VERGE Futures Framework

VERGE organizes change into six domains of human activity. Define is how people conceive of and give meaning to reality — ideas, beliefs, language, paradigms. Relate is how people structure their relationships and social organization. Connect is how people and things are linked across distance, including communication and transport technologies. Create is how people design, make, and produce. Consume is how people use, acquire, and experience what is created. Destroy is how people dispose of, dismantle, and end things. Together they aim to cover the fundamental ways humans act in and on the world, providing an activity-based alternative to discipline-based scanning categories.

STEEP and PEST sort signals of change by academic or analytical category — social, technological, economic, environmental, political. VERGE instead sorts them by the dimension of human experience they touch — how we define, relate, connect, create, consume, and destroy. The difference is more than relabeling: because a single human change often spans several STEEP buckets, those taxonomies can fragment it, whereas VERGE's activity-based domains tend to keep related changes together and make the interactions between them visible. VERGE is also explicitly generative, used to walk a topic through all six domains to prompt ideas, where STEEP is more often a passive filing scheme.

It does both, and its generative use is arguably its greater strength. As a filing ontology it sorts scanning signals by the human activity they concern and keeps cross-domain changes together. As a generative lens it is used to deliberately walk a focal topic through Define, Relate, Connect, Create, Consume, and Destroy, asking for each how the topic might reshape that part of human life and what new possibilities or risks follow. This structured six-domain sweep, combined with reading across the domains for tensions and reinforcements, ensures comprehensive coverage and yields implications that feed scenario, visioning, and strategy work.