Abstract
The paper summarizes the results of a combined research and workshop project focussing on an exploration of the role of literary, artistic and media utopias within societal discourses about the development of technology and their interaction with scientific approaches to the future.
Focusing on the genre of science fiction it shows that the design of negative (dystopian) and positive (eutopian) scenarios in its works not only represent a valid examination of futures but have a significant impact on their shaping as well. Taking up movements and moods within society, they represent soft factors that are as driving forces as effective and consequential as hard factors. Thus, they offer complementary insights that an analysis of the hard rational-scientific, political and economic factors and their consequences for the future cannot provide.
Literary, artistic and media utopias enter moreover into a complex interaction with science in general and futures research in particular (particularly as well with technology assessment, science and technology studies and similar interdisciplinary future-oriented academic endeavors).
Against this background it becomes evident that literary approaches to the future can have an important (indirect mediating) impact on the processes shaping techno-scientific and industrial developments. Furthermore, they seem to exert a decisive influence on their social acceptance and on the framing of public funding programs that are not only promoting R&D projects, but are also trying to direct the paths of innovation.