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.

Our societies are facing increasingly complex sets of risks, and the rapid pace of change is challenging existing governance systems. There is a growing acknowledgement of the need to transform current approaches to policymaking and decision-making to become more futureoriented in support of anticipatory action and building long-term resilience.

The UN Summit of the Future, held in September 2024, marked a pivotal moment in global governance. The Pact for the Future, including its annexes on a Global Digital Compact and a Declaration on Future Generations, was adopted by the UN General Assembly by consensus and committed to a broad range of priorities to ensure that the multilateral system is better able to
address the realities of today and prepare for the challenges of tomorrow.

To contribute to fostering a culture of anticipation and preparedness, and to building a multilateral system that remains relevant for current and future generations, the UN Futures Lab/Global Hub and the International Science Council (ISC) have collaborated to better understand the concrete and transformational role of futures thinking and strategic foresight in informing decision-making and action. Futures thinking and strategic foresight are key to helping us address complex issues and deal with significant uncertainty – and to embedding long-term perspectives that consider policy implications on future generations.

Drawing on case studies from the Global South , this joint paper demonstrates the versatility of foresight practices with a focus on tangible actions for decision-makers and policymakers. It also illustrates how these approaches can support anticipatory governance and resilience building, offering lessons learned and practical recommendations.

The selection of 14 case studies presented in this report reflect balance across geographies, themes, sectors, stakeholders, and foresight tools. The case studies illustrate a range of impacts, primarily through a typology of approaches by desired outcomes as outlined below:

📌Local and Indigenous Knowledge, Sources, and Practices

        📌Building Local Capacities and Durable Solutions from Community-Led Initiatives

        📌Multistakeholder Partnerships and Collaborations

        📌Organizational Development

        📌Sector-Wide Policy Development and Innovation

        📌Futures Empowered by Technological Advancements and Innovation

        📌Improved Social Outcomes/Social Well-Being for Marginalized Communities

        📌Rebuilding Narratives

🔗Source: UN Futures Lab/Global Hub and the International Science Council (2025). Futures Thinking and Strategic Foresight in Action: Insights from the Global South, New York. unfutureslab.org/project/futures-thinking-and-strategic-foresight-in-action-insights-from-the-global-south

A new initiative to support EU Member States in embedding long-term, anticipatory thinking into decision-making at every level—national, regional, and local. 

Future-Oriented Policymaking is an ongoing joint project by the European Commission Directorate-General for Structural Reform Support (DG REFORM) and the EU Policy Lab of the Joint Research Centre. The project supports foresight capacity building in EU Member States and integrating future-oriented thinking into decision-making.

The project supports foresight capacity building in EU Member States and integrating future-oriented thinking into decision-making.

Get involved!
The success of the project depends on the active participation of policymakers, practitioners, and citizens. Whether you are an experienced foresight practitioner or entirely new to the concept, we welcome your insights.

Share ideas, take our survey*: Help us understand your needs and shape the final deliverables. What has worked well in your context? What challenges have you faced? How can we make foresight more relevant to your needs? > Survey

Join our beta testing group**: Be among the first to try out our new toolkit and training materials. Your feedback will help us refine and improve these resources for everyone (fill in the survey and click join beta testing group at the end).

* Preferably before 12 September 2025 to make full use of your ideas.

* *Places for beta testing are limited, and we are committed to working with a diverse range of partners. If you are interested, please fill in the survey by 5/09/2025 . We will confirm participation after that date. Institutionalising future-oriented policymaking is a collective journey, which requires commitment, curiosity, and courage: from leaders, civil servants, and citizens alike. Let’s work together to make foresight a cornerstone of European policymaking. 

Stay tuned for updates and don’t hesitate to reach out if you’d like to contribute to this exciting initiative.

> Future-oriented Policymaking 

This is the short English-language Policy Brief from the research project Foresight and Future Generations in Law-Making (FORGE). FORGE examined issues of future-regarding lawmaking in an interdisciplinary manner, combining expertise on futures studies, political science, and jurisprudence. The aim of the study was to analyse the status of future generations and their rights in current legislative processes, and to map and compare practices for foresight and consideration of future generations in different political contexts, nationally and internationally. The purpose of the project was to increase understanding on i) how future generations can be better taken into account in policymaking; ii) how foresight can be better utilised in lawmaking. 

The FORGE-project was unique – there had not previously been a study with a similar scope in Finland and comparable international examples are, to the best knowledge of the authors, extremely rare. FORGE supported the preparation of the second part
of the Government Report on the Future. The project was funded by the Government’s analysis, assessment and research activities (VN TEAS) and was conducted during 1/2022–11/2022 by researchers of the University of Turku, Åbo Akademi University and Tampere University.

Findings:

From an international comparison, Finland already has an advanced national foresight system and can be regarded as a pioneer in futureregarding policymaking. However, there is still room for improvement in terms of using foresight and considering future generations as a part of lawmaking. Such improvement could be achieved by developing and upgrading the existing institutions and practices and by making more incremental changes in practices, modes of interaction, and attitudes. For example, foresight should be conducted more as a continuous activity, and future generations’ interests and rights should be considered more systematically in legislative processes, while acknowledging the plurality of future interests.

Development proposals:

Full lenght-report available in Finnish

In addition to the 12-page Policy Brief summarising the FORGE projects' finding in English, The Prime Minister's Office has published the full 203-page report in Finnish. This can be found here below.

Research and innovation (R&I) foresight in Europe is no longer a niche methodological practice. It is increasingly recognised as a governance capability for navigating polycrises and rapid technological change. Yet it remains unevenly institutionalised and therefore strategically underused. The revised Eye of Europe report, Showcasing Perspectives: A Stocktaking of R&I Foresight Practices in Europe, argues that the value of foresight depends less on the number of activities conducted than on mandates, timing, institutional anchoring and the conditions that enable uptake. 

The report, drafted by the DLR Project Management Agency (DLR-PT) is based on a mixed-methods design combining desk research, an online survey, and qualitative interviews. It identifies 181 organisations involved in R&I foresight and analyses a portfolio of 69 recent projects submitted by 51 organisations from 21 European Research Area (ERA) countries. Taken together, these cases show how foresight is applied at the intersection of science, innovation and policy. This includes agenda-setting at national and regional levels, addressing mission-oriented challenges such as climate change and health, and anticipating the impact of digitalisation and emerging technologies. This demonstrates that foresight is already being applied in situations involving both high levels of uncertainty and significant political implications.

A central finding concerns a governance gap in the way foresight is used. In some contexts, foresight is supported by institutional routines and longstanding project experiences. In others, however, it remains disconnected from budget cycles, regulatory windows, and key decision points. This results in ad hoc exercises, which lower their impact. foresight generates policy value when it is embedded in governance cycles where decisions are taken and backed by clear administrative or political mandates. When senior decision-makers are engaged from the outset and remain committed, foresight can inform strategies, influence funding priorities and contribute to formal policy instruments. However, when it is poorly timed or treated as a standalone initiative (as it is in the case of some of the 69 cases), it tends to remain advisory rather than impactful. 

Process and participation matter

This is also why the study considers the foresight process itself to be significant. Across the 69 cases, co-creation and participatory engagement generated long-lasting benefits, such as trust-building and enhanced futures literacy, which often outlast the written output such as yet another foresight report. These learning effects strengthen anticipatory capacity by shaping how institutions interpret signals, assess risk and negotiate trade-offs in uncertain conditions. Furthermore, the report indicates that the participation of decision makers is associated with higher uptake than expert-only approaches.

The report also identifies structural weaknesses that limit the political legitimacy of foresight, and consequently its strategic impact. Participation patterns remain strongly centred on experts and the political administration: scientists and experts, as well as public bodies, are involved in the vast majority of projects (93% and 90%, respectively), while citizens and business representatives are integrated less systematically (30% and 40%, respectively). This choice of participants influences which futures are considered plausible and which risks are prioritised. For mission-oriented and transformative R&I agendas, where implementation depends on social acceptance and behavioural change, broader participation is not simply a box-ticking exercise but appears to be an important condition for the development of robust policies that are socially acceptable.
Methodologically, the report highlights a continued focus on exploratory tools. Scenarios, trend analysis and horizon scanning dominate (64%, 52% and 48% respectively), while methods that connect more directly to implementation and robustness, such as policy stress-testing (7%), backcasting (20%) and futures literacy formats (10%), remain underused. This has both technical and political implications. While the prevailing method mix supports exploration, it often fails to translate long-term insight into robust decision-making under short-term political incentives, budget constraints and organisational routines. In this context, broadening the methodological repertoire is about strengthening the capacity of institutions to connect long-term perspectives to actionable pathways that can withstand electoral, administrative, and fiscal pressures. 

When it comes to communicating results, the study highlights a tendency to rely too heavily on written outputs, which can restrict visibility and sustained engagement. In contrast, more immersive, visual or experiential formats can extend interaction beyond the immediate project cycle. This determines whether foresight is perceived as just another report in the bookshelf or as an active reference point in debates on public policy. 

Capacity was identified as the overarching constraint in the assessed cases. Almost all respondents (96%) identified capacity-building needs relating to methods, facilitation, data analysis, communication, policy translation and staffing. When foresight is added to existing roles as an additional task, continuity and quality tend to deteriorate and institutionalisation stalls. Therefore, the synthesis treats capacity building as a prerequisite for transitioning from project-based experimentation to routine governance functions embedded in organisational practice and decision-making cycles.

Looking ahead, the report identifies emerging practices of political significance. AI-supported horizon scanning and data-driven anticipation offer greater speed and scope, while experiential and speculative formats increase engagement and deliberation. At the same time, the report emphasises the need for critical reflection on transparency and bias. It highlights a growing focus on representation (including future generations and nature), debiasing techniques, and human-centred, sustainability-oriented futures. These developments signal a shift away from technology- or growth-centred narratives, towards approaches that more explicitly address values, legitimacy and intergenerational justice as these issues are gaining importance in European debates on the direction of R&I policy.

The findings raise a broader question for the European foresight community: what would it take for foresight to move from project-based experimentation to a routine governance capability across Europe? Addressing this question requires attention not only to methods, but to mandates, institutional design, participation and capacity. How these elements are strengthened will shape the role foresight can play in guiding Europe’s R&I policy in the years ahead. 

For more information, please contact the author, Simon Winter, at Simon.Winter@dlr.de.