Productive Procrastination #41 – General Update
Welcome back.
My name is Johannes Kleske; I’m a critical futurist and strategic designer living in Berlin, Germany. And you are still subscribed to my newsletter. It’s been over a year since I last checked in, and I’m long overdue for a general update.
Goodbye Third Wave
So let me start with the big one. Last autumn, Igor and I sold our foresight and strategic design studio Third Wave to the design consultancy Edenspiekermann. Here’s the official announcement.
After 12 years, it was time to take it to the next stage. We had done our fair share of trend and futures reports, foresight sprints, and workshops. But the job usually ended with some recommendations. Collaborating over the years with Edenspiekermann, it became clear that we could provide a more impactful process, going from trends and scenarios to backcasting and strategies to narratives and prototypes – working at the intersections of foresight, design, and strategy. So as of October 2022, I’m Senior Director of Foresight at Edenspiekermann, here in Berlin.
Looking back, I’m immensely grateful for being able to do my own thing with my best friend for such a long time. We’re glad we could bring Third Wave to an end on a high, and I’m incredibly thankful that I can continue to work with Igor at the new gig.
Future Imaginaries thesis translated
I’ve finished translating my master’s thesis on future imaginaries and published it in full in my digital garden here. Having Sohail Inayatullah repost with “This is great” might have been my highlight of this year so far ;)
Interview at Foresight Folk
Katharina Michalski has launched a new online publication around foresight and futures thinking. In the inaugural interview, she asked me about my work as a critical futurist and lots more.
The problem for me with Foresight and Futures Studies is that it is a highly under-theorised discipline. In that sense, we don’t really have a proper theory of the future. What exactly is a future? How does it work? How is it constructed? What are its components? We don’t ask these questions enough; instead, we move straight to the application. This results in a poor reflection of the methods. For me, this is part of Critical Futures, to deconstruct the methods and our various understandings of the future and to ask how we can improve.
Read the full interview
Promoting Critical Futures Studies in Germany
Together with my good friend Jonas Drechsel, I've recently launched kritische-zukunftsforschung.de. We've been both fascinated with the topic and its role in futures thinking. Germany has a strong tradition in critical and participatory futures research, based on the work of early pioneer Robert Jungk. We want to play our part in rekindling the discourse.
The website gives a short explanation of the topic and links to a couple of papers in the field. We've read these papers and recorded our conversations about them in a podcast. The next step is to organise an event around the topic. We're asking visitors to sign up for a newsletter if they are interested in the event happening. So far, almost 90 people have done so. So I guess we have to do this. ;)
Visit the website (German)
Republica Talk
For Republica this year, I was invited by Maya Van Leemput and Mushon Zer-Aviv to take part in their subtrack “Futures Change”, which involved a workshop, a panel, and a meetup (read Mushon’s recap here).
As part of the panel, I gave a short talk about how we as a society usually deal with uncertainty and why a tweet by tech analyst Ben Evans perfectly sums up the role of futures in capitalism. Also, I want to apologise to all humans named Tina on behalf of the panel while remaining steadfast in our mission to fight against TINA …
Watch the talk (starting at 21:34) here
That’s it for life and content updates for now. I’m thankful for all of you who have followed and supported my journey over the last years. Let’s see where this next leg of it takes me.
As always, please feel free to hit ‘reply’ and let me know your thoughts and questions. These days, you can also find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Mastodon, and BlueSky.
I wish you the best, Johannes