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.