Handle with Futures

On the hot, balmy evening of the solar eclipse this August, I picked up a lovely smooth white pebble on a Costa Blanca beach. Nothing unusual about that: there are millions of them. But these pebbles began life in an ancient seabed, millennia ago. They have travelled through geological time, changed location and acquired meanings they never started with. 

I tried talking to mine. What could it tell me about its past or our future? It holds hindsight,  insight from that moment in time, and perhaps foresight about our earth.   

In December, I will take it to Berlin and send it forward again. This time, though, only four years. I am going to put it in a special box that nobody will open until 2030. The pebble is easy. What else should go in the box?

One object 

Imagine you have room for just one small object. It must tell someone something about learning in 2026. You may or may not be there when the box is opened, but you should not need to explain it. No helpful presentation. No chance to say, “Well, obviously, what I meant was…” Just the object. What would you choose?  And how confident are you that someone picking it up in 2030 will understand what you meant? 

Humans have been wrestling with versions of this problem for a very long time. We have placed objects in tombs, foundations and buildings, associated them with people we loved or admired, and left behind the everyday things from which later generations have tried to understand us. Sometimes we deliberately tried to communicate with the future.

 Time Capsules 

For the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, one of the great industrial and technology companies of its day, created an extraordinarily ambitious box.  It was designed to remain buried for 5,000 years. George Pendray, of Westinghouse, gave it the name that stuck: the “time capsule”. Its creators tried to preserve something of the material and intellectual life of their age. There was an enormous quantity of information, but ordinary objects too: a fountain pen, textiles, manufactured goods and other bits and pieces of contemporary life. 

What do we send? 

Thirty years later, Japan took the idea even further. For Expo ’70 in Osaka, two identical capsules were created containing 2,000+ objects and records representing contemporary culture. One is intended to remain sealed until 6970. Its twin was first opened in 2000 and is checked every hundred years for preservation. Five thousand years is quite a feedback loop! 

But both experiments expose the same wonderfully impossible problem. However carefully you choose, you cannot control what the future will find significant. 

History has a habit of becoming fascinated by things their owners regarded as completely unremarkable: a shopping receipt, a child’s toy, a train ticket, a scribbled note. A grand statement may survive, but the mundane object beside it may eventually tell us much more about how people lived. And objects do not explain themselves. 

John Berger put it wonderfully simply in Ways of Seeing: 

“The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.” 

There is the person who chooses an object and the world in which they choose it. Then there is the person who encounters it later, bringing different knowledge, assumptions, technologies and experiences. The object may remain the same; the world looking at it has changed. Which is where this becomes particularly interesting for learning. 

What represents learning in 2026? 

Forget 5,000 years. Let us try four.  

Looking backwards four years, to 2022. How much of what we now routinely do in our professional lives did we do in quite the same way then? How did we search, write, translate, design learning, prepare presentations, assess students or find answers? 

Now turn around and look four years in the other direction. 

What currently seems extraordinary that might be utterly unremarkable by 2030? 

AI has made that question particularly compelling because we are surrounded by predictions. We forecast what AI will do to universities, teachers, students, assessment, jobs and knowledge itself. Some of those forecasts will prove useful. Others will undoubtedly look entertaining in retrospect. 

But there is another way of engaging with the future. Instead of asking only, “What will 2030 be like?”, we can also ask “What would we like 2030 to know about us?” 

That changes the exercise. We stop trying only to predict what might happen and start making choices about what matters.  

From forecasting to forwarding 

This connects with the field of experiential futures. Stuart Candy and others have used objects, artefacts and experiences to make futures tangible: something people can encounter and respond to rather than leaving the future safely contained in forecasts, scenarios and PowerPoint slides. 

The objects matter because choosing and encountering them provokes questions. What represents us? What matters enough to keep? What do we think somebody in the future needs to understand? And what might they completely misunderstand? 

Generating interpretations of education futures is becoming astonishingly easy. Deciding which we want, what we value and how to harness them for the good of learning remains human problems.  

Perhaps, then, alongside all our forecasting, we could do a little more forwarding. 

Practising forwarding  

Which brings me back to my pebble. At OEB26 in Berlin this December, we are going to create our own time capsule. OEB gives us an unusual opportunity. Our box will not represent one university, company, city or even one country. Its contents will come from us: an international community involved in learning, bringing different educational cultures, languages, technologies, experiences and expectations together at our special, particular moment. And quite a moment! 

We invite delegates to contribute one small object that says something about learning in 2026. Small is important. It does not have to be expensive, impressive or digital. We will ask you to tell us why you chose it. I would like to record some of those explanations too, so the future gets not just the object but a little of the voice that sent it. And there is one more question. How confident are you that your object — and what you think it represents — will still make sense in 2030? 

Then we will close the box and wait. Four years is hardly geological time. It is not even very ambitious by time-capsule standards. But in learning and technology, four years may be quite enough. 

When the Capsule is opened in 2030, perhaps something that seemed to embody the AI revolution in 2026 will already look quaint. Perhaps something apparently trivial will turn out to matter enormously. Perhaps somebody will pick up an object whose meaning seemed completely obvious to its contributor and wonder what we were thinking. 

As for me, I will put in my white Costa Blanca pebble. And, after this exceptionally hot Spanish summer, my Factor 50. One represents a journey of millions of years. The other may say rather more about 2026 than I currently realise.  

Invitation  

What can you contribute?  Join us at OEB in Berlin at 16.00 on Friday 4 December. Start thinking about it now. Or choose something from the conference. Bring one small object that says something about learning in 2026 — and be prepared to send it forward. If you cannot be there this year- why not try it for yourself, your company, your students? 

Professor Salmon is a member of OEB26’s Global Council and is dedicated to transforming education –helping institutions, companies, educators, and learners embrace new possibilities with success, growth, confidence, and creativity. 

Written for OEB 2026 by Gilly Salmon.

References 

Berger, J. (1972), Ways of Seeing. London: BBC/Penguin. 

Candy, S. & Dunagan, J. (2017), “Designing an experiential scenario: The People Who Vanished”, Futures, 86, 136–153. 

Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company (1938), The Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy, New York World’s Fair 1939. 

Time Capsule EXPO ’70, Osaka.