Transforming the Future Anticipation in the 21st Century

A book by Riel Miller, 2018.

It isn’t just a book review, it is also a review of a concept. The book introduces the concept of future literacy, a discipline, a concept, and an idea promoted by UNESCO. This concept should help people to think about their future more productively. In turn it should help to make a better decision and create a better future.

The books consists of a number of articles about different aspects of future literacy. It has a number of theoretical articles, which discuss the concept and its roots and origins. This theoretical articles mostly operates with terms “use-of-future” and “discipline of anticipation”. As I can understand them the first term, use-of-future implies more active work towards shaping the future according to our needs and expectations. The second term, discipline of anticipation defines a framework of more productive imagining and forecasting different future events. Both of them should be used together when people systematically think about the future, create some useful knowledge, then make decisions.

There is also a practical part, which describes future literacy workshops. These workshops were used to imagine future states of different complex systems. Fourteen cases in total was discussed, for example the future of sports and the future for local labor markets. These workshops show a practical implementation of future literacy.

Future literacy isn’t directly related to critical thinking, but it uses tools and methods from critical thinking. So if you are interested in disciplines related to future forecasting, or if you want to create a better future you can check this book. It isn’t a textbook which can guide and teach you how to increase your skill of future literacy. But it can show you different ways how to do it yourself. Alternatively you can find necessary contacts of UNESCO-related organizations, which works on this topic.

Overall the book presents an interesting and novel concept which may be worth investigating. UNESCO is also provides the book free of charge, you can find it here. You can download it or read in your browser.