Value-Based Modelling of Aspirational Futures in Scenario Development in Hybrid and Virtual Environments

This paper approaches the concept of ‘aspirational futures’ in terms of anticipatory democracy research methodology based on scenario development (Bishop et al., 2018) with anticipatory modelling systems employed in value-based modelling and simulation of democratic political organization and democratic political culture (Voinea, 2021, 2022, 2025). This approach is aimed at providing a research framework for understanding and explaining the community design of desirable futures in hybrid and virtual social environments. It enhances the view that communities face the challenge of understanding their world by co-creating its meaning in contexts which are essentially different from the traditional social world we use to know so far. Coping with such contexts demands worldviews which could require either new, that is, co-created values or new relationships between value set and stable community beliefs, that is, context-adapted relstionships based on meaning co-creation. The design methodology of desirable futures for democratic communities have been mainly understood and explained as based on a combination of scenario development and scenario planning as well as other methodologies which provide for alternatives of deliberation for mid- and long-term future (Bezoldt, ?). However, the modelling and simulation of political systems as well as political cultures based on such methodologies have not been integrated with essential features of hybrid and virtual environments, thus remaining limited to weak anticipative systems rather than being strong anticipatory systems, where the difference between ‘anticipative’ and ‘anticipatory’ systems resides in their internal condition of reflexivity (Leydersdorff and Dubois, ?). By methodologically distinguishing between ‘anticipative’ and ‘anticipatory’ models of political systems as essentially ‘non-reflexive’ and, respectively, ‘reflexive’ artificial systems, this paper provides a modelling approach on how desirable futures is reached by communities as both conceptual and practical image of their living in the hybrid and virtual social environments. The approach employs modelling and simulation experiments which provide support to the idea that the design of ‘desirable futures’ in terms of anticipatory democracy scenario development requires the intertwinning of meaning co-creation and value co-creation processes. The modelling and simulation experiments are performed in two relevant social contexts: (1) community cohesion, and (2) community separation. The case studies make use of a global index of social cohesion as provided by several global data and analytical sources (Bertelsmann Social Cohesion Radar, UNECE, WVS, Gallup World Poll, OECD Social Capital Indicators), and elaborates a global index of community separation based on the same data sources.The experiments provides support to the idea that community cohesion favors the design of desirable futures in terms of a (partially) shared established value set, while the community separation favors the design of desirable futures in terms of meaning and value co-creation, thus addressing both instrumental and intrinsic values. Hybrid and virtual environments which favor an increased degree of community separation make communities emphasize an increased need to understand this context by co-creating meaning and value, and reflexively adapt their value sets.