Designing radical scenarios to navigate our turbulent future

The Anthropocene is the present time of human-caused accelerating global change, and new forms of Anthropocene risk are emerging that society has hitherto never experienced. As such, the Anthropocene challenges our ability to comprehend the present, let alone the future. While we have quantitative and model-based tools, we need complementary methods to make sense of surprise and to create fuller scenarios. Radical futures methods, such as science fiction prototyping, can expand the scope of what potential outcomes are considered for the future. Specifically, radical futures methods can develop synthetic understanding of the Anthropocene, build anticipatory capacity for novel challenges, and examine chains of causality for Anthropocene surprises. In this talk I'll discuss these dimensions in the context of my own radical futures work. I'll conclude the talk with a discussion of what I have learned using these methods, and what frontiers exist in radical futures research.