Speculation & Percolation: Brewing Steadily

The Futures Thinking Network at TORCH is proud to announce the imminent launch of their audio-visual reading list project, Speculation & Percolation. Conceptualised by Anne Ploin, Chelsea Haith, Dan Holloway, and Chris Burr, the project takes the form of seven interviews with academics, thinkers, and creatives from across disciplines discussing what they’re reading, watching, listening to and pondering on which informs their thinking about the future.

Speculation is the act of imagining how things might otherwise be. People speculate about the past, the present and the future, and frequently and more commonly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, people speculate with money. It entails creative imagination, some knowledge of the present and the desire to consider the answers to the questions: ‘what else’ and ‘how other’. Percolation is a method of brewing coffee in which the coffee is gradually filtered through a porous substance, often filter paper.  However, it may also refer us to the process of seeking a deep understanding when we allow ideas to brew, or steep, in the percolators of our minds, changing our perspectives, giving us new insights, enriching our sense of ourselves and the world around us. Speculating and percolating, we hope to encourage reflection and further research into our possible futures and allow ideas to brew.

Interviewed and filmed by Anne Ploin and edited by Chelsea Haith, these brief insights into the interviewees’ reading and thinking practices will, we hope, offer others who are interested in research encompassed by future-oriented thinking some direction and guidance in their media and literature consumption trajectories. Come for the ideas, stay for the personalities. The videos are fun, the lack of coffee becomes a running joke, sometimes we sit in the grass, occasionally a door slams, and everyone learns something.

One episode will be posted each week for seven weeks.

Follow us on Twitter @ThinkFuturesNow and keep an eye out for our first episode, launching soon, in which we talk about narrative, speculative fiction and 3D printed teddy-bears.