The Futures We Create

• Quick look

  ✹ Project:The Futures We Create is a collaborative project strengthening the public’s ability to be reflective, critical and hopeful about the future, via the support of creative and imagination practices.

  ✦ Funding: Taike

  ✦ Role: Designer, researcher, facilitator

  ✦ Main collaborators:Andrea Gilly, Sara D’Angelo (both of the Falay Collective)

  ✦ Other collaborators: Sanni Saarimäki (Tunne Ry) and Ekata Theatre

  ✦ Year: 2024

• Process

  The project addresses the following key research questions:

  1. How can creative cultural  practices transfer futures thinking skills and unlock critical futures imagination with a diverse citizen audience?

  2. How can more distributed futures skills shift dominant societal narratives of climate futures?

  3. How can creative practice and new climate future narratives build agency in individuals and enable climate action?

  These questions were explored through a series of iterative workshops that combined futures thinking approaches, collective imagination techniques and embodied methods.

  Workshops were held across Summer and Autumn 2024, with groups such as Elokapina, and Mitäs Mitäs Mitäs festival.

• Impact

  Through the exploratory process we developed a series of tools and approaches for making futures thinking more accessible, drawing on various techniques from creative practice, including:

  • An embodied practice for longing

  • A time travel visualisation

  • A method for collective improvised storytelling

  With psychologically informed advice from Sanni Saarimäki (Tunne Ry), an important element of the workshops was to build a safe container for exploring and facing difficult emotions. However, the later stages of the workshop were carefully designed to transform these paralysing feelings into agency and hopefulness for the future, looking towards a future that feels both positive and attainable. 

  Participants of the workshops reported feeling hopeful and inspired to stay active in climate/futures work, and especially commented on the power of dreaming about a hopeful future collectively with others.