Glossary
5C Meditation
This framework connects five skillful means (curiosity, curation, coordination, commitment, creation) to the five elements (air, fire, water, earth, ether) to achieve self-actualization and group cohesion, and provides intangible building blocks for deep transformational work.
Agnostic Contextual Design
Agnostic Contextual Design prioritizes context over method. This framework also favors condition over solution. In order to design for emergent complexity, shifting context is observed and evaluated on a regular basis to determine appropriate interventions, and design responds to changing conditions instead of fixed relationships between problem and solution.
Collective Wisdom
Collective Wisdom is a hybrid field study that sets out to map, define and shed light on co-creation methods within media (arts, documentary and journalism) and adjacent areas of knowledge (design, open-source tech, urban and community planning).
Community of Practice
Regular, rhythmic meetings, events, presentations and rituals at which GoFA members cultivate trust, community cohesion, and co-creation.
Design Justice
Design justice rethinks design processes, centers people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face.
Donut Economics
The Doughnut, or Doughnut economics, is a visual framework for sustainable development–shaped like a doughnut or lifebelt–combining the concept of planetary boundaries with the complementary concept of social boundaries. The name derives from the shape of the diagram, i.e.
Emergent Strategies
Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of the human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures in which people want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns.
Equitable Co-Creation
The Guild’s unique core practice around co-authorship is realized through processes like the Futurist Writers Room. The resulting breakthroughs have been captured in artifacts like Portals and 20 Decades of 2020. While there are many powerful approaches, structures, tools and technologies to enable the exchange of ideas within communities, GoFA also recognizes the potential for inequitable dynamics and imbalances of power relations that turn good intentions into bad outcomes. Without common agreement among those exchanging ideas and/or pre-established frameworks for playing together at various stages along the creative continuum, individuals risk falling prey to the same systemic failures they seek to address.
Future Architecture
non-definition
The notion of giving future architecture a fixed definition is contested by Sharon Chang. According to Chang, the process of building the field of future architecture involves frequent revision of its definition and reinvention of language related to it. As a collaborative, intersectional discipline that draws inspiration from numerous existing fields, future architecture can be seen as an umbrella term to describe silo-busting and highly-integrated multidisciplinary endeavors aimed at improving the world based on shared values. To understand the nature of future architecture is to acknowledge that it cannot be defined as a singular "thing" by any entity at any given time. People who identify as future architects will examine, challenge, alter and expand the definition of future architecture based on their own exploration and experimentation.
Existing Definitions
The notion of giving future architecture a fixed definition is contested by Sharon Chang. According to Chang, the process of building the field of future architecture involves frequent revision of its definition and reinvention of language related to it. As a collaborative, intersectional discipline that draws inspiration from numerous existing fields, future architecture can be seen as an umbrella term to describe silo-busting and highly-integrated multidisciplinary endeavors aimed at improving the world based on shared values. To understand the nature of future architecture is to acknowledge that it cannot be defined as a singular "thing" by any entity at any given time. People who identify as future architects will examine, challenge, alter and expand the definition of future architecture based on their own exploration and experimentation.
Future Writers Room
The FWR is a tool for rapid prototyping. It works with participants to create a multitude of speculative historiographies that contribute to a shared set of design principles and a speculative future narrative, resulting in a shared vision. The FWR framework catalyzes a collectively imagined future as a precursor to the development of Shared Futures that can be prototyped. The first Future Writers Room was launched as a prototype at GoFA’s launch in October 2019 by Madebo Fatunde, Tony Patrick, Lafayette Cruise and Rob Sinclair.
INE Framework
Imagination: how one understands the world to be in both its actuality and its possibility.
Narrative: how one communicates that understanding; embedded in individual and collective identity.
Embodiment: how one experiences that understanding through mind-body integration.
The INE framework is used to calibrate the dynamic interplay between imagination, narrative and embodiment. The more radical and unencumbered our imagination gets, the more we are equipped to develop powerful narratives that align divergent values and transcend current cultural limitations. As these narratives become more diverse and complex, identity can evolve in ways that increase human capacity to more fully embody shared values on intellectual, emotional and spiritual levels. Such elevated embodiment opens up neurological pathways that can lead to expanded consciousness, thereby enhancing motivation and the ability to imagine beyond the boundaries of current realities.
Project Drawdown
Project Drawdown® is a nonprofit organization that seeks to help the world reach “drawdown”—the future point in time when atmospheric greenhouse gas levels stop climbing and start to steadily decline.
Race After Technology
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code is a 2019 American book focusing on a range of ways in which social hierarchies, particularly racism, are embedded in the logical layer of internet-based technologies.
Regenerative Living Systems
Regeneration means to give new life and energy to. Regenerative paradigms, principles and frameworks have been articulated by various authors, including Carol Sanford and Ben Haggard, as ways to recognize the four dominant modern systems paradigms operating in parallel to shape the contemporary context. The seven principles give rise to frameworks that act as scaffolding for aligning social systems with the way nature has evolved. The origin of regeneration is as old as life itself, practiced in more recent times by Native American and Indigenous Peoples and farmers.
Shared Future
A potential reality co-created with shared visions to achieve collective wellbeing and shared prosperity.
Story, Rule, Money (SRM)
SRM is a framework for systems intervention. It provides critical lenses–story, rule, money–for analyzing a given system’s propensity to change through intentional design. Key areas for investigation include: how individual stories become collective narratives; how the process of narrative co-creation helps to align values, create incentive, change behaviors and shift power structures; and how access to capital is determined by the interplay of these elements.
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