25/10/2020
We will be having our last talk of the year this Thursday, 29 October. The talk will be "The Future is Full of Mathematics" by Dr Tim Boykett of Time's Up, University of Applied Arts Vienna, and Johannes Kepler University Linz. This will take place on MS Teams. The abstract of his talk is below:
Being a mathematician gives you ways of looking at the world that are different and hopefully, valuable. In our work at Time's Up on Futuring, a wide range of mathematical ideas arise. In this talk, I want to look at some of them and contextualise them.
Futuring, also known as Foresight, is a practice based around imagining what the world, society, a business or an organisation might do in some kind of near future. The analytical and predictive forms emerged after the second world war in the area of cybernetics and systems theory. As the impossibility of prediction became clear, with the emergence of chaos theory and such disciplines. We know that, in the words of many, "predictions are difficult, especially about the future" and thus, we accept that prognoses are impossible. Futuring, as we practice it, is a process of imagining a number of possible/plausible/preferable scenarios and using this imagination in order to better prepare the relevant group to be able to respond to the possible scenarios.
We will cover a number of tools that we use with some mathematical content, as well as discussing the ways in which the mindset of a mathematician can help in being a good futures practitioner.
Date: Thursday, 29 October 2020
Time: 13:00
Place: MS Teams (https://tinyurl.com/y5s3nfeo)
We hope to see you all there!