am I legally allowed to change back? And he asked me this, and as we were walking the streets of Paris, I had to stop and go, wait a minute. Because, it was insight that just took the whole… we went in an entirely different direction and it was just a random statement, a random realization that occurred during his participation in this. The different branches and places you can go when exploring this topic in the future are not limited.
Peter Hayward: Thanks, Dave. Can I jump in and ask a question? The APF Awards, doing the recognizing best students work. The APF wants to recognize good work. It wants to support institutions teaching futures and foresight. But from your perspective, are the awards a cliched idea? And really, do we need awards to identify just a handful of people and say your work is good? Or is this really a worthwhile exercise continuing?
Hauson Le: I think I think one thing that stands out to me at least is in, I think, like our experience, my experience of our group winning this award. I think it really made a difference in terms of momentum of, what we what I believe was possible for this project and that was really thanks to one, the courage to keep on putting this work out there, but two to apply from our professor Adam (Cowart), and Juli (Rush). Thank you. But the lab, our lab director, right? So I think it made, for me, it made a difference in, in the group of Oh, okay. Like we won an APF award. Let's just start applying for things. Let's keep trying this. And it led to, one of the led to a lot of iteration that I think it's not the only thing, but for me, I think it made a difference.
Mushfiqa Jamaluddin: Yeah, I think what I hear in that is, is getting that positive feedback and the support from people within the community and so do I think that our project is necessarily the best that was submitted, and that's why we won or, in our work that is so subjective, right? It's hard to say that. So I think. For me, I would love to see ways that we can more regularly provide that feedback to early Futurists. And to support them and say, hey this is interesting. Here are the ways that you can take this further. That, I think is at the core of what the awards serve for us and it would be amazing if more people got that opportunity as well.
Ingrid Furtado: For your question I would say a big yes to keep doing it because you are giving voice for some topics that may have never been heard, and you are facilitating that path. So, a big yes for y'all.
Peter Hayward: I'm going to wrap it. Look, it's been, again, on behalf of the APF, congratulations for winning Best Masters Student Awards. Congratulations on the work. I think the work is both courageous and creative and fantastic. And thanks for also finding some time to spend some time with the FuturePod community.
I hope you found encouragement and ideas from the Shameless Collective team about using the future to have important and difficult conversations in the present.
FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod please check out the Patreon link on the website. I'm Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining us today.