Two recent reports in The New York Times describe the incredible ambition and potential in the Big Data field. One article examines he work of Gil Elbaz, a mathematician, Caltech graduate, and former Google employee, who also the founder of Factual, a company which is collating unprecedentedly large amounts of data with an extremely wide range of topics and sources. Factual’s mission is to try to identify and store every available fact in the world.  Elbaz sees the world as “one big data problem,” and believes that “If all data was clear, a lot fewer people would subtract value from the world. A lot more people would add value.” The other article reports on the work of researchers in probabilistic topic modeling such as those of the Cultural Observatory, a Harvard-based group which are developing powerful algorithmic search and analysis tools for revealing patterns and associations in large information repositories such as arXiv, a massive scientific paper archive.

These new developments in the Big Data field will lead to tools that will offer not just an unprecedented scale of data availability for innovation in scenario planning and other foresight methods but will also create new demand and opportunities for scenarios as a robust narrative form for conveying data pattern and association analyses. The drive to use the new data capabilities to better manage and communicate organizations’ strategic response to future uncertainties will also generate the challenge of data overload and overly complex data analysis - all data must, after all, ultimately be transformed into stories for widespread human understanding.

Arizona State University recently announced an impressive high-profile campus-wide futures and foresight event, Emerge 2012 (March 1-3, 2012). Incorporating many different perspectives on futures, foresight, and scenarios - including art & design, law, engineering, and interactive entertainment - the event is also featuring leading futurist and technology speakers such as Stewart Brand and Sherry Turkle, and is supported by Intel. Arizona State has notably ramped up its futures and foresight work’s public profile in recent years - for instance, ASU partners with the New America Foundation in presenting a futures column for Slate.com

The respected futurist and scenario planner Jamais Cascio has a good commentary post up on the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies site - he considers the dilemma facing futures, scenario planning and other foresight practitioners in communicating scenarios to clients, audiences and publics that balance likelihood (and detail) with believability, with the two in a trade-off relationship with each other. Cascio’s visionary 2006 post - an inspiration to us at the Scenario Lab - on the potential of mass participatory online scenario writing is also certainly worth revisiting when considering this “foresight paradox”.

Members of the Scenario Lab were pleased to attend a joint event held by the Los Angeles Global Arts & Media Node of the well-known international futures think tank network, the Millennium Project together with the Producers Guild of America and c3. Part of a series of events marking the launch of the Millennium Project’s State of the Future 2011 report, the brainstorming session focussed on discussing how to expand the role of arts and media creatives in communicating futures work to the public.