Join us for "Creative Science Athens", our 3rd annual International Creative Science Foundation Workshop – 16-17th July 2013

The theme of this workshop is “Innovations in Business & Technology“. It builds on two earlier successful workshops Creative Science 2010 & Creative Science 2011. The methodology employed by the workshop is to invite researchers to submit fictional stories that describe their visions of future businesses or technologies. This approach is called Science-Fiction Prototyping (SFP) and has the aim of providing a means for differing members of society to have conversations about the kind of futures they would like (or not!).

Science-Fiction Prototyping (SFP) was created by Brian David Johnson (Intel’s Futurist) as a means to help Intel engineers think about the applications for their integrated circuits. This was a particular challenge to Intel as it can take 7-10 years from concept to manufacture (up to 3 generations of computer or 6 generations of mobile phone away!). Clearly drafting specifications for products so far into the future, requires a way to think about that future, and to hold conversations with the stakeholders of that future; SFP became that tool. In 2010 Science Fiction Prototyping became the subject of the first workshop on the topic, Creative Science 2010 followed a year later by another workshop, Creative Science 2011. SFPs can be created by anyone who has an interest in thinking about, or influencing the future. Typically, SFPs are written by scientist, engineers or business professionals but they are equally open to members of the public including school children who may want to influence the work of researchers. In this way science fiction prototypes act as a way of involving the widest section of the population in determining the research agenda, thereby making science and business investment, and output more useful to everyone. The goals of the workshop are to act as a catalyst of this new approach by acting as a forum where researchers from differing disciplines can come together to explore how to develop this area.

If you would like to see examples of earlier SFPs, look at Creative Science 2010 (http://dces.essex.ac.uk/Research/iieg/CS2010.htm) or Creative Science 2011(http://dces.essex.ac.uk/Research/iieg/CS2011.htm). In addition there have been two special editions of ‘Futures‘ and ‘Technology Forecasting and Social Change‘ journals that carry some very interesting papers discussing SFP for modeling future business, society and technology. Alternatively, there is more information about this topic on the main Creative Science website (www.creative-science.org) and more information about the venue on the IE’13 website (www.intenv.org).

We look forward to meeting you in Athens.