Dator

1. Continued growth – the persistence of the general characteristics of American society – growth oriented, opportunity-filled, technologically-progressive, upwardly-mobile, internationally- dominant, science-guided, rich, leisure- filled, abundant, and liberal society.

2. Societal collapse – driven by resource shortages, food shortages, climate change, environmental disasters, widespread natural or human-made diseases, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other "acts of god." Political or administra- tive ineptness or a snowballing series of pure accidents or terroristic events, nuclear war or some combination of these lead to a slide of our present "high civilization" into conditions not unlike the early Dark Ages in Europe – or worse.

3. A conserver society – the "Good Ship Industrial Growth" cannot persist; it is already beginning to sink. We need a managed shrinkage rather than growth.

4. The transformational society – American society over the next 30 to 50 years
(from 1977) will go through a fundamental paradigm shift which will be a challenging "birth-like" process. Some advocates of this image parallel those who call for the conserver society, but see new value, institutional, and techno- logical arrangements fundamentally different from anything we have seen before. Others (Alvin Toffler and Jim Dator) focus on transformation driven by the fragmenting and individualizing effects of impending technologies, an end to Western dominance, artificial intelligence and technology.
The conference was successful, although most of the authors could not, or did not, take up the challenge of relating their forecasts to Dator's alternative futures. The approach, however, of putting alternative futures in front of individuals or groups and having them consider the implications became a common technique for IAF as we engaged groups with the future.

(Jim Dator's Alternative Futures and the Path to IAF's Aspirational Futures, Clement Bezold, Institute for Alternative Futures U.S.A.
Researchgate 2015)

Abstract

Jim Dator has specialized in understanding and developing "alternative futures". He periodically assess- es the range of futures as seen by experts and futurists and by people in various settings where he serves as a futurist. These expert and popular images change over time, and some reflect that lack of thought about the future. But for three decades Dator has compressed the range of futures into four archetypes – continued growth, collapse/decline, conserver/disciplined society, and high tech transformation. As co-founder of the Institute for Alternative Futures and futures mentor to Clem Bezold, his approach has been significant in the origins and evolution of IAF's aspirational futures approach. Aspirational futures has organizations or commu- nities generate several scenarios: a most likely, best intelligence future that usually parallels a continued growth image; a challenge scenario that considers significant responses to "what could go wrong"; and one or two visionary scenarios that identify future visionary conditions and alternative paths to get there.

In the original design, the deck of cards contains four suits or categories of card to kindle and guide imaginations. Arc is the applicable time horizon and type of future, building on Jim Dator’s four generic futures (sometime)also called archetypes) framework (Dator, 2009a). Terrain is the context for the object, either a physical location or a domain of human activity. The Object is the category of hypothetical ‘future thing’ for which players will generate a description (not always a physical artefact), ranging from Device, to Headline, to Monument. Finally, Mood says how it feels to interact with that thing, lending an ‘interior’ inflection to the other three more ‘external’ elements.1 A creative prompt comprises any set of four cards, one from each suit (ATOM). For example see Figure 6.1. This combination challenges us to describe an artefact from just a few years into the future; a beverage relating somehow to a zoo, that evokes a continued growth trajectory in the wider society, and that imparts a sense of disgust. In response one player proposed a product called ZooShooters, a hypothetical product from animal rights activist group PETA. This drink, when imbibed, gives one the experience of the suffering of a caged animal.