This item was originally published at ASU News.
Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, Intel and the Society for Science & the Public are proud to announce the winners of their competition, “The Future – Powered by Fiction.” The competition, which ran from May through December 2013, challenged young people ages 13-25 from all over the world to share their visions for possible futures inspired by real science and technology. “The Future – Powered by Fiction” was truly global in scope: the 274 total submissions include stories from 15 different countries and 36 U.S. states.
The competition is part of Tomorrow Project USA, an ongoing collaboration among the Center for Science and the Imagination, Intel and the Society for Science & the Public, that uses competitions and other tools to drive critical, creative, fact-based conversations about possible futures.
The winners were originally announced by Intel futurist Brian David Johnson on a live Google Hangout from the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles on May 14.
“In an increasingly complex world, we need to arm students with new tools for synthesizing enormous amounts of information,” says Ed Finn, director of the Center for Science and the Imagination and assistant professor in ASU’s School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the Department of English. “Storytelling is a powerful method for taking information from a variety of sources, imbuing it with human significance and making meaning from it. The Tomorrow Project [provides the] opportunity for students to use storytelling to explore the future as a spectrum of possibilities and consider the potential consequences of the rapid and accelerating changes we’re seeing in science and technology.”
Ten winners were selected to receive a $1,000 prize from the Intel Foundation and to have their work published in an anthology, “The Future – Powered by Fiction,” to be released in summer 2014. The winners represent three different countries and eight U.S. states:
• Michael Arteaga, Toronto, Canada, “The Last Allocation”
• Diya Basrai, California, U.S., “Descent”
• Carlos Duralde, Georgia, U.S., “Lost Dreams”
• Aliah Eberting, Utah, U.S., “A Flavorful Future”
• Christine Ann Hurd, Texas, U.S., “And the Tapestry of Starts Curled Up To Reveal the Face of God”
• Alycia McCreary, Kentucky, U.S., “Parenthood Planned”
• Natalie Petit, Ohio, U.S., “A Toothache for the Truth”
• Hannah Reese, North Carolina, U.S., “Family Feast”
• Claire Spackman, Hong Kong, “The Genes of Tomorrow”
• Jorge Tenorio, Arizona, U.S., “LifeTime”
Tenorio is an ASU graduate student and a research analyst at ASU’s Office of University Initiatives.
In addition to the ten $1,000 prizewinners, 33 additional stories will be published in a series of three anthologies to be released throughout 2014 and 2015. To see the full list of winners, visit: http://isef.tomorrow-projects.com/results/.
The winners were selected by an editorial board of scholars, journalists, artists and futurists, chaired by Ed Finn and G. Pascal Zachary, professor of practice at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes.
Bryan Walsh, senior writer for TIME magazine and a member of the editorial board, said of the winning entries: “The stories I was fortunate enough to judge showed a wonderful imaginative sense, an ability to use fiction to explore the shape of our future.”
All of the anthologies published in 2014 and 2015 will be free to download and share from the Center for Science and the Imagination and Tomorrow Project USA.