Summ( )n Futures

You could as well open bets on Kalshi

Happy World #Anthropology Day - and congrats to all fellow practitioners! Summ( )n may be psychologists and sociologists, but we often work with an anthropological lens too (whether its 'cultural anthropology' or 'social anthropology' lens... ok, stop, let a thousand anthropologies blossom.

Presentation about Trust Experience Lab tinyurl.com/ykwp35uz

#Trust isn't 'broken', it’s just plural. Based on our research on different trust logics we developed Trust Experience Lab - a hands-on workshop to explore which trusts are at play, map the frictions, convert into new ideas and concepts. Not 'rebuilding trust' - designing experiences that resonate

The chart shows Americans’ trust in mass media from 1972 to 2025: the share with “great deal/fair amount” of trust declines from about 70% in the 1970s to 28% in 2025, while “not very much” and “none at all” both rise to the mid-30% range

#Trust in media in the US has hit its lowest level in history: only 28% say they have a great deal or at least a fair amount of trust today, down from 40% just five years ago, according to #Gallup. A collateral issue, of course, is if we trust these polls. news.gallup.com/poll/695762/...

You can read more about this study here tinyurl.com/5dfymazd

Last year we’ve been working on a large study of urban youth in #Kazakhstan. It was intense and at times exhausting - multi-method, exploring shifts in values, images of the future and new pathways. A bliss at the end, reaffirmed why we do what we do: explore futures with people, not about people.

Very powerful piece; sends shivers down the spine

Quite amusingly (and sadly), but I still haven't written anything here about our project in #Kazakhstan. Together with our partners we conducted a very important study of the youth of this country, their images of the futures, and how they plan to get there. Should do a series of posts, I guess

That’s literally Summ( )n’s business strategy! When we say, “We summon the futures to play with them now,” that’s how we expect to lure clients into these “games”

I feel this stream has been a bit abandoned lately - well, summer break etc, all understandable. A good way to restart is to share the news about our recent presentation at the Amsterdam Trust Summit. We introduced our new Dynamic #Trust Assessment Toolkit, freshly minted and ready to use!

I wrote about our #Futures of Trust(s) session a while ago tinyurl.com/2n2r5cu6 It was all nice and interesting but also quite generic, more like a promise. We run several pilot sessions and can share some results - see the new deck about Trust(s) in Transition tinyurl.com/mwt37su3

Very much in line with our recent piece on 'multiple trusts', different trust regimes

This blog has actually triggered me to look back and restart (and restore) my old #streetphotography project, cea +/- (centralasian.tumblr.com). I run it for years but abandoned it in the last two years (not the picture-taking, but the sharing part)

Hoe meer open, eerlijk en echt je bent over je werk, hoe meer het waarde voor je publiek. Fake en glitter verhalen delen lijkt misschien even fijn, maar op de lange termijn is het schadelijk, voor iedereen

#ETHDam 25 was super interesting but also hyper-intensive and led to a bit of overload in my head; tried to blog in real-time but failed :( - will come back to this story after a bit. Meanwhile, more of the recent #streetphotography / #streetethnography

Liz Steininger from Least Authority on Designing for Autonomy at #ETHDam 25

Privacy as Ecosystem at #ETHDam 25 by Web3Privacy

So, private cryptocurrency is NOT used by the criminals only? The news are BIG at #ETHDam (shared by Reuben Yap from Firo, no less) #trust

(AI)Satoshi speaks at #ETHDam - all the crypto memes are being enacted

Eleonore Blanc opens #ETHDam in Amsterdam

I’m a bit lost here. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the future starts when we get lost. When we look for being lost.

Our 'Exploring Futures image shows people with maps. Not because we promise to show the way, but perhaps because we want to help you get lost.

So maybe it’s about stopping. About suspending movement. About realizing that we can’t just keep doing what we were doing. That true futuring starts the moment we understand the past can’t continue on the same path and buy a pause.

But what do we have instead? Well, to begin with we were never really about 'desired futures', we were more about changes - the kinds that are already visible but go unnoticed because we rush too quickly toward the next 'desired future'.

Today, our politically correct 'desired future' looks different, all these GDPRed SDGs 5P peppered with GSIs. But they are still just as clearly defined. Even when today’s futurists talk about 'uncertainty', it’s 'our kind of uncertainty' - controlled, measured, with KPIs in place to track progress

Constantly changing, shifting, evolving? Apparently that wasn’t self-evident - worse even, the very ‘transition’ was understood as movement toward a defined goal. Back then that goal was liberal capitalism, Fukuyama’s 'end of history'. The rest of the world just needed to catch up.

The 'future' always sounded to me like a kind of fetish, something we chase without questioning too much. When I was studying sociology in the 1990s, our program was called Understanding Societies in Transition. I remember thinking that was redundant - aren’t all societies always in transition?

Summ( )n is all about ‘futures’. We summon them, sense their signals, and help others make sense of them. We even design them (or design for them).

I’ve been part of this field of futuring for ~ 30 years now, so maybe it's a bit late to admit this but I’ve always felt very uneasy with the F-word.🧵

The original format of my +/- stream on Tumblr was actually always an intermix of 'people pics' (b/w as a rule) and 'technology pics'. The latter could be interpreted ve-e-e-ery broadly, of course :) #streetphotography

Amusingly, and even though Summ( )n is all about 'futuring', Understanding People, understanding now is as important as the future track. And that part is very much informed by the pictures that we take. Guess what? The most active followers of Summ( )n here at BSky are ... #streetphotographers!