The Futures We Create
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Proactive Systems Change Projects
Tags: People, Futures thinking, Collective imagination
Funder: Taike
Collaborators: Tunne ry & Ekata Theatre
Summary
How can creative cultural practices transfer futures thinking skills and unlock critical futures imagination with a diverse public audience? How can more distributed futures skills shift dominant societal narratives of climate futures? How can creative practice and new climate future narratives build agency in individuals and enable climate action?
"The Futures We Create" is a collaborative project led by Andrea Gilly, Savannah Vize, and Sara D’Angelo, strengthening the public’s ability to be reflective, critical and hopeful about the future, via the support of creative and imagination practices. Funded by Taike, the project began in 2023 and continued until Autumn 2024.
“We are all able participants in creating our future.”
Process
This project took an exploratory and iterative approach, building creative approaches and tools which were then tested in a series of different public workshops across Summer 2024 in Helsinki.
Working with Tunne Ry (a mental health organisation in Finland exploring eco-emotions) we created a process designed to support participants to face the overwhelming emotions of grief, anxiety, longing and disconnect stemming from the environmental and interconnecting crises.
We explored approaches from collective imagination and imagination activism, embodied knowledge, improvisation and storytelling, and futures thinking, to build a number of different tools for this process, including:
Embodied longing: a guided method for connecting with feelings of longing around the future
Imagination 2035: a collective imagination method for travelling to a hopeful yet realistic future, then returning and writing a postcard from the future
Collective story building: a method borrowing from improvisation techniques to collectively write a shared story of the visited future
Ekata Theatre provided advice in the iteration of this process. Different iterations of these tools were tested in workshops held with Elokapina, Salarakas, Mitäs Mitäs Mitäs festival, Poimu and in an online open workshop.
“There are big and little steps to achieve a positive future. All of them matter. Sometimes power is in the big group, sometimes time and rest help to create something new.”
“The workshop steps and path gave real examples to guide thoughts into practical, positive and open ways and roles!”
Outcome
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.
You can find some of the tools shared as open source resources in our corresponding blog here, as well as a collection of the co-written stories of the future developed during the workshops.
“It helped me avoid dystopian thinking and it was fruitful to engage with imagining possibilities.”
This project was made possible by Taike
Interested in the power of imagination or creating routes for more people to contribute to our shared futures?
Contact person
Savannah Vize
savannah@falayconsulting.com
