The 'Good' Futurist – Compass – 2025-11

An article witten in collaboration with Charlie Warwick and Bree Trevena for Compass magazine reflecting on the notiong of being a ‘good’ futurist or futures practitioner. 

“Rather than aspiring to be “good”, might we aspire to be useful? And what could “usefulness” look like?

Matthew Fuller describes “seamfulness”: acts of analysis focused not on the smooth conjunction of practices, concepts and materials but on the perceptible seams and spaces, or tensions, between. He argues identification of seams – where one typology, dynamic or paradigm butts up against another – can generatively decentre power by intentionally luminating fissures, flaws, omission and leaks between boundaries.

More recently, artist and futures practitioner Jevon Chandra evoked Indonesian dance scholar and curator Helly Minarti in wondering if a valuable futurist is perhaps akin to a good dramaturg – an “invested traveller” and “critical friend” able to take on the dual role of pendamping (companion) and penganggu (provocateur). Might the useful futurist be one able to constructively pull at seams, walking side by side with communities, surfacing and unpacking contradictions, overlaps, interactions and complexities?

As humans are confronted by fractious, homogenous futures, all the while struggling to navigate their increasingly complex presents, futurists that play with frictions between sociological and ecological systems can surface generative combinations and possibilities, rather than reductive predictions. Playing in the messy, liminal space between agendas, norms and systems is how futures can remain open for those who don’t choose foreclosure.”