PROJECT CONTEXTUAL FUTURES - NOW

It is important during the next few years that a serious effort be made to project scenarios descriptive of alternative lines of evolving conditions within selected social fields, such as life within a nation or a well established institution. An earlier article offered a theory that asserts a very tight linkage between any act of choosing and the chooser's image of the relevant context. This article makes the following points: (1) policy choices usually impact the future, so images of future contexts are needed in policy selection and in making assumptions within analytical policy evaluations; (2) a futures projection should possess certain attributes if it is to induce similar images of context in the minds of its users, and various methods of futures projection are evaluated against those criteria; (3) these matters are especially urgent now.