The Malkovich Principle

A few weeks back, I was invited to be a critical friend on a futures project by Paul Graham Raven & Keri Facer. The artefact in the centre, the central vehicle to invite people into this world, was a newspaper.

Newspapers are, of course, a brilliant container for giving people just enough context of a complex other world. They are (still) a familiar form of media for people who understand intuitively that they are holding a compressed subsection of a culture. It is not intended to be a particularly deep dive into one particular aspect of a world, but a glanceable, loosely-connected sweep of the pressing matters in a culture today.

Over the course of the day, the wider research group were invited to create various types of different content which would appear in the newspaper; news items and articles, puzzles, weather reports, and so on and so forth.

One of the things I was helping think about was just how readers should encounter this newspaper, and therefore this world. This is when I started talking about what I’m now calling The Malkovich Principle, directly lifted from the film Being John Malkovich.

N.B. Plot summary here, but I feel anyone who has read this far on this blog knows what it is…

Why might you want a Malkovich then?

If you (from this world) hold the paper (from that world), then from the fingers up, you are knowing holding it as a futures exercise.

You will read it peering through the cracks in its construction, like watching Penn & Teller trick in a see-through box. And that is not really what it is for.

Instead, give people a Malkovich to slip into. A door in the back of the head of somebody else’s head. Through their eyes you will wander through the words and pictures, their fingers flicking through the pages to find the world that makes sense to them, not you.

This, in hindsight, is not unlike an exercise Elisabet Rosello ran as part of this recent summer’s IED Innovation & Future thinking course.

As a way of demonstrating a participatory futures method, she prepared a set of different personas from three different groups.

We each were given a character to inhabit briefly, then in discussion with our peers (citizens, corporate or government) understood our connections within different groups, before finally being brought into a ‘public forum’ where we collectively talked about out interests. It worked really well.

In short, Elisabet crafted a set of Malkovichs for the cohort to inhabit in a given future scenario. And you could do much worse in thinking about doing that with other futures materials like a newspaper.

The one thing you need to watch out for is Malkovich Malkovich – you can’t drop someone into themselves essentially.

An education policymaker is perhaps too close to a Head Teacher to usefully wander around the world looking for something different. All they’ll hear is Malkovich Malkovich.

And nobody needs to see that.