Explain about the future

EXPLAIN ABOUT THE FUTURE
I cried the first time I watched Wall-E. And I cried the second time too. Since becoming a parent, I’ve noticed that I’m much more easily moved to tears watching movies, reading novels or a watching an emotionally charged moment in an episode of Queer Eye (tears roll down my cheeks every time). Still, from the outset, it may not be entirely clear why I would cry to a movie like Wall-E.
If you haven’t seen it, the story is set in the 29th century and is about a robotic trash compactor, Wall-E, and its interaction with an unmanned probe, Eve, searching an uninhabitable earth for plants. The movie conveys a dystopian image of a world in which humanity have abandoned earth after years of over consumption and environmental neglect. As the probe is shown a plant, it goes into permanent standby, leaving the confused Wall-E trying all kinds of ways to reconnect with Eve, to no good. We all know network connectivity issues can be a cause of great stress and emotional drama (anger mostly) — but it doesn’t normally move us to tears. But this scene certainly does.
The reason why the scene where Wall-E and Eve (still in standby) watch the sunset together it’s deeply moving is because its also a deeply human behaviour.
My new job
The reason why I’m sharing my tendency to cry to children’s movies (and Queer Eye) is because there’s a point here to be made, that I’ll expect to use a lot in my job as the Chief Storyteller for Viable Cities. For those of you unfamiliar with this program, it’s a large government funded research and innovation program in Sweden, with the audacious mission of making a cities in Sweden carbon neutral by 2030. The program is based on the ideas of economist Mariana Mazzucato who have written extensively on the importance of clearly defined missions to drive innovation.
Earlier this year, they decided on appointing a Chief Storyteller — the first of its kind in the world for a government research and innovation program of this magnitude — the theory of change being that that stories have the power to engage people in a way scientific facts seldom can. In short: to reach the program’s mission, storytelling is believed a key to get people engaged enough to change their behaviour and norms. Whether in everyday life or in our perceptions of the ways things are or could be.
In this post, I want to lay out some of my ideas on how tho achieve this. For obvious reason, I will not be the one telling all the stories and that’s the way it should be. In many countries and cities, there’s been a call for a unifying story with the power to unite an increasingly fragmented society but I don’t think that would be possible today, it fit ever has. It’s true that history often has been written by the winners, but it’s also true that countries that have agreed on one story had done so during authoritarian leaderships or in periods of decimated public debate. To put it in a post-modern terms: the narrator is often a person of power and that you can tell from the story.
At Viable Cities, we often talk about how the future city is already in beta, and that goes for these plans as well. At the moment, my hypothesis is to create some kind of framework to enable telling stories about the future of our cities from the perspective of different stakeholders. For instance, for the public to describe their wishes for a city, and for city planners to tell the public about their ideas.
This will be in turn be a part of a play book I envision is needed to support a process where citizens are involved in co-creating the stories about desires, human needs, underlaying problems and possible solutions a city might face. With the help of these collections of stories, one can then create a better understanding of various perspectives and nurture engagement from all those affected so that once can find solution that will satisfy the needs of as many as possible, thus easing implementation and adoption of the solutions agreed on.
The playbook itself will be a co-creation, as the framework, as well as stories that we can use as an example to let people know various ways of telling stories in the most effective and emotional way possible. (All we will do in the storytelling efforts of Viable Cities will be made available to everyone else, via open source, so you will be able to steal or borrow as much as you like).
That said, let’s look at how storytelling can play a role in getting us to the carbon neutral society faster.