A graphic novel based approach to large scale elicitation of normative future scenarios

Scenario analysis has emerged as a necessary component of understanding and modelling large scale future developments in socio-political systems. Within scenario work, “Visions” are normative scenarios crafted by stakeholders, and are used to explore desired futures and their implications. Where traditional stakeholder engagement tools such as workshops and focus groups allow the development of visions with small groups of people, widespread connectivity allows engagement with the public at large through crowdsourcing techniques. Using crowdsourcing methodologies to elicit future desires requires an approach which differs from human computation, collaborative workshop based methods and the standard preference elicitation techniques used in crowdsourcing opinions. Rather than asking “Which of these options do you prefer?” it is necessary to engage participants with the question of “What kind of world would you like to live in?”. As such, contextualisation of the activity is crucial participants must be able to think creatively as well as analytically, and the difference between expectation and desire must be made clear. In this paper we outline the design of a web-based vision development system based on the creation of storyboards for future life stories, targeted at young Europeans. Rather than answer a set of survey questions, participants are asked to graphically imagine a narrative for their future selves, relating to different aspects of their living and working lives. The use of graphical elements aids in both engaging with young people, and easing accessibility for participants of multiple languages. We blend the use of pre-selected images and freeform text to support both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the Paste the appropriate copyright statement here. ACM now supports three different copyright statements: • ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the historical approach. • License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an exclusive publication license. • Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open access. The additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single spaced. visions created. This system is being used in the context of an EU-wide research project which seeks to understand the way our landscapes are changing and how society relates to these changes; as such, it serves a dual purpose as a public engagement tool as well as a source of scientific data. The tool created is open source, and can be re-purposed for other experiments.