Why Organize a Future Arts School Lab?

Future Arts School Labs help arts universities anticipate futures: prepare for incoming futures, plan actions to shape futures, consider novelty for the present (Miller, 2018), and take steps to build preferred futures for higher arts education. They are designed for imagining alternative futures, strategic planning, and curriculum development. Futures thinking has the utmost relevance to higher arts education because it helps explicate and understand forces shaping the future development of higher education systems, individual arts universities, arts ecosystems, careers in the arts, communities, and, more generally, society. In increasingly rapid change, growing complexity, and uncertainty, arts universities and their educational programmes benefit from futures thinking. It helps them scan possible future horizons, identify future opportunities, threats, and preferred alternatives, find ways to adapt to change and disrupt instead of being disrupted, and use imagination and arts-based approaches to enrich futures thinking.