This Tuesday I was invited to read a guest lecture to the students of the Breda Academy of Leisure (part of the NHTV, Breda University of Applied Science). The title of the lecture was ‘The Future of Leisure in Eindhoven’, but it was about the content but rather about the methods to think about and tools to explore these possible futures. It was aimed to help students in making their assignments and learn the methodology, not certain conclusions and findings.
As often with the lectures of the futures, ‘the future happened to be different’.
This is one of the slides I usually use to illustrate the concept of ‘future horizons’:
And this is how the road to Breda looked at this morning:
Everything that could go wrong on the way, went wrong: I was stuck in a traffic for 1,5 hours, then went to the wrong building, then on a way to the right one got into the construction site etc. Â But eventually I did manage to find the place, and the room, and even the students! I was told by Olaf Ernst, who was a host of the lecture, that the student turnaround was pretty impressive:
As always, I tried to make the talk more interactive, and even included some exercise (on ‘aligning futures’); it was a bit squeezed because of the lack of time (caused my delay), but at the end it went pretty well, and I hope that students got a point or two from my story:
The slides can be found on Issuu (Thinking about and Making of) The Futures of Leisure in Eindhoven.
After the talk I had a chance to walk through the building – it’s not big, and pretty homey, and has quite a distinctive atmosphere (perhaps due to interesting lighting/interrior design):
Finally I met with Marco Bevolo, who actually introduced me to Olaf and was instrumental in making this guest lecture happened (thanks again!) I even stopped shortly at his own class, and we talked briefly with the students – may be not the last time, since I could come to their presentations one day soon, too:
