SOIF@HRCFS – Asia-Pacific@Hawaii-Futures

In conjunction with the School of International Futures, HRCFS will co-host a four-day workshop on Maui at Lumeria. This unique gathering leverages Hawaii’s strategic vantage point to examine regional and global trends and emerging issues. You may refer to the concept note for more details about the event.

2012 Manoa Futures Symposium

On Friday, November 30th, 2012, HRCFS hosted the Manoa Futures Symposium. As one of, if not, the first gatherings for graduate students pursuing studies in Futures, the conference brought together young scholars from Australia, Finland, Germany, Canada, Bahrain, and across the U.S. representing Regent University, University of Sunshine Coast, the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD), JAMK University of Applied Sciences, the University of Southern California (USC), the University of Houston, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Dr. Jose Ramos delivered a lively keynote address and abstracts from presenters were published as a symposium in The Journal of Futures Studies, Vol. 17, No. 3, March 2013.

2012 Hawaii Agriculture Conference

In conjunction with the Hawaii Food Policy Council (HFPC), HRCFS organized and co-facilitated a workshop that utilized experiential futures focusing on food at the 2012 Hawaii Agriculture Conference. This interactive workshop also featured a primer on Futures Thinking and a policy brief focusing on food system sustainability.

Campuses 2060

Since August 2008, students and faculty affiliated with the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, and students and faculty affiliated with the School of Architecture of the University of Hawaii at Manoa have been engaged in a project called “Campuses 2060”. The project explores the history, present situation, and alternative futures of institutions of higher education worldwide according to the overall “future” these institutions find themselves in, and the specific mission, participants, resources, pedagogy, and physical campus that they develop in response to each future. There have been three public presentations of their ongoing work so far. While the initial focus has been on the University of Hawaii at Manoa. it is the intention of the project, still ongoing, to become a global resource for ideas and information about the futures of higher education anywhere.

Coral Cross

In spring 2009, just as a novel strain of H1N1 influenza A (quickly dubbed “swine flu” in the media) was spreading around the world, 400 players from the United States, including 117 in Hawaii, along with others from Japan, Australia, Canada, the UK, and some 20 other countries worldwide, took part in a unique experiment in public health outreach, awareness, and education. As the virus began to spread, Coral Cross – an “Emergent Reality Game” designed by the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies (HRCFS) for the Hawaii Department of Health (DOH) and spearheaded by Stuart Candy of the Center – provided a novel platform on which some 520 people would create an online community, launching a counter-viral campaign to spread pandemic awareness. Players tested their knowledge and learned facts about influenza’s causes and effects, along with relevant means of mitigation and prevention. They also had an opportunity to explore existing federal guidelines about vaccine prioritization, and to discuss their understandings, concerns, and values in relation to handling the current outbreak, as well as the potential for more severe pandemics. Coral Cross was custom designed by HRCFS for the State of Hawaii as part of its Public Engagement Demonstration Project on Pandemic Influenza. The game constituted one piece of a three-pronged public outreach strategy, alongside a series of live television broadcasts in Hawaii, and in-person pandemic information sessions held on the island of Oahu.

The Project had been conceived and begun well before the first case of H1N1 influenza broke out. It had to be completely re-conceived and re-written to accommodate that fact. The original idea was to have participants “experience” six weeks from the outbreak the flu in six days of gameplay in order to be better prepared when the outbreak did occur. But with the actual outbreak of the flu one day before the game was to go live, the project was completely refocused.

Gaming Futures

On December 1, 2012, HRCFS researchers ran a hybrid, digitial-physical game as the culminating experience for a year-long research project on the impact of communication technologies upon power relations across past, present, and futures contexts.

Myanmar Futures Exchange

Collaborating with the East-West Center to host the first-ever futures-based workshop in Myanmar, The Myanmar Futures Exchange offered a series of workshop sessions focused on crowdsourcing what drivers of change would be most impactful on the country’s economic development by 2020.

Hawaii 2050

What might Hawaii, and the world of which it is a part, look, feel and live like in 50 years’ time? In order to help people engage in this discussion, the kick-off activities on August 26, 2006 to a state-wide process called “Hawaii 2050” allowed participants to experience alternate possibilities as tangible realities in four different rooms designed to exhibit four very different alternative futures of Hawaii in 2050, complete with ambassadors from the future who guided them through each future for about one hour.

Time Capsule at Kapiolani Park

On June 11, 2077, tomorrow’s futurists will unearth a message of 100 years previous. Included in the time capsule are mementos of the day of its burial, including newspapers, recordings of radio and TV shows (and their playback mechanisms), and a message to the future from futurist Jim Dator written in 1977.

Manoa Journal of Fried and Half-Fried Ideas

The Manoa Journal of Fried and Half-Fried Ideas was a device for testing out ideas about the future in the early stages, before they are aired or published for conventional audiences or journals. In other words, Half-Fried offered a creative and nurturing environment for nascent ideas. As such, we encourage submissions from all areas, people, and persuasions.