Abstract
After the Second World War, many social critics thought technology had taken over all forms of modern thought and activity. To these thinkers, the arms industry, the cold war, nuclear threat, atomic science, overpopulation, lonely crowds, computing, famine, and ecological catastrophe were signs of technological determinism. The critics were utterly worried about the state of democracy in a technological world. The postdigital era faces similar challenges and even more pressing problems with the progress and inventions in digitalization. German-born Robert Jungk and Norbert Müllert addressed these problems from the 1960s onwards and wanted to search for solutions to technological determinism. Their answer was to invent a future workshop method that allowed ordinary people to participate in imagining the future and solve small and large-scale social problems. This chapter describes the future workshop as a viable postdigital research method that allows scholars methodological experimentation and switches from what is to what is not yet, but what could be.
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RAND is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by the Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. See https://www.rand.org/. Accessed 22 November 2022.
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Suoranta, J., Teräs, M. (2023). Future Workshops as Postdigital Research Method. In: Jandrić, P., MacKenzie, A., Knox, J. (eds) Constructing Postdigital Research . Postdigital Science and Education . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35411-3_16
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