What happens when 10 people encounter the same unfinished future, imagine what comes next, and then meet one another's interpretations?

At Futures4Europe 2026 in Rome, Recognizing the Future in the Room invites conference attendees to explore this question alongside the participants in an ongoing Emotional Foresight experiment. The workshop will bring short films based on individual continuations into a shared space for viewing, reflection and discussion. 

You do not need to have taken part in the earlier phase to contribute your perspective.

This article shares the thinking behind the experiment and its early observations. The next part happens together in Rome.

Name: Recognizing the Future in the Room, Emotional Foresight through a Group-Based Adaptation of the Resonant Future Self Framework - Iuliana Adina Apostol 

Date: 30.09.2026

Time: 15:30

The same film provides a shared starting point. It does not guarantee a shared future.

What this experiment examines

The experiment asks what changes when a person moves from watching a future to imagining how it continues, and then encounters someone else's version. It connects three things: emotional response, interpretation and perceived possibility for action.

This is the specific role of Emotional Foresight here. Participants encounter a possible future, attend to what it evokes, and explore what happens to that response as they give the future meaning. The analysis follows both their emotional ratings and their explanations of what changed. Hope, fear, uncertainty and resistance all matter; becoming more optimistic is not the criterion for success.

The pilot develops the Resonant Future Self Framework presented in Vienna in 2025 into a group format. Participants supply the interpretations and continuations that make the collective experiment possible.

Why begin with a film?

An earlier pilot at AIMEDIA 2026 in Nice used guided imagination without a seed film. Five researchers took part in individual sessions, then joined fifteen others in a workshop. The twenty researchers spent eight minutes with their eyes closed, listening to meditation music and imagining how it felt to inhabit 2032.

In the five individual accounts, familiar rooms and work routines predominated. AI appeared explicitly in only one scene. In the workshop accounts, family, homes and personal experiences became more prominent, while AI remained peripheral despite its prominence at the conference. These exploratory observations raised a design question: how can we help people imagine beyond an extension of their present?

Rome introduces an unfamiliar shared starting point. The seed film’s themes were drawn from responses to a three-minute poll circulated to all conference participants, grounding the scenario in the futures and emotions respondents described. The 90-second seed film, "Profile Source: Unresolved", depicts a world in which people receive periodically updated Future Profiles. Mara discovers that an apparently personal future image is appearing in other people's profiles too. The film ends without explaining why.

Participants are asked:

“What do you believe is happening, and what happens next?”

The film was designed to leave both the explanation and the emotional response open. The anomaly might evoke curiosity, unease, hope or several feelings at once. Participants can question the system, reinterpret what they have seen or introduce a possibility the film leaves unstated. Its imagery and sound still influence interpretation: ambiguity does not make the stimulus neutral.

Give imagination somewhere unfamiliar to begin, while leaving the meaning open.

What participants have reported so far

One participant described a shift from feeling “depressed and scared” to “optimistic and more at ease.” Another reported feeling “more empowered and hopeful.” A third explained what made a different response possible:

“Before I was hopeless and scared, now I feel hopeful because I tried to find a (literal) backdoor to make futures plural and unpredictable again.”

The backdoor matters. In this account, renewed hope is connected to an imagined opening in a system that had initially felt closed. The participant had introduced a way to act within the scenario.

This gives the experiment a concrete question to pursue: does constructing a continuation change what a person believes is possible, and how does that relate to what they feel?

A change in feeling becomes more informative when we can trace the change in meaning behind it.

The individual trajectories also differ. Some ratings move relatively little; others shift substantially. A group average cannot show all of those differences, and a stable emotional rating does not necessarily mean that nothing changed in a person's interpretation. The maps therefore retain individual responses alongside participants' words.

The Ambivalence Map: how do hope and fear move?

The map follows each participant's hope and fear ratings, both on a 0–6 scale, across the three stages. It allows us to examine changes in each emotion separately, including whether hope increases while fear remains present.

Hope can rise without fear disappearing. A single positivity score would miss that distinction.

The quadrant labels are shorthand. Low hope and low fear, labelled “emotionally distant,” cannot establish distance by themselves: someone could still feel strong curiosity or another emotion.

Norway is at the digital frontier in many areas. However, it needs to keep pace with rapid technological developments and competition, while improving performance in areas where it could catch up. Staying at the frontier requires agility, flexibility and well-co-ordinated digital policies. A national digital strategy can play an important role to ensure the policy framework in place makes the most of digital technologies and data for growth and well-being.

Norway has identified several underlying priorities that will shape the content and structure of its forthcoming national digital strategy: ensuring high-quality information and communications infrastructure; developing the data economy; fostering data protection and information security; increasing the digitalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises; promoting an inclusive digital society in the context of an ageing population; supporting the green transition; and digitalising the public sector. These priorities will help realise Norway’s vision of a sustainable welfare society that safeguards a safe and simple everyday life for citizens and the non-governmental sector, a strengthened business sector and a better and renewed public sector.

Norway’s digital policy landscape comprises relatively more initiatives related to Innovation than the other dimensions of the OECD Going Digital Integrated Policy Framework (the Framework), followed by Society, Access and Use. In terms of performance, Norway outperforms all OECD countries in indicators related to the effective use of digital technologies. It also outperforms the OECD and Nordic averages in societal indicators of digital transformation. Norway is above the OECD average on indicators of Trust and Access, although below the Nordic average. Norway has opportunities to catch up in indicators related to Market openness, Jobs and Innovation where there is the most potential to improve performance.

Recommendations
Key policy recommendations to achieve a more digital, innovative and inclusive Norway are structured around six areas:

Encourage technology adoption and skills development to ensure a more digital-intensive economy and resilient workforce. This involves promoting adoption of digital technologies among small and medium-sized enterprises and empowering people with the skills to succeed in a digital world of work.

Prioritise innovation to create a more digital Norway. This requires encouraging a culture of experimentation and risk taking, reducing regulatory burdens on start-ups and young firms, incentivising venture capital investment and support firms in scaling up, promoting investment in research and development, and harnessing the potential of “GovTech”.

Maximise the potential of data, while maintaining Norway’s strong culture of trust. This includes leveraging Norway’s culture of trust to incentivise data sharing, realising the potential of open government data to drive digital innovation, taking a multifaceted approach to monitoring and addressing cyber risks, and supporting development of data-related skills and infrastructure.

Harness the potential of digital technologies for society. This involves increasing digital inclusion through policies targeted at the groups most in need, discouraging e-waste production and encouraging e-waste recycling.

Prepare for next generation networks and a future of unlimited connectivity everywhere. This entails upgrading fixed and mobile networks to 5G and beyond, closing geographic connectivity divides by focusing on the underserved, fostering competition and reducing red tape, and supporting businesses to improve their connectivity.

Design holistic digital policies within effective governance and monitoring mechanisms. This involves using all dimensions of the Framework to design future digital policies; fostering interministerial and stakeholder co-operation in digital policy design and implementation; monitoring progress using the OECD Going Digital Toolkit as Norway’s national digital dashboard; and strengthening a whole-of-government approach to adoption of digital technologies in the public sector.

Source: OECD - Publications