VERGE Futures Framework

The VERGE framework is a general-practice scanning ontology developed by foresight practitioners Richard Lum and Michele Bowman to organize signals of change and stimulate ideation across six fundamental domains of human experience: Define, Relate, Connect, Create, Consume, and Destroy. Rather than sorting scanning material by the conventional STEEP categories — social, technological, economic, environmental, political — VERGE organizes it by the basic ways people make sense of and act in the world: how we define reality and meaning, relate to one another, connect across distance, create and produce, consume and use, and dispose of or destroy. This human-centered ontology is designed to surface changes and cross-domain interactions that category-based taxonomies tend to fragment or miss. Catalogued among the scanning and ideation methods of the field, VERGE serves both as a way to file environmental-scanning hits and as a generative lens for thinking through the implications of change.