International Conference on Anticipation, Oslo

From 9th to 11th October 2019 the 3rd International Conference on Anticipation will be held at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway (AHO). The conference will provide an interdisciplinary meeting ground in which researchers, scholars and practitioners who are seeking to understand anticipation and anticipatory practices can come together to deepen their understanding and create productive new connections.

The overarching aim of the Conference Series and of the emerging field of Anticipation Studies is to create new perspectives of how individuals, groups, institutions, systems and cultures use ideas of the future to act in the present.

The 2019 conference builds on the 1st Conference of Anticipation, held in Trento, Italy in 2015 which saw over 350 delegates gather to explore topics ranging from design futures, to anticipatory economics and the philosophy of the present.

The 2nd International Conference on Anticipation held in London, UK, in November 2017. This conference aimed to put into dialogue the empirical, practical and theoretical insights that are emerging in highly diverse fields ranging from biology to psychology, cultural geography to critical theory, physics to design, history to mathematics, urban theory to engineering.

Our >3rd conference takes these concerns further, emboldened by what has been achieved. We see a need to be aware of a diversity of interests and actors in facing future challenges and shaping possible anticipatory alternatives, processes, emergent practices and actual sustainable pathways. Anticipation 2019 therefore benefits from being located in a ‘design university’ where design is no longer a matter of problem solving but of working anticipatorially, that is in an reflexive interplay between making and analysing. The conference, however, it is not limited to Design. Our focus on Anticipation – separately and together – stretches us to construct and communicate via a multitude of disciplines and domains, and more often than not through transdisciplinary linkages and configurations.