Our SCENARIOS page is loosely based on ideas Brian Eno talks about in a Whole Earth Review article Unthinkable Futures. On one level it's sort of a playful intellectual game pushing imaginary scenarios to extremes, but based on very real premises. It's also being applied as a serious business reality analysis tool by extrapolating possible futures given a certain business scenarios.

The Global Business Network (GBN), of which Eno is a member, expounds on GBN uses on Scenario Planning as a consulting service and brainstorming methodology they offer to member business clients.

Eno has also used scenarios playfully, in ways that sound a bit vaguely similar John Zorn's game music such as Cobra, assigning roles and scenarios to musicians, often independently, so each player is in effect acting a role in some fantasy and applying that to the context of their musical improvisations.

In the fairly recent recording sessions for the David Bowie Outside 1. release Eno gave each musician game roles to play, using scenario imagery. He was also using similar techniques in the recording sessions he was doing in the early 90's with D'Cuckoo and other bands (as discussed in an article (Mondo 2000) on D'Cuckoo. And it's not far off from the use of Oblique Strategies cards devised by Eno and Peter Schmidt for resolving uncertainty via scenarios in the recording studio creative processes.

So we thought we'd offer a collection point here for scenarios. We hope to bundle a few up and ask Eno to contribute futures to them, or reactions at least, as aprt of an interview of sorts we're aiming for. Please read up a bit on the references above on Scenarios in the context of GBN and Eno's work, then, jump in and add your own scenarios. We're looking for fun, humorous and unusual...

Hints: Since Brian generally doesn't seem that interested in reliving the past or knowing what his fans think about his works I think this would work best if scenarios here have little or nothing to do with Brian Eno. This is more like one of those fiction contests where you get asked to write something in the style of a famous author. So using the sort of imagery Eno uses might be useful, but overall the point here is to create interesting scenarios, with Eno only figuring as a catalyst and potential target to be asked to expand potential futures on some of these scenarios.

Scenarios from our readers

In the future, changing your eyecolor with contacts becomes so commonplace that it dissolves into a religion of sorts, where the only acceptable colors are either black or white and revealing your eyecolor becomes something almost intimate and never something one does in public. Eye color becomes something erotic and takes on the same social stigmata as today nudity has.