In 2023, Associate Professor Helen Marshall, Dr Skye Doherty, Ms Joanne Anderson partnered with the Digital Cultures and Societies Hub, Associate Professor Nic Kaempf and Mr Volker Schimmel, the Director of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ‘Global Data Service’ on a two-day scenario lab.
The Challenge
Around the world today, over 140 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes. These numbers are already at a historic high and are expected to rise exponentially in the decades to come. At the same time, new sets of digital technologies (such AI, data collection & surveillance, digital identities or predictive analytics) are growing rapidly. The journeys and experiences of refugees, internally displaced persons, and stateless persons are becoming increasingly entangled with these developing digital technologies. For the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), this evolving ‘digital humanitarian space’ is already offering new opportunities, risks, challenges, and dilemmas, yet the organisation necessarily tends to focus on crisis response rather than long-term analysis.
The Solution
The Scenario Lab was a two-day workshop which drew scholars from a range of disciplines together to anticipate how these new sets of technologies may transform the work of the UNHCR over the next twenty years. The event engaged a series of experts who knew their respective fields well but had relatively little experience with traditional foresight methodologies. Participants developed a series of timelines that mapped out future trajectories and explored divergence points in order to produce best-case, worst-case, and ‘weird’ scenarios. These were not intended to be predictions but rather to explore a range of possibilities that might inform how the UNHCR could ‘future proof’ the technologies they are developing to help protect some of the most vulnerable populations.
The Impact
The Scenario Lab emerged from a cross-disciplinary conversation between the UNHCR, UQ’s Digital Cultures and Societies Hub and the WhatIF Lab. Because forced displacement and digital technology are vast and complex domains, the exercise called for assembling a diverse range of expertise and then creating the space in which connections could be made and the seeds for potential collaborations planted. The UNHCR encouraged participants to view the workshop as a collective thought experiment — not an attempt to predict the future but rather work together to anticipate potential scenarios, and to do so in a spirit of hope, searching for possibilities of positive change. At the end of the two days, participants left with ‘inspiration, new ideas, and the discovery of shared or complementary interests’.
News stories from the future inspired by the lab were published by Dr Doherty in the newsletter Wicked Thinking.