Studio update – Spring 2022

This academic year I am on sabbatical leave finishing three long-running projects and planning to focus more on applications of the archaeological imagination to matters of common and pressing contemporary concern, especially through design foresight and futures literacy. This is why I have put to one side my critical commentary on all things archaeological and…

Futures Literacy: how to decolonize the future

December 8 – 12 2020. Tamara (Carleton) and I were at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit [Link] representing our research group – Foresight at Stanford [Link]. We are standing for design foresight and what we are now calling creative pragmatics (in our forthcoming book – [Link]). Competencies, tools and techniques, mindsets not for predicting the…

imagining the future – SAP’s Ideathon 2020

Today I opened and SAP University Alliances Ideathon – 21 teams around the world spending a weekend addressing critical world challenges – [Link] For future world building, I made the case for using a toolkit that we are calling creative pragmatics, a kind of next-generation design thinking.

Update – the actuality of the archaeological past

I have contributed little to this site Since 2016. I have been writing (Greece and Rome: a new model of antiquity [Link]), running experiments in fieldwork (Project Borderlands [Link]), exploring applied archaeology (with a host of organizations and corporations), asking questions of the proper role of the academic, the researcher, the scholar. In this contemporary…

Update – Collections Depot for Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

Previous reports on this extraordinary project in the future of the museum – [Link] Projects and research theme – Future of the past – Studio Michael Shanks @ Stanford – [Link] JANUS Initiative @ Stanford – [Link] The public art depot for the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, designed by MVRDV is nearing completion in Rotterdam….

urban futures – the cultural field

For nearly ten years I have been serving on the International Advisory Board in Rotterdam [Link] – offering comment on the city’s life and plans. This year we turned to culture in the city. A group of us joined a year long process to reach out to stakeholder groups and institutions, to the people of…