Futures studies is an interdisciplinary field, studying yesterday's and today's changes, and aggregating and analyzing
both lay and professional strategies and opinions with respect to tomorrow. It includes analyzing the sources,
patterns, and causes of change and stability in an attempt to develop foresight and to map possible futures. Around
the world the field is variously referred to as futures studies, strategic foresight, futuristics, futures thinking,
futuring, futurology, and futurism. Futures studies and strategic foresight are the academic field's most commonly
used terms in the English-speaking world.
Foresight may be the oldest term for the field. In a 1932 BBC broadcast the visionary author H.G. Wells called for
the establishment of "Departments and Professors of Foresight", foreshadowing the development of modern
academic futures studies by approximately 40 years.[1] Thirty years earlier, he had argued that the future could be
known scientifically in The Discovery of the Future, a 1902 lecture to the Royal Institution. "Futurology" is a term
common in encyclopedias, though it is used almost exclusively by nonpractitioners today, at least in the
English-speaking world. "Futurology" is defined as the "study of the future."[2] The term was coined by German
professor Ossip K. Flechtheim[citation needed] in the mid-1940s, who proposed it as a new branch of knowledge that
would include a new science of probability. This term may have fallen from favor in recent decades because modern
practitioners stress the importance of alternative and plural futures, rather than one monolithic future, and the
limitations of prediction and probability, versus the creation of possible and preferable futures.[citation needed]
Three factors usually distinguish futures studies from the research conducted by other disciplines (although all of
these disciplines overlap, to differing degrees). First, futures studies often examines not only possible but also
probable, preferable, and "wild card" futures. Second, futures studies typically attempts to gain a holistic or systemic