‘Scenario thinking’ is a term originally used within military intelligence as an aid to long-term and future planning. It is now widely adopted by the academic, business and design community as a means to generate ideas and enhance product or service life cycles. The technique usually draws on demographic and fact-based research, combining system thinking with cause-effect relationships to understand how different elements would / could influence each other.

Workshop Description:

Open to educators and workshop leaders, the goal of the workshop is to demonstrate through practical examples the use of scenario thinking methods as a means to provoke debate around possible and imagined futures relating to synthetic biology.

Dillon and Benque will lead participants through a 90-min workshop using ‘scenario thinking’ to explore Synthetic Biology scenarios. A selection of techniques will be presented, plus outcomes of the Idea Translation Lab on Synthetic Biology (run by Dillon at the Science Gallery), and Benque’s StudioLab projects (Royal College of Art, London). The goal of the workshop is to demonstrate through practical examples the use of scenario thinking methods as a means to provoke debate around possible and imagined futures.

Participants:

This workshop is open to educators and workshop leaders interested in learning and exploring ‘scenario thinking’ skills for use in their practice. Participants must bring a laptop with visual editing software (eg. for images: Photoshop, GIMP, Paint and/or for video: Pinnacle)

Workshop Presenters:

Teresa Dillon and David Benque

Relevant Links:

Science Gallery: www.sciencegallery.com
Teresa Dillon: www.polarproduce.org
David Benque: www.davidbenque.com
Royal College of Art, Blueprints for the Unknown: http://studiolab.di.rca.ac.uk/