Studio Michael Shanks Stanford This week I am off to join Sabine (Remdisch) and colleagues as part of our collaboration — Trans-nation Co-creation. Here’s a kind of prospectus. TNCC Tour and Dialogues: A Week of Innovation, Leadership, and Foresight From June 13 to 19, 2026, the Institute for Performance Management at Leuphana University Lüneburg holds a…
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Heritage — making futures
A critical-heritage complement to the Janus Maneuver – [Link] More notes on futures studies. A second component to the same conclusion: that working with the past is a way of making futures. Convergence — the “Janus Maneuver” and heritage futures In a recent post I made the case for “The Janus Maneuver” [Link] — that…
Some archaeological notes on futures studies
The Janus Maneuver Hindsight, foresight, and futures studies Everyone, it seems, is a futurist now. Here are some loosely gathered thoughts on why an archaeology of design may be a missing foundation. These are notes – so expect inaccuracies and mistakes of memory (hopefully minor). After Janus – the divine principle of looking both back…
Newsletter — Stanford Archaeology Center
Prospective reflections on 2025-26 Acting with nature — prehistory My new book Archaeologies of Nature: Activating the Archive, written with Gabriella Giannachi, University of Exeter and Turin, is now complete and in production. Open Access — it will be available as PDF in June 2026. We use an archaeology of artworks to probe human relationships…
AI and collaboration — lessons from Stanford
Here is the keynote I presented at our reunion last week in Odense, of Danish alumni of the Stanford H-Star fellowship program (2010 to 2015). Keith Devlin (H-Star director emeritus) and Connie Svabo of the STEM Education Research Center – FNUG at University of Southern Denmark [Link], were our hosts. The program enabled about 50…
An academic gift economy: what Stanford H-STAR and mediaX got right
A reflection after the Danish H-STAR fellowship reunion, University Southern Denmark, Odense, May 22-23 2026 Last weekend I joined a reunion of the Danish researchers — twenty-five or so of us — who had passed through Stanford’s H-STAR fellowship between about 2010 and 2015. It was organized by Connie Svabo, whom I hosted at Stanford…