FOUNDATION: A game of not-knowings
26/8/2025 ☼ not-knowing ☼ experience ☼ risk ☼ uncertainty
What if you could experience what it’s like to make decisions when the actions and outcomes available to you are truly uncertain? That’s what FOUNDATION, a new prototype interactive exhibit at MOD., invites you to explore.
FOUNDATION is a multi-player construction game where participants work together to make the best foundation for future players to build the tallest structures possible. But: When you start playing, you don’t know what building materials will be available, what rules you’ll need to follow, or what foundation previous players have left behind. You discover these things by experimenting, building, and creating as you go.
The exhibit is designed to let players experience two specific types of uncertainty that we often encounter in real life but rarely recognize: not-knowing what actions you can take, and not-knowing what outcomes you might achieve.
These aren’t like flipping a coin where you know all the possible results — they’re situations where the actions and outcomes that are possible emerge only through exploration and experimentation.
Any player can change the rules during the game, and anyone can deconstruct existing structures to rebuild them better or differently. (Discarded rules move to a different board, so future players can choose to reactivate them.) This means new possibilities appear that didn’t exist before, much like how each generation inherits structures, resources, rules, and ideas from those who came before — then decides what to keep, tear down, build from scratch, or bring back into circulation.
The exhibit is designed to help people recognize when they’re dealing with genuine uncertainty rather than calculable risk. Too often, we try to treat complex life decisions — like choosing a career — as if they’re optimization problems that can be solved with the right calculations. But many of our most important decisions involve navigating true uncertainty: Unknowns that can’t be reduced to probability calculations.
FOUNDATION grew out of my 15-year research programme on uncertainty and not-knowing, and was developed in collaboration with the team at MOD., researchers from UniSA and the University of Adelaide, and South Australia’s futures and foresight communities. The exhibit builds on mechanisms that were developed during a multidisciplinary workshop on strategies for creating different types of not-knowing on-demand — during which we collectively realised that designing games that let players experience true uncertainty (rather than just risk) is really hard.
Visit details
FOUNDATION is open in the MOD. Studio until Saturday, August 30, 2025. The exhibit is designed for ages 12 and up, with particular focus on participants aged 15-25.
MOD. is located in the Bradley Building, University of South Australia (North Terrace at Morphett Street), Adelaide SA 5000. Open 10am-5pm, Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is free. Get directions here or visit mod.org.au for more information.
Thanks and acknowledgments
Thanks to the team at MOD. and participants in the workshop on not-knowing mechanisms, but very special thanks to Daniel Lawrance, Dylan DeLosAngeles, Brooke Ferguson, and Lisa Bailey for all they did to get this off the ground.
For the last few years, I’ve been wrestling with the practical challenges of meaning-making in our increasingly AI-saturated world, developing frameworks for how humans can work effectively alongside these powerful tools while preserving the meaning-making work that is the irreplaceably human part of the reasoning we do. I’ve published this as a short series of essays on meaning-making as a valuable but overlooked lens for understanding and using AI tools
I’ve also been working on turning discomfort into something productive. idk is the first of these tools for productive discomfort.
And I’ve spent the last 15 years investigating how organisations can succeed in uncertain times. The Uncertainty Mindset is my book about how to design organisations that thrive in uncertainty and can clearly distinguish it from risk.