Thinking with History About the Future with Immersive Technology

Alix Green, at the University of Essex, explains that the “thinking with history” approach “humanises and demythologises what can appear to be timeless realities or ideas and, in doing so, breaks down determinism and opens up the possibility of different futures”.

The past, as the future, is ‘not here’; neither exists, hence we cannot with any certainty either recover the former or anticipate the future. We can only represent them. For historians Gaddis and Staley, imagination is the skill that makes the process of representation possible. (Green, 2012)

This way of thinking is a powerful addition to the forecasts developed from mathematical models created by climate scientists, ecologists, and economists that dominate our thinking about the climate and the broader environment in the future. We need these models, but we also need to contextualize their predictions and remain attentive to their limitations, both in predicting the future and in communicating messages about the future to people. Without attention to history and the contingency of the past, people feel locked into the energy regimes, politics, and economic systems that dominate the present. We think Green makes a very compelling case, but are left with the question: how can we encourage more people to consider history when thinking about the future?

Our hypothesis is that augmented and virtual reality technology presents a new opportunity for nonlinear storytelling that will allow us to create engaging immersive experiences to get our audience to think historically about the future challenges presented by the limits of the biosphere.

Our goal is to get people to think about London’s history and the geographical, political, and economic context that allowed it to grow beyond local ecological limits in the nineteenth century, juxtaposed to the present, where a network of global cities are putting too much pressure on the limits of the earth.

We will also encourage users to consider the links between these transatlantic connections brought by commodity exchanges and the process of settler colonialism. Timber ships provided cheap passage to European immigrants travelling to North America, increasing the settler population. Logging camps pushed deep into unceded Algonquin territory. The creation of a wheat exporting economy in Saskatchewan coincided with dispossession and starvation of the Cree, Nakota, Dakota, and Lakota, the pass system, and residential schools that followed on the plains. We’ll encourage the audience to consider how this context shapes the futures they want to create. Can we continue to allow geography to hide the consequences of our actions?

We see immersive technology as a new opportunity to present history to the public to stimulate thinking about the future. It has the potential to highlight contingency and context better than linear storytelling.

Green, Alix. “Continuity, Contingency and Context: Bringing the Historian’s Cognitive Toolkit into University Futures and Public Policy Development.” Futures, Special Issue: University Learning, 44, no. 2 (March 1, 2012): 174–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2011.09.010.