Alexis is a Design and Foresight Strategist in Toronto and Peter chats to her about the psychology of meeting our future self and how we can build a better relationship with that self plus also make the future more vivid by colouring the future in with thoughts and experiences. Like the experience of engaging with Nature.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
References
Futuring with Nature: https://www.instagram.com/futuring_with_nature/
Memory, Time, and Plurality: Reimagining narratives for transformative futures: https://rsdsymposium.org/narratives-for-transformative-futures/
Why is it so hard to think about the future?: https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/3519/1/Tennent_Alexis_2021_MDES_SFI_MRP.pdf
Transcript
Peter Hayward: We often say to our clients, our students and ourselves to imagine ourselves in the future. To imagine our future self. We think or maybe hope that we will engender postive emotions towards that future self and that we will act wisely in the present to care for that future self. But is that the case?
Alexis Tennent: So one thing that really struck me was when I was doing this research. Is that if we think about ourselves far into the future, it starts to activate parts of the brain that are related to strangers.
So the further we think to the future, the more we see ourselves as a stranger. I thought, my gosh then, this is a huge barrier. If the cognitive process default cognitive process is to start to think of ourselves as a stranger, the further we think out, then how can we even see ourselves in the future? How can we act? Beneficially towards the stranger or these strangers, if you're thinking about in more community sense?
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod. Alexis Tennent who is a Design and Foresight Strategist based in Toronto, Ontario.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Alexis.
Alexis Tennent: Thank you so much for having me.
Peter Hayward: Great to have you here. So let's start with the Alexis Tennentt story. How did you get involved with the Futures in Foresight community?
Alexis Tennent: Sure. So this goes back a little bit to, I would say almost my past career, but there's no real past career they're all integrated, but I worked for 11 years in the energy industry and mainly in energy conservation, and then eventually into economic development and it was in the later years that I accidentally found myself on a foresight project and I had never heard of foresight before I thought it was fascinating, but what happened was I was supposed to do another project, but the government changed. It was crown corporation. And so we weren't doing that project anymoreand they said, why don't you jump on this project? And so I started learning about very quickly learning about strategic foresight and they were well intosome scenario planning around energy planning for the province of BC and that's in Canada. I should say British Columbia in Canada. And so at that point, they had a lot of the technical stuff done around these scenariosand they had done a lot of subject matterinterviews. They really formed them nicely. And so when I got into the project, they really wanted to have some narratives. Stuff that was the day in the life that would ground these really high level energy plan scenarios into stuff that customers, internal folks, external folks could just understand them better.
And you can imagine the energy industry doesn't- there's not a lot of opportunity for provocative storytelling, and so I just was like counting my lucky stars that I had landed on this project. And and I didn't know about strategic foresight. So I decided I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna dive into thisand so that, that was my start. Just the introduction to it was on the job and I got to create these these really interesting stories. I don't know. I ended up. Having to move on to another job because it was temporary position and all that, and I don't know really what all came of it, but it was really quite fascinating that there was this field where people think about the future in that kind of way, in a very exploratory way.
And so I decided I moved on to another positionwithin the energy industry and then I decided that I either needed to stay and this was going to be my career or I need to go. And so I, and maybe come back to it, but to go and learn something else or do something else. So I decided that I would go I did a bit of traveling.
And I didn't have a plan. I thought that I would actually, I thought that I would go to New Zealand and pursue a master's in psychology. So I went to New Zealand, met with some profs. It didn't quite, nothing quite felt right. And amazingly enough, I met another Canadian while I was in New Zealand and I was talking to her about the things that I enjoyed about my previous jobs but my career and things, I wanted to move into.
And she said, have you ever heard of this program At OCAD? And she told me the name of it. And it's I haven't even heard of OCAD, nevermind this program. But I started looking into it and it just clicked for me. It was like all the psychology stuff would have been really interesting, but it would have been quite narrow.
And when I saw this program is strategic foresight, I thought, first of all, I know a little bit about this. And secondly, I could apply this to any industry, any field any kind of thinking that I do. So I applied, I got in and that was that. That's what really started me in strategic foresight and futures thinking.
I think it was, perhaps, it always would have been a natural fit. I was, I often think about the future. Even as a kid, always that serious, like that serious child who's like what's next, what if? So yeah, it was a really great fit.
Peter Hayward: I had this I had this personal experience and I saw it dozens and dozens of times in the classroom as a teacher. Can you still remember how it felt when you went into the classroom for the first time and you sat in a class and you felt validated?
Alexis Tennent: Yeah, I would say so. And I was really looking for, I wasn't just looking for a master's, to pursue or further my career. It was in a sense, but I was looking for transformation, personal transformation as well. And yeah, coming to OCAD, so I packed up my life in Vancouver. I came over to Toronto and I would say even in the orientation in the weeks prior to starting it just felt yeah, this is it. This feels right.
There was just like a levity to being there. Like I felt lighter and it was, yeah, it was pretty incredible. And it was just like, okay, this was, it was worth it to, to go through all of this and the not knowing and the ambiguity and the quitting the job without a plan. And packing up my apartment in Vancouver that I loved and then saying goodbye to family and friends.
Peter Hayward: And it is that transformational journey that takes both sadness of putting things away and futures put aside emergent releasing of potential. Absolutely.
and but yeah, I suppose that's at that and then just the emergence, like you said, just to be like, okay future Alexis is going to figure this out. She doesn't have a plan exactly, but she's going to be okay. Cause future Alexis is pretty smart. I have to assume that she's even smarter than I am than present Alexis and she's going to be okay.
Peter Hayward: So tell me about future Alexis. So what did future Alexis learn about herself and the field in such a rich place as the Ontario College of Art and Design, as it used to be called?
Alexis Tennent: Yeah. I think it was incredibly lucky that the strategic foresight program is an art school. And I know about other people have said that as well.
So my background before academic background before this was I have a bachelor of general studies in applied science, so heavy in biology, kinesiology and psychology, and it was mainly biopsychology. They all, they go really well together, those three, three fields. And then I did sustainable community developmentand this was all at Simon Fraser University which is not an art school as well known for a lot of other programs, but not the arts necessarily. It does have art programs, but it's not an art school. And I just thought. Yeah, I was just maybe more of a science person, but I really loved the creativeI love to, I had a creative side as well. I never thought that I would go to art school. So it was pretty exciting to go to an art school to study my master's. And I and what I learned is like how incredibly integrated everything is, or can be, should be, can be, not always. But if you let it be, and how I guess all of this, all of these things I had been doing -so when I was in my bachelor's, I couldn't decide on a major. So I had three minors and I guess that's when I, started becoming a generalist and felt like a little bit lost in the, in this sort of not deciding or not picking something or not becoming a specialist. But then I got to OCAD and strategic foresight and it was like, Oh, this is where it all fits.
Like when you're thinking about the future, you're working with the future. We need specialists for sure. But we need, we really need generalists who can see the patterns and know a little bit about a lot of things that suddenly became incredibly valuable. And also working in the energy industry was incredibly valuable, cause energy is, it's about people, it's about industry, it's about society. So you're on so many different planes.
So yeah, that's what I learned about myself. It was like, okay, I all this sort of being lost or not knowing was actually just the, just laying the ground for something that was going to fit really well.
Peter Hayward: So when you were getting towards the end of the masters, then you would have started that lovely conversation of, so what afters or what's next or how do I make a living out of this? You have the wonderful time in the richness of the OCAD environment and reality is waiting for you.
Alexis Tennent: Yeah, that's an interesting, that's interesting as well. Yeah. So the program's not very long. It took me two years to do it. Some people get it done more quickly than I did. I did it during, so the pandemic happened halfway through the second semester, so there is a lot going on. In fact, it happened, the pandemic happened while we were doing our Foresight studio.
So we were learning about Foresight. And then the future was happening to us. Yeah, this certainly added another level. So yeah, coming, still being in the pandemic and finishing up. And so what is next? Yeah that's quite a journey. And so again, it was just like, lean into the ambiguity and see what happens.
Apply on lots of things. Thing I did was there was an honorarium to do a little bit of work for Georgian College. And I was still writing my, finishing up my major research project. And I thought I think I could fit this in. This might be good. And so I did that.
And then that led to more work with Georgian College. Yeah, all these kind of it, A lot of is happenstance, but it's, I guess it's not in a sense too, because you're when things come to you and you think maybe, yes, I will do that. I will try that. And then that stuff leads to more work.
But it's interesting. It's difficult to navigate, but I had a bit of confidence in the fact that I had done, or I had participated in a foresight project Iin my career, so it's I know people are doing, I know organizations are doing this, so this, at least, I can rest on that. Maybe not everyone all the time, and it was even pre pandemic.
So I thought, okay I think it's only going to get bigger. So we'll just let this unfold and see what happens.
Peter Hayward: So what did happen?
Alexis Tennent: So then I became a social innovation fellow at Georgian College. And so we were working, I was working with a small team of of people. So one of them was an art educator, another graphic designer another person from the OCADSFI program, and we were working on projects like community based project or complex issues within the community. And so the first one was around social isolation among older adults. And so we were very much still in the pandemic, maybe not in the worst of it anymore, but this was a really important topic.
Another one was on affordable housing. Worked with the municipality on that project. And that's a really big issue, I think worldwide, but, in Canada for sure. And climate change and food was another project we did. And so through this there was some bandwidth, some leeway for us to also experiment.
And I'm really grateful for that. And this is where I, so I had heard about this thing that some organizations were doing called a scan club mainly in government. I asked questions, people have been to these scan clubs within government and I couldn't go because I wasn't in government myself, but I thought, okay I feel like having not been to a scan club I thought I think we could do one at Georgian college. So I started doing that when we're working on the 1st project, social isolation among older adults and that's, I think that's where it, I started to really feel like I was in the foresight field because I, okay we're going to do something here with some of the knowledge that I've gainedand I'm going to just experiment and make it my own.
And that became a really great thing, actually. We invited students, but also staff and faculty and subject matter experts as well to come in and we have the topic for six weeks and we just come back week after week and share signals of change that we're seeing in that topic.
And it was great. The sort of the flow of it, the repetitiveness of it. I was thinking, like we do a lot of sort of one off workshops, but what if we a series of coming together and practicing finding signals of change, practicing, communicating them with each other and and pushing ourselves to see that the weak signals, going deeper, but also what became apparent was we needed to practice listening to other people's futures and this became a venue for that.
And that dissolve the hierarchy too because the staff, the faculty, the students strategic foresight was new to all of them. And so it wasn't like you're in a room and the faculty know more than the students or vice versa. Everyone has a perspective based on what they've experienced in life, their networks. Just what they're seeing. And so it was really a nice equalizer as well. And when I put it out to the alumni network or I should say, it was not even, it's not alumni network. It's I guess it's a network of students, alumni, and sort of other folks who are involved in strategic foresight around OCAD.
I thought I'll put it out there and see if anyone wants to come to our scan club. And I was surprised that people wanted to come. And they want to come not just to one, but to multiple sessions and to continue to practice what we had learned in our masters. Yeah I keep going back to the scan club as being, I feel like that's what happened after.
After, once I started working with that, experimenting with that model and kind of playing with it and growing it. And it was in that process that I felt like, yeah, okay. I think I'm, I think I'm in this now. I think I'm a part of the Foresight community.
Peter Hayward: A couple of podcasts ago, I had a couple of guests on Meredith and Dave, who've got a thing called Complex Mess, which they created as a bit like a scan club, but a scan club around complexity and working with complex problems. And I think it was in that podcast, Dave makes the point that he thought it was going to be a lot of theories and a lot of models but the big surprise for them was people want a community. They actually want to be with people. While they're working this stuff out. We don't want to be alone.
Alexis Tennent: Yeah. Yeah. That's what I found as well. Yeah, to just do futures thinking by yourself is, that's a pretty that's rough. That's it's yeah it's quite burdensome. But if you can come together as a community and talk about what you're seeing and maybe what you're worrying about.
And others validate that, but also there's others in the room who are going to see it in a different light to see it a different way, know a different understand a different impact that we don't need to be aware of. And suddenly it's okay if we're all together, if there's a community of us, it's not just up to me to figure out every fearful and bad thing.
Other people are on it as well, but also the flip side to look at what are we seeing that is positive, or what is a positive thing that might come out of this? What’s seemingly a terrible thing. Cause it's just not black and white typically there's wins and there's losses in everything that's developing.
So yeah, the community aspect of thinking about the future is something that's really important to me. And I just this past fall, I was the innovator in residence for the Toronto Public Library for Futures and Foresight, and that's something that I really want to bring in to that residency as well, is that we could create a community, or I would set, I would try to set some ground for a community to be made.
I know I'm not in charge of it. I can't make a community happen by myself. And so we replicated that again, that every Wednesday night I called it I called it Futures Club, and you don't have to come to every every session. You can just come to one. If you want, you can come to them all.
And there was a group of people who came to all or most of them. And we worked all the way through, we were working on the topic futures of work, and we started with signals. I guided everyone through how to find signals and how to talk, how we might talk about them. And so I think it was the first five Wednesdays we just did signals and it was online.
So it meant that more people could join. Toronto's quite big and it can be a bit unaccessible if it's in-person, and then we moved into trends in this Future Club. And so we were taking those signals and then we're going to move, we're going to move through a project. And we said, as if we had a client, but we're our own client we want to understand the future together.
And so we moved that in-person. And so we started really playing with those signals and then eventually built some very preliminary scenarios at the end to, to work through. But yeah, it was really important for me That there could be, it wouldn't just be 26 one-off workshops, but that there would be yeah, so a theme or a flow that kind of went through it and even the other, all the, the other workshops that weren't necessarily really into the scanning and the the trend building, but all these other topics, it seemed to form a community as well. So we had topics around feminist futures, LGBTQ2S+ futures. Trying to remember all of them. We had an image, we had a couple of imagination labs, is what I called them. And the great thing is that I was able to have a lot of different guests come in.
I had 11 different people come in and co facilitate or present their work. And yeah, cause I, I thought, if people are coming to these workshops and these programs and if they just see me day in and day out, like that's not representative of the full, all the work that's being done even just in Toronto.
And yeah, I got to have mostly OCAD alumni join me and that really helped. I think, I like to think that helped as well, form the community. Because it's almost like characters on the TV. If there's only one character and you don't identify with her, me, then, okay, it's you might not come back, but to have a lot of different people with a lot of different perspectives, different ways of facilitating, different passions, and different personal stories talking about the future. My hope is that there's just more chance for people, the public, who are coming in participating in these workshops would see themselves in a presenter or in a facilitator and go, Oh yeah, I, me too. That's, I see myself too in this. And I think that was yeah, that was really important for me. for, hopefully just setting that groundwork for a community to develop over those 10 weeks.
Peter Hayward: Cool. Let's move. We've covered a lot already, and that's only just in the Alexis story, but let's go a bit deeper into the infinite toolkit of Alexis. So what are the. What do you want to talk about in terms of a kind of framework or philosophy or approach that's central to your craft?
Alexis Tennent: Yeah, so more and more, I'm coming back to what I studied in my bachelor's around science and biopsychology,and cognitive science and that, it's becoming a bit of a go to framework for me. So when I was doing my master's research project, or major research project, what I ended up doing was, so I wasn't sure what I was going to do.
And mainly because there was a pandemic and everything just went out the window. So I started with this idea that I was seeing images of the future on the internet or wherever, and they just didn't, they just didn't resonate with me. I couldn't see myself in them.
Even when there were humans in these images, it couldn't, it wasn't about me. So I thought, okay, just to keep my mind going, get myself out of the bed, out of bed in the morning during this pandemic, I'm just going to create photos, images of the future through photos. So I started doing that.
I started doing that process. It turned into, I thought it was just gonna be a side project until I figured out what I was going to do for my research project, it turned into my research project, and through that exploration of creating these images of the future and then the autoethnography piece that came with the self-reflection, I realized there's a, there's quite a psychological component to thinking about the future.
And so as I did more and more research on that really got into the sort of the cognitive science around it and understanding that, like we think about the, I know when we think about the future, we often think about things like technology and changing politics and all that, but like, all of that is happening in our brains and it's all being driven by cognitive processes.
So the future actually starts at the molecular level and the neural level. So that I'm coming back to that more and more in how I think about futures literacy, for sure, and try to incorporate these ideas.So nothing's lost, right? You think you're changing career, but you're, you're just you're circling back to what you've learned and then and deepening it through the sort of the new knowledge that you have.
So one thing that really struck me was when I was doing this research, is that if we think about ourselves far into the future, it starts to activate parts of the brain that are related to strangers.
So the further we think to the future, the more we see ourselves as a stranger. I thought, my gosh then, this is a huge barrier. If the, if the cognitive process, default cognitive process is to start to think of ourselves as a stranger the further we think out then how can we even see ourselves in the future?
How can we act beneficially towards this stranger, or these strangers, if you're thinking about in more community sense. So I'm going, I'm going back into that, okay where does it all start? And I think sometimes we think that the future, at the smallest level, at the lowest level, as you come down from your society and industry and community is down to the individual.
But it's deeper than that. It's the, it's the biological, the body processes and how our brains are organized, that we have to go even further. We have to go deeper, deeper than just the individual. So that's something that I'm really trying to play with. And it relates well to this, the other frameworks that I'm working with is around concepts of time.
So in In Western culture, it's all about linear time. We're just marching forward along this line. There's this one point of origin. And there's that sense of Oh, the past is the past. We don't go back. We always go forward. And that's. It's not that, that, we think of the time as being always just this natural thing, or, and it's not, that's a human conception of how to measure change.
And it's not universal. So there's other concepts of time. So trying to pull these two things together, the cognitive science and the conceptions of time. So another thing that came up in my research was that our ability to think about the future, sorry, our ability, our memory, our ability to remember the past, we think, I think, maybe think of as being it's a great survival mechanism because you can remember, maybe where a food source was or water source or, how do we connect with your kin, but some scientists are saying, or not some scientists are saying I think it's, I think it's more like the actual big survival benefit is that it allows us to recombine - so we have all these memories and we can recombine them infinitely to think about the future and to think of possibilities of the future, anticipate them and then prepare ourselves for the future. So it's not really, the big advantage is not about thinking about, it's not about the past, it's about the future.
And so if we have more, we have more memories, more collective stories, more material to work with from the past or memory, then we have more material to work with when we think about the future.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, if you watch nature and you watch other animals, other mammals, memory and operation. I watch my ravens when I put out the chicken carcass after dinner. The ravens eat their fill of it, and then they hide the rest of it in the garden for when they can go and get it later. So they remember where they put the chicken bones when they can go back and get them. And we have that raven brain ourselves. But what you're talking about is the actual literacy as raw material for constructing prospective ideas about the future.
Alexis Tennent: Yeah. Yeah. So we can anticipate many different futures, and we can recombine this information in memory infinite times.
Or infinitely and yeah, so now we have, now we understand the brain and how we think about the future and how we use memory, but then, we've got linear time that says the past is the past is gone and we, and yet so many stories have been cut from the past. We have this one dominant narrative to then this one point of origin to go back and get our material, our memory material from, but it's, it's very lacking because we have, cut away women's stories, Indigenous stories, stories from People of Colour.
But that's not how our brains work. So it's interesting that we've created a conception of time that actually is not in tune with how our brains work. And I use those frameworks a lot and I'm investigating them more on how do we get that richness back in history, and story, in past, and memories so that we can actually have transformative futures.
Yeah, and I don't know exactly how yet, but I'm working on it and yeah.
Peter Hayward: One of the seminal theories in our field developed by Jim Dator. Is the scenario archetypes that, and I've had Jim on a very early podcast and have a listen to his podcast if you haven't if you haven't listened to his future pod, but if I poorly paraphrase what Jim said is that the way we remember and imagine the future can be placed within these archetypes. It appears to be culturally nonspecific, it appears to repeat across cultures a future of growth more, a future of less, collapse, decline, shrink, small, a future of discipline, restraint. which can be forced or socially, and then a fourth archetype of transformation radical rejigging of reality.
Is there something in that in terms of how we choose to remember by using these archetypes or containers to put memories into when we think about the past? Because you talked about possibly we have archetypes that don't regard women. We have archetypes that don't regard Indigenous. Is that kind of the way you think archetypes might play?
Alexis Tennent: What a question. Oh, yeah. Let's see. So I think that like these these archetypes, they're good in that they're pushing us to think about at least four different scenarios.
So we're having to recombine what we know into at least four different sort of packages. And it also helps us to think further into the future than we could if there was no frame. I think about like cultural life frames, or cultural life scripts, sorry, also do that. What I mean by that is have these sort of life scripts where there's expected things that might happen in your life at around certain times.
Times being, being young, being a student maybe, finding someone getting married, buying a home, retiring, having grandchildren or having children, having grandchildren, et cetera, death, and so that actually helps us think of a script, but it helps us think about the future because even as a child, even as a five year old, because of this life script, you can think about having grandchildren, which is like pretty incredible at such a young age.
So it, in the one way it pushes us into the future and then and the other way it constrains, right? Cause then you've got a life script where things are expected to happen at certain times. And I think, and so this is where I think sometimes we get into is this framework helpful or not?
And every, I think everything is helpful and not helpful, and that's okay. And I think about transform in one as one of the archetypes and I'm always interesting excited about that. So transform can be a lot of different things. It can be something really positive or it can be something that's quite negative, but it's a transform.
And I think that's where a better understanding of how our brains work it's going to benefit that archetype a lot. Because Transform is something we have not seen yet. It's something that we have to recombine what we know in a way that is really novel. And I think that's where, going, being able to go back and pull through stories that have been, cut away or lost, purposely lost that's where the information is gonna come from to inform that those transform scenarios.
And think that we don't have we do transform scenarios with the information we have in the dominant narrative, but like, how much more transformative would they be if we had the full, a full richness to draw from, which we don't. We don't yet, people are working on it and I'm certainly not, I'm talking about things I've read that other people have written and other people have talked about, but I, with the cognitive science lens on it, what's happening in the brain I think that's really important.
Yeah I think these things play well together.
Peter Hayward: I've got another one for you. Thinking of the future self as a stranger. This is me speculating, of course, you could not have imagined future Alexis from past Alexis. Future Alexis is is a stranger to past Alexis because you have transformed. However, when you are future Alexis, you can see back to past Alexis and integrate or bring her with you?
Alexis Tennent: Yeah. Yeah that's okay. So this is a great question because I did I did address it a little bit in my research project. And so one of my recommendations was that we have to become friends with our future self. And we have to see ourselves as continuous in time. So we have this habit of kind of breaking our lifespan up into these segments, childhood. And when childhood is done, it's done, Adulthood and then, when that phase is done, it's done. And then old age, and then, you know the time before that is done. So I will be different. Future, future Alexis is different than present Alexis, but she's also continuous in time. I exist across all of these time zones and there are things about me that will always be true.
So I'm an introvert. I've been an introvert since the moment I was born. I'm introvert now, I'm going to be introvert in the future. I have a certain, we all have a certain sense of humor. It might change a bit, but there's going to be something that pulls through, like there's going to be lots of things that pull through over time.
So that future Alexis is not as strange as I might think. And, something that has also come up is that what makes us be afraid or think of our future selves as a stranger or not being able to identify with our future self is societal attitudes around aging. And this is not in, in, of course, not in every culture, but certainly in my culture this idea of you've, you're, you passed your prime or that you shouldn't, that you shouldn't age.
And especially for women, like how many products are aimed at us not getting older or not revealing an aging process. And the sort of that eventually I'm going to become irrelevant. I'll still be alive, which is odd. I'll still be alive, but I might become irrelevant in society's mind.
So it's very hard sometimes to think about your future self when you've got that working against you. And in my research, what I found is that studies have found that you don't have to be very old to have those fears. Or so when I think when we're looking at people and saying, let's think about a 20 year horizon and if you're 60, then you're thinking about when you're 80 and you think, Oh, maybe that's the age where it becomes harder to think about the future. But actually, you can be in your twenties because there's such a, such negativity around the aging self. And so if you're 25 and you think about yourself as 45, how many people are - how many of us, and I've passed this age, being like, Oh my gosh, I'm turning 30, I'm turning 30! Because these are internalized, these internalized attitudes and they're playing much earlier in life than we might think. So there's a lot to unpack there. And we need to start, like that.
Yes, I can be, I can get to I can get to know future Alexis. And that's about that mental time travel. And seeing her in a positive light and seeing her as being, intelligent and caring and loving and having the sense of humor or having her quirks and being a full person, not just not just an aging person, or this person to be afraid of, or that I'll, be past the good part of my life. So we have a lot of hurdles that, that we have put up in society to get there but we can, and I've been practicing that. That, okay what would, 10, 10 year from now, Alexis what what does she know that I don't know?
Peter Hayward: Yeah,
Alexis Tennent: I just, and like, how great is that? It does seem the more time you spend alive, the more you're going to know what's important and what's not important. And so I think there's a lot of relief in that.
And if we can tap into our future selves a bit more, like we think we haven't met our future self yet, but we have in a lot of ways we can, we can project and again, like we'll have to recombine, what we know and maybe have a few different future selves to work with, and that's okay.
Cause that's actually pretty freeing that we can there are a multitude of future selves and, what we might be doing in the future. And another thing that, that came out of my research is that like we're always competing with the vividness of the here and now of the present.
I look out, I can see the greenery on the tree outside. I, I, everything is very vivid. And the further we think into the future, the more sort of fuzzy and ambiguous it gets more abstract, but, what we also know, or what has been known through research is that the more times you go and visit the future, every time you visit it, you add a little detail, you add a little life, a little color.
And so it's never going to be able to compete with the vividness of the present, but we need to just start coloring in the future. But coloring it in, in a way that is, that resonates with ourselves, right? Cause the future is meant to be rich, just as rich as the present. So it's not about, the future is not an objective experience.
It's very subjective and we need to add that detail. So yeah, you can track and you can time travel to the future anytime you want and add in that detail and change it and recombine it. But we often don't do that. We just fear the future. But why don't we, why don't we go and color in the future and then we have something to work towards.
Peter Hayward: Wow, that's beautiful stuff, Alexis. Moving on. What, we've already touched on some of those, but just, is there anything else that. That you're sensing around you that you find yourself paying specific, real interest and attention to in the futures around you.
Alexis Tennent: Yeah, for sure. So anything around, disruptions to family structure, I think are super interesting.
The way we see family and kinship and community is shifting. And I think in a lot of, in a lot of ways, in a lot of positive ways though, so I'm, it's very interesting. Like it's not like non monogamy just popped up. It's been around forever, but the fact that it's in public discourse in a way that it hasn't been in, at least in the past few decades, I think it's incredibly interesting.
Having, three parents on the birth certificate that kind of stuff and it it's Oh, wow. It's such a reaction to, if we think about how marriage and family has evolved and how it's been a very economic, economic endeavor, economic commitment in the past and how that sort of all these things are coming together and disrupting that and maybe dissolving it in some ways.
And then of course, the, the pushback as well. So things like, reproductive rights and the overturning of Roe v. Wade and like what the ripple effect is going to be on that. And, we often think of, okay, it's, it's about abortion, but it's not just about abortion and, it's about healthcare and, but then it's also about the workplace.
So if you don't have reproductive rights, then what does that mean for you as someone in the workplace, and there was a signal or something, or maybe it was a signal, it was a sort of a, an opinion piece or a thought piece around how Roe v. Wade might actually, in a way that we don't expect, push women back into gender roles in the workplace.
So you think, Oh, it's in the family, of course in, in community and family, of course, but in the workplace in that if you are of a gender where it seeen that you shouldn't be able to make these big decisions about your body, should you be able to make big decisions about anything, really. And, so I think these disruptions around, around family and women and how we're organizing ourselves to raise the next generation are super, super interesting.
And then another one that is I think is really interesting is, so there's a an article from this year that I read and it's where scientists are advocating for a revision of the definition of loneliness to include not just people, but also disconnection from animals, places, and rituals.
And so it I saw this at a good time cause we're working on a project that has to do with this. And so the signal is not, the signal is not the understanding of how all these things are involved in loneliness, because this has been well understood in a lot of cultures - connection to nature, connection to land, connection to ritual.
But it’s the signal being around this, sort of, the scientific community, the research community catching up to these ideas that are already established and what that might mean for interventions for understanding of what we should have access to what our rights might be.
So yeah, I think that's also very interesting stuff.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, the I don't know, science didn't create nature as separate, but science probably accelerated a tendency to talk about ourselves and nature, or us having a relationship with nature, as opposed to the obvious scientific observation that we are part of nature, along with everything else that's part of nature.
And yeah, loneliness is one of those. You, you touched on a couple of doozies when you were in the in the residency when you picked on yeah loneliness and housing.
And then the notion of kinship and family. There is obviously a theme running through that, Alexis, in the sense of who am I and who is my we, and where does the we fit with all the other ways? Is that too simplistic?
Alexis Tennent: No, as simple and as complex as that, really.
But yeah, like I think, for so long, we've, as humans have been place ourselves above nature and been extractive and the sense of that we're better, we're smarter we're something . It doesn't make, that doesn't make sense. And I think more and more, this is, again, this is not new but more and more of that conversation around, what is our identity as humans? And so my classmates and I had done a project around, it was about the futures of the wilds, the future of nature.
And we decided to look into the future of identity with respect to the wild. And so what if, what if we did, we use the, we use those archetypes that collapse, growth, transform and discipline. And so it was like, what if we carry on as we are, placing ourselves above and above nature, what would that look like?
What about the collapse? And so it wasn't, in the end, we decided it wasn't the collapse of nature. That's not what was in the archetype. It was the collapse of the human identity with nature. And so instead of being a sort of above, it was now humans saw themselves as below nature. So that whole pure dynamic collapse.
And so now you can't go and my classmate, Hannah, did a really lovely job with this scenario. You can't own, you can't own anything. You can't have houseplants. You can't have that power dynamic with a houseplant. She had created this story around, that you, it was illegal.
And, somebody had hidden the houseplant and kept it alive because it reminded them of their mother that, given it to them, before this transformation happened and interesting how that sort of identity and companionship but then it was also, it was illegal.
So yeah, it's finding our place, like finding our place within the natural world. And I was talking to my collaborator, Joanne, and we were we were sitting around and we're conceptualizing something around some workshops around nature. Andwe were, we're in Toronto and we're on a rooftop garden and we're looking around and just talking through what we're seeing and you look out and you see these these sky rises or these towers.
And it's wait a minute, actually, that is natural because the behavior that builtthat structure is natural for us to want to create homes and habitats, like just as any other creature might do. We know we see birds creating, making these nests and stuff. We're doing that too, but it's, yeah, the behind, what's behind it is very natural.
It's very natural to try to build a home, but then the materials or the way we're doing it is maybe what is unnatural. So this moment of oh, our place, all these things that we're doing are natural. It's just how we're doing it.
And so how do we place ourselves back in, get ourselves, take those natural behaviors, those natural intuitionsAand fit it back in again into that we, that is beyond beyond ourselves, beyond human. Yeah. How do we fit, how do we fit back in, but like in a way that is human
Peter Hayward: lovely, Alexis. We're at a point where you've just designed and I think delivered a set of workshops called Futuring with Nature. You might want to talk about that
Alexis Tennent: sure, yeah. So I'll give you a little bit of backstory on the workshops Futuring with Nature. I have two collaborators on this. So one of them is Joanne Renaux and she's an art educator and an artist and Shaun Alfonso, who also went through the OCAD SFI program just after I did, and we actually all worked together at Georgian College.
So what happened was I was no longer working at Georgian College anymore, but Joanne and I really enjoyed collaborating. So we thought, we're just going to keep getting together regularly semi regularly. And just with no agenda, we're just gonna get together. We're going to have some, bring some art supplies and just chat and do art and see what, just see what happens.
And so we did that through the winter and into the spring. And then it just we started, talking about about futures and nature and art, and there was a program I wanted to run in the residency at the Toronto Public Library that I just couldn't, it just wasn't possible. It was the winter and it wasn't possible to go outside.
And so we said, okay, what if we did this, but added the, this art piece to it that Joanne was able to bring to it. And so it's for me and we each have our own reasons for this workshop and for the work and what we're contributing to it. But for me, it was where I'm going back to when I was a kid and when I was five, we moved from a neighborhood with neighbors and full of kids to somewhere that was more remote.
I guess it wasn't really remote, but it was we had a large piece of land and everyone around us did as well. And so there weren't like a lot of houses in sight. We certainly had neighbors, but suddenly we had we had a forest in the backyard kind of thing. And. I spend a lot of time in the forest.
It was, that era of the parenting style was the go outside and come back for dinner kind of style. And so initially my brother and I spent a lot of time out there just exploring. And my best friend would come often and have sleepovers and spend the night. We'd spend a lot of time in the forest.
And so it was through that there was this repetition of access to the natural world that has stayed with me. And I, we spent a lot of time outside in the forest until I was, until you're about a teenager and then you're not so interested anymore, but I had several years of that and now I, I live in the city and it's, there certainly is nature here, but it's a little, it's more it's harder to get to, it's harder to go to regularly and it's hard because there's more people accessing the sort of the same bits of nature. Maybe don't get to hear and see quite everything that, that I did.
And, and when you're a kid you're willing to taste things and put things in your mouth that you wouldn't as an adult and smell things, so it was just coming back to that realization that, there's a, it's hard to form those connections to nature when you're, especially when you're in the city.
And then that, how are we going to have a future that is, pro-nature if we don't have a connection to nature. So we have all, we often have these, there's these times we get together and we talk about the environment in terms of of foresight and futures, but we're also disconnected from it.
So perhaps first we need to have the relationship. It's like, how can you help a friend that you haven't gotten to know yet, like, how can you help them plan their future or plan a future with them if you're not getting to know them? So that was a big impetus for these workshops.
And so what we decided to do is that we would invite folks to come and just do a little bit of what I got to do as a child and to just repeatedly come back and observe and try and test things. And so we've broken it up into the different senses as well. Just last night, we did our first session, and we invited people to really think about touch and texture, and we're in the park, and it's outside, and we start off with a few little games of, can you, I created these boxes where you put your hands in without looking and feel these leaves in both sides.
And I said, can you feel the color of the leaves without looking at it? And so we did some of that, did some of that, those kinds of things. And, I had some really dry green leaves, just to make it harder, dry brown leaves. So yeah, we're really diving into the different senses.
And then what Joanne is bringing to it is, we can go out and observe and touch, but like, how do we bring that data, that information back to be able to process it and and show each other what we've gone and experienced. And so what she had us doing last night was doing just simple rubbings.
So where you take a crayon and a piece of paper and you hold it up against the bark and you rub your crayon onto the paper and you get this really beautiful rubbing of the texture that you've experienced. And so we did that last night. And so over the course of three different, different nights, we're going to do the same thing, but so we did touch and texture, then the next we're going to add sound and site, and we're going to do another simple piece of, like a art collection.
And then we're going to do taste and smell on the final night. And so all these things that are coming back. So there's the rubbings, there's going to be some some shadow stencilling. And I think we're going to be doing some printing with the,with the food items, with the edible items that we find, and we don't know what this is going to turn into a community art project.
We don't know what it's going to look like. And genuinely, we don't know. Joanne and I don't know. It's not that it's not the participants don't know and we know. We don't know. And we're just going to let it emerge. So we're trying to talk about futures through this idea that things can emerge.
We're talking also about seasonality. So right now we're in the middle of summer here in Toronto. It's really lush. It's green. There's lots of signs that it's summer, there's also, if we look deep enough, there's already signs that the fall, of the fall, and so that would be the short term future.
And then we're asking participants to look even further and try to find signals of the future. Sorry, of the winter in the middle of summer, which seems almost impossible, but it is, and so we say, it can be future winter or a past winter or past spring or some other timeline that is further out than just the next season.
And so that's where we're bringing in that future thinking and foresight, like this idea that signals of change are, lots is happening below the surface. It's not smartphones just appeared suddenly or even within 10 years, like that there were signals that this, that we would have this kind of technology, decades and decades ago, and some people understood that and knew that. And so we look through the seasons, something that's very natural, something we have a lot of experience with. We get to go through these cycles of seasons every year, they're a little different, things are changing because of climate change.
But if we look at, okay, like what might be happening now in the summer, that tells us about the winter, or maybe when we're in the winter and it's covered with snow, to know that there's stuff going on beneath the snow, things that we might be able to detect or at least be able to imagine that a summer is coming or three summers are coming or four summers are coming.
Peter Hayward: That's interesting. I'm hearing, that we have to start with relationship first. Relationship, empathy, and. Acceptance, and from that, we can then have a deep and full relationship with something. And you're moving them into the future notion. You're thinking I might love summer, but how can I learn to love winter? How can I learn to love wild, future space? So share the love, share the empathy and relationship with future. Is that what I think is going on.
Alexis Tennent: Yeah. And just like we're, maybe you try to have a relationship with your future self, a friendship with your future self, to try to have a friendship with nature and the future self of nature as well. And to see yourself within it too.
We were talking about last night, the signals that it's summer, it's green, there's birds, this and that. And then we say, but also, what are us humans, what are we doing? And had, and someone said, Oh yeah, everyone's so happy. That's a sign that we're in summer, and people are dressed differently and socializing and that kind of thing. And yeah, to see, to have a friendship with nature, but to see yourself in that friendship as well is really important.
Like it's not just here we go. We observe nature. That's the subject of our research, but like, how do we fit into that? And how do we become friends with that, with nature and develop that relationship and it has to be an ongoing one. And if we want to see, if we want to see the signals of change of climate change, then if we don't have a baseline, if we don't start that baseline now for ourselves of what is nature and what is it doing, how are we going to see those subtle signals of climate change, if we don't have that baseline friendship, where we're talking to each other and we're interacting with each other and that ritual of coming back out to the same spot and observing that tree again. And then we go back to loneliness and how loneliness is connect is can be a disconnection from place and ritual. So how do we develop these rituals that are around nature? Yeah, that we become a part of it.
We, there's always a place to come back to. If we might lose people. We might, we might have to distance ourselves from people or friendships might change, but if we've got a relationship with where we are and the other species around us, then we hope that we have that. We always have that.
And I think that's important too.
Peter Hayward: Cool. Alexis, it's been wonderful to catch up. I've had an absolute ball in our conversation. I hope you have as too. So thanks for finding some time for the chat and spending some time with the FuturePod community.
Alexis Tennent: Thanks so much, Peter. And thanks for those questions. The provocative questions that are making me think a little more deeply about some of my work. So I really appreciate that.
Peter Hayward: Some great ideas and thoughts there from Alexis about how we can personally and professionally make the future more vivid and make our future self a bit less of a stranger. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod then please check out the Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward thanks for joining me today. Till next time.