“Any serious study of the future implies an equally rigorous hindsight operation of the past.”
John McHale – cybernetician, artist and futures thinker, 1969.
Today’s accelerating pace of change challenges our ability to pause, interrogate and (re-)assess the past that shapes our current imaginations and infrastructures. How might we enable researchers, policymakers, designers and others to efficiently gain the requisite knowledge to enable effective and responsible actions under time constraint and uncertainty?
In this paper, we synthesise works from media and critical technology studies, cybernetics and conservation, to establish wayfinding tools and practices that enable us to ‘know as we go’ or even ‘know through going’.
We introduce the Cybernetic Futures Compass as a companion to the Cybernetic Futures Framework introduced in the previous chapter. The Compass brings cybernetic principles into futures practice and provides a disciplined approach for diverse stakeholders to illuminate, negotiate and organise competing perceptions of the system or issue of interest. The Compass does not tell us what to do but it helps us collectively asks better questions, which may surface silences, erasures and shift our vantage points as we imagine and act towards hopeful futures.