The Futures We Create
“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.
Where did this project come from?
We are facing and experiencing multiple interconnected crises: a state of environmental, social, economic and political turmoil. Hollywood movies, social media, tv documentaries and news coverage present us with a paralysing and apocalyptic picture of both today and our future, contrasted only with unattainable and inequitable technological utopias. As we engage with these frightening narratives, individual emotions such as guilt, anger, frustration, or combined webs of emotions experienced as grief and hopeless disengagement emerge. Though completely normal and rational responses to the polycrisis, these “eco-emotions” (known also as eco-anxiety and climate grief, read more about climate emotions here) are often buried, leaving us feeling disconnected, separate and polarised. This collective anxiety and fear for the future is palpable — we’re feeling a disengagement in conversations with friends, colleagues and clients, and a fizzling out of hopeful, imaginative and exploratory narratives of the future.
Instead of ignoring or attempting to fix these difficult emotions, psychological research has positioned the need to confront, experience and accept them in order to reimagine our responses and foster agency and resilience. In sharing collective experiences of how eco-emotions feel and impact us, for example, we can build community and relate to each other’s experiences. When we name and process these emotions, the energy that they hold can be redirected, and a sense of agency can emerge. In turn, acknowledging and facing these emotions can lead to resilience and a preparedness to face future challenges. We are, however, lacking safe spaces, communities and environments where these emotions can be shared and processed.
What we‘ve done so far
The Futures We Create is a project that emerged in response to this entangled crisis of environment, society, culture, hope and imagination, and the need to face the resulting emotions. The project set out to explore how our creative backgrounds and facilitation skills could create participatory, playful and accessible spaces that invite new imaginations of hopeful yet realistic possibilities and in turn foster agency, hope and a revitalised sense of community in the face of the polycrisis. With support from licensed psychologist and eco-emotions researcher Sanni Saarimäki from Tunne Ry, and physical theatre and embodied practitioners Ekata Theatre, our iterative design process has focused on designing a creative yet safe space that takes care of participants and appropriately manages the boundaries of exploring these complex and difficult emotions.
The project also builds on the idea that creative and artistic practices can play active roles in stimulating action towards social and ecological sustainability. Our project objective is that through futures thinking practices, we can equip individuals and communities with knowledge that contributes to building resilience, hope and agency for the future.
Through the project, we have designed, prototyped and iteratively tested a series of tools and approaches that support engagement with the full spectrum of emotions resulting from conversations about the future. Stitched together into a 2.5–3 hour workshop, these tools have been designed as an experiential intervention for agency and resilience in the face of the polycrisis. These workshops, held in Summer and Autumn 2024, have explored how to welcome these complex emotions and recognise the potential value and energy in every emotional response.
Our ideas in action
Below, we share a handful of the tools we have been developing, and continue to develop in the ongoing stages of the project.
Embodied Longing
The complex times in which we live, call for practices that cultivate resilience and can ground us as we navigate uncertainty. One way to foster this resilience is through embodied practices that connect us with the sensations in our body and contribute self-regulation of our nervous system. We find these practices important, as they create a feeling of safety from which creativity and imagination can emerge.
To support this journey, we created a guided ‘bodyfulness’ (using the whole body rather than just the mind as in mindfulness) exercise that helps participants check in, explore different sensations in their bodies, and connect with their longing for the future. The experience is supported by music and begins with a moment to settle in. Then, participants are invited to tune into how their bodies feel in response to the state of the world, allowing their emotions, sensations, and thoughts to emerge. We encourage participants to explore the emotions through movement, breath, or stillness. After this, participants are invited to connect to their longing; feeling where it manifests in their body and imagining what this longing is. Longing is a complex emotion evoking a diverse range of qualities and sensations in the body.
After the practice, we invite participants to reflect on what emerged by journaling, and then we invite them to share their longing with a partner. This is important because it allows the embodied exploration to be verbalised, which is a way to understand our emotions, but also relate to one another, as we realise that our longings and emotions are not as unique, but often shared.
Imagination
Bell Hooks’ quote reminds us that, “what we cannot imagine cannot come into being”. We have centred imagination in our work, as a way to support participants in envisioning or creating a different narrative of the future for themselves. We have taken inspiration from Jane McGonigal, a games researcher and futurist, who works in understanding the potential of imagining the future through simulations, as a way to learn and anticipate future events. We have specifically drawn inspiration from Episodic Future Thinking which is a mental time travelling practice that consists of imagining a future as vivid as possible, as a way to train our minds, play with what we believe to be possible, envision that which we desire as well as what we don’t desire, and think about how what we do today might affect or create that future we envisioned.
Inspired by this, we invite participants to travel to a future 10 years from now. This future we time travel to, is a future of climate justice, where governments, companies and civil society have worked together to implement solutions, adapt to and mitigate climate change. It is not an utopia, as the impacts are already present and visible, but we are learning to adapt in creative ways, while we listen to scientists’ warnings and diligently implement their recommendations. The goal of this imagination exercise is to solidify the idea that a positive future in which climate change is addressed, is possible.
After this time travel, we invite participants to write a postcard from the future, to the present moment, where they capture the feelings of the future, or their thoughts after experiencing this future. This postcard works as a reminder of this glimpse of a hopeful realistic future that participants can take with them and use as a reminder of the workshop process.
Collective storybuilding
To complement our individual imagination exercise, we bring our pluriversal future scenarios to life by creating a shared story of the future — a mosaic of the group’s individual hopeful visions, stitched together into a collective story that we build together. This collective story building exercise creates a rich picture of the future where all participants have input.
Learning from improvisation techniques this method takes a “Yes, and…” approach to imagining a shared future. We start with an opening sentence, “The year is 2035 and I see…”, and ask participants to bring elements, senses, memories and ideas from their individually imagined futures, by continuing the sentence and building a story together. To add elements of realism and build on the richness of the story, we as facilitators ask occasional “What If” questions to give more clarity and bring this story to life.
Finally, we ask the question — what if this was real? How did we get there? This ends the exercise with a concrete imagination of the steps needed to take us from our present reality towards our imagined hopeful future. After we conclude, we read the future story back to the group, and reflect on what we built together. You can listen to some of the stories we collectively built below:
What’s next
The first stages of this project have been led by a culture of emergence and exploration. In this process, several discussion points have surfaced around democratising imagination and pluriversal futures work; supporting participants to face their emotions for the future; and broadening the conversation around the future beyond utopian and dystopian visions. We’ve touched on these topics in our work, but haven’t been able to fully integrate them, due to a lack of knowledge, a language barrier, the settings in which the workshop has been hosted, or maybe due to its explorative and iterative nature.
Moreover, we recognise the value in artistic collaboration with science and other disciplines, for this project. Which is why we have sought the expertise and advice from Tunne Ry and Ekata theatre. In the future, we seek to continue building networks and collaborating closely with our advisors, and with other interested people with whom this thinking resonates.
We continue to integrate these perspectives more intentionally, in conversations, tool development and facilitation, as The Futures We Create takes on new shapes. If you’d like to join the conversation, collaborate, give feedback or reach out, we are open to cross-pollinations and emergent forms of collaboration.
Meet the team behind the project
Learn more about the working group behind The Futures We Create and our motivations for this project.
Andrea Gilly, who started the project in 2020
“I started thinking about the narratives we have about the world, and how these are encouraging more dystopian ideas of the future. I started working on The Futures We Create as a way to research on eco-emotions & their impact, but also as a means to build agency for the future. For me this project is a way to create new narratives of futures that are hopeful and worth striving for, it is not too late. I also believe that this project becomes richer through collaborations, as more people join and expand the thinking of what is possible”
Sara D’Angelo, who joined the project in 2023
“ I’m interested in how embodiment practices combined with future thinking methods can help unlock critical future imagination with a diverse citizen audience. Specifically, I’m curious about how these practices can connect people with their individual and collective longing for the future, the inherent force of existence propelling us, and how to use longing as a driver for change. Furthermore, I’m eager to understand how this connection can foster agency, shift dominant societal narratives, and enable climate action.”
Savannah Vize, who joined the project in 2023
“Through my MA in Creative Sustainability and my thesis, I became really interested in the necessity of play and joy in how we navigate difficult topics like the climate crisis. Without moments of lightness or being able to imagine alternative futures, we risk continuing on the same path that brought us here in the first place. I hope that through this project we can create spaces for play and joy, to reignite our imaginations for more hopeful futures for people and planet.”
This project was made possible by Taike, thank you for believing in our idea.
