Joseph Voros

Not long after I started working at Swinburne back in 2000, I of course ransacked all the early issues of Futures (hi Ted!) I could get my hands onto in order to get my head into the space of Futures Studies. Luckily, Swinburne had quite a stash. One of the pieces I found — and which strongly influenced my later direction as a researcher — was the article: Gordon, Theodore J. 1971. ‘Future of Futurists’. Futures 3(4):322–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(71)90051-6. In particular, I quote from the second-last paragraph: “The field also needs … theoreticians who are to the methodologists as ‘basic’ scientists are to their ‘applied’ colleagues, searching for the paradigms of the future”. So, yes, a prize commemorating TG’s contributions to the field as an applied futurist, but also a twin prize enacting his view that we also need theoreticians, which was the primary identity I chose to follow, per his observation.