Field Guide to Futures Ecosystem
Cartography of next-generation foresight organizations
Description
The landscape of organizations, laboratories, institutes, and movements engaged in shaping the technological future has expanded rapidly over the past two decades and especially since 2020. This landscape now encompasses entities that differ dramatically in institutional form, epistemic orientation, ideological commitment, and scale of operation, from corporate AI mega-laboratories to nonprofit research institutes, from techno-optimist think tanks to critical assessment organizations, from legacy futures studies bodies to emergent intellectual hubs with no clear disciplinary home. Despite this proliferation, no systematic, publicly accessible cartography of the futurist arena exists. Researchers, practitioners, students, and early-career professionals entering this space lack structured orientation resources that convey not just who the major players are, but what their epistemic commitments are, what institutional forms they take, what trajectories they are on, and how they relate to one another and to broader intellectual and political movements.
This working paper introduces the Landscape of Futurists project, a research initiative hosted by JOPRO’s Center for Future Studies. The project aims to produce a curated cartography, comparative analysis, and open dataset of the organizations and movements shaping next-generation futurist thought. We describe the orientation problem that motivates this work, survey existing mapping efforts and their limitations, propose a provisional typology for categorizing entities in the futurist landscape, present an illustrative preliminary landscape, and outline the research agenda for subsequent phases. The paper is intended as a foundation for collaboration and as a public artifact that can attract research support and inform the broader community of researchers and practitioners seeking to navigate this space.
Keywords
futurist organizations, institutional mapping, epistemic cartography, foresight, technology governance, research orientation, futures studies