Virtual flying carpets and digital disaster rooms: Towards a critical analysis of immersive speculative environments in Museums of the Future

Around the world we are seeing the emergence of new institutions and organisations offering immersive speculative environments which deploy virtual and mixed realities to give participants a ‘live experience’ of the future. Often (but not exclusively) found in an emerging network of ‘museums of the future’, the distinctive affordances of these mixed reality environments have yet to be fully grasped in terms of their implications for public participation in futures thinking and futures-making. Given the complex sociodigital features of these environments, the paper proposes a novel conceptual framework for interdisciplinary study. This draws on an integrative literature review of engineering, design education, humanities and psychology fields already engaging with the implications of immersive speculative environments. This review draws out the technological, textual, interventionist, political-economic and critical pedagogical questions these raise. It then puts this work into dialogue with the futures education literature and proposes critical lines of inquiry for Futures Studies. The paper argues that, as corporate and state actors increasingly play a significant role in the design and powerful immersive speculative environments, there is an important role for Futures Studies to critically examine the contribution (or otherwise) of these environments to the public imagination and making of futures. In particular, it argues that urgent attention is required to questions of authorship, affordances, audiences, agency and accumulation • Discusses the rise of digitally enabled immersive speculative environments as tools for public education in ‘museums of the future’ • Describes the convergence of public concerns about the future, technological uncertainties and digital and immersive speculative environments • Identifies disciplinary and analytical perspectives currently shaping studies of immersive environments and summarises the research questions that these generate • Proposes five transdisciplinary lines of inquiry to deepen examination of these environments: affordances, authorship, audiences, accumulation, and agency • Contributes a versatile research framework which can be used to develop critical inquiry in Futures studies, into how cultural institutions deploy immersive speculative environments to promote futures literacies.