A Spark of Good Life
Summary
Can you imagine a good life for yourself, your neighbor, and the entire planet? Can you imagine people coming together with this premise, sharing their visions, and taking action toward a better, more sustainable future?
We collaborated with Sitra’s ‘Nature and Daily Life’ team in the unique project using ‘good life’ as an entryway to engage the Finnish public in sustainable behaviors, societal change, and futures thinking. The project resulted in a toolbox with several beginner-friendly and engaging imagination tools – tested and co-designed with users.
How would your sustainable good life look like?
A future vision created by a group of developer group participants.
The challenge
To move toward a good and sustainable life, both as a society and as individuals, we must first envision it. Positive images of a sustainable future create hope, guide our actions, and unite us around shared dreams and values. This requires questioning our current beliefs about what a good life and sustainability mean. Could our vision of a good life also mean a sustainable life – a life that is good for everyone?
However, the resources for imagination haven't been equally accessible. By including diverse voices in future visioning, we enhance our collective ability to build a fair and desirable future.
The project had three main goals:
Creating and sharing new narratives about good life, success, and well-being.
Distributing imagination skills and capacities, and creating routes and connections for collective imagination.
Establishing actionable steps towards the good life and planetary well-being at personal, societal, material, and non-material levels.
Our challenge was to build an engaging imagination toolbox for a sustainable future, inviting the Finnish public to participate.
Process
during 9 months the project engaged a developer group of 30 people, their communities, and a wider audience of people in Finland to test and co-design the imagination tools.
To support sustainable futures imagination, we created a conceptual framework through the iterative process, to combine the project themes, good life, sustainability, and futures imagination.
The Developer group shared their own experiences with imagination tools, tested and participated in co-designing the tools for the toolbox during a series of workshops.
“Excellently facilitated workshops! The work was mind-expanding and the space was safe. It was interesting to spend a full day in a workshop and not feel tired afterward – even if the work was socially and intellectually challenging!”
“The workshop process gave me much more than I expected. Networking, eye-opening discussions from different perspectives, the meaning of social sustainability, and the real impact of imagination. The process was also valuable for strengthening my work as an entrepreneur”
A wider audience was reached through Good Life Pop-ups, where the tool and toolbox concepts were tested.
Outcome
The toolbox ‘Sparkle of Good Life’ or ‘Hyvän elämän kipinä’ includes a website and an online imagination gallery for open access to tools and visions.
The toolbox is versatile and can be used in multiple contexts, such as schools, workplaces, and with friends and family. It aims to build collective and personal agency, gain clarity, or simply provide a platform for exploring new ideas. To cater to different target groups, the final tools include methods to enhance imaginative capacities, distribute imagination and future skills, and build and share visions—all packaged in gamified and experiential ways. These tools feature visual materials and audio to support imagination, reach new target groups, and create an emotional experience for users.
Additionally, as creating a space for important discussions and connecting with others was a key aspect of the project, the toolbox includes communal imagination experiences that anyone can host with ready-made supportive materials, and a virtual space where users can view others' visions and share their own.
The final toolbox will be published by Sitra in autumn 2024.
Keep updated on the toolbox’s status on Sitra’s website, and by ordering Sitra’s Sustainability Solutions newsletter.
The toolbox contains tools suitable for various target groups and contexts, aimed at building capacities, developing skills, and setting collective visions and actions.
Interested in the power of imagination or creating routes for more people to contribute to our shared futures?
Contact person
Zeynep Falay von Flittner
zeynep@falayconsulting.com
