4.3 Stories permit creative visions of the future

An advantage of combining a distant time-horizon (e.g., the end of the 21st century) with a creative approach to scenario generation (e.g. science fiction prototyping), is the ability to play with themes that are outlandish or perhaps ridiculous, at least compared to the present day (Dator, 1993; Johnson, 2011). In the context of the Arctic, there are a significant number of factors that will lead to diverse and wide-ranging outcomes, in particular the roles of Indigenous identities in the future (e.g., Latulippe & Klenk, 2020), pronounced ecological change (Post et al., 2009), and radical technological advances (Akiwenzie-Damm et al., 2019; Asinnajaq, 2017).

The process of developing a story-based future inherently requires creativity, which is neither easy to quantify nor easy to train. Moreover, narrative scenarios can prove to be tremendously engaging to readers of scenarios, by immersing a reader in a story rather than providing only a description (Burnam-Fink, 2015). With this demonstration of blending computational text analysis with storytelling, a next step could be to engage Arctic participants directly in both the curation of a novel corpus of literature on the future, and to participate in the imagining of new visions of the future. Stepping back, this work can be seen as examining how human creativity can productively collaborate with machine learning methods. Indeed, in an era where algorithms dominate discourse about what to expect from and of the future, there is an urgency for demonstrations of the critical role of humanistic perspectives.

Artwork is an additional mode of contending with the complex content and questions embedded in scenarios, and can include visual art, spoken word, musical interpretation, or theatrical production (Grimberg et al., 2019; Jacobs et al., 2017; Merrie et al., 2018). As such, art can be leveraged to meaningfully engage a much broader audience that otherwise would not have a clear way to participate in the process of envisioning Arctic futures. Art can tap into deep-seated human experience, and it can be leveraged to connect wide-ranging audiences with important, worthwhile topics, with which they might not otherwise engage (Akiwenzie-Damm et al., 2019; Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999). While full discussion is beyond the scope of this article, visual concept art has been developed to accompany the ten visions of the Arctic presented in this article. This artwork provides an engaging and immersive complement for the stories themselves. An example is shown in Fig 4.