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 

Where: Sala Marconi

Date: 30.09.2026

Time: 17:30

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.

Concept & facilitation: Iuliana Adina Apostol 

AIMEDIA 2026 - The Second International Conference on AI-based Media Innovation 

Nice, 5–9 July 2026 

part of IARIA - International Academy, Research, and Industry Association

Felt Futures is an experiential foresight project taking place at AIMEDIA 2026, the Second International Conference on AI-based Media Innovation, in Nice, France in July 2026. It begins from a proposition most foresight leaves untouched: a future is not only something a team analyses, but something they can be brought to feel — in the body, in the present tense — before the analysis begins.

Conventional foresight maps the terrain. It produces scenarios, trends and probabilities, and tells a group what is plausible. What it rarely settles is whether anyone in the room recognises themselves in the future being described. Teams routinely assemble an intellectualised future — mapped, weighted, argued — that no one actually inhabits, and then wonder why it fails to move them. The gap between an abstract projection and a future as it is felt from the inside is what Experiential Futures scholarship calls the experiential gulf. Felt Futures is an attempt to work directly in that gap.

Method. The project applies an adapted version of the Resonant Future Self Framework (RFSF), a facilitated protocol that guides a participant into a present-tense, sensory inhabitation of an ordinary working day in 2032 — not a forecast of it. Across five positions, the session moves from a temporal warm-up into the texture of the day itself, the relational field of who else is present, the threshold of what in the 2026 self is no longer recognised, and finally a single sentence sent from 2032 back to now. The wager is that a vividly simulated future runs on much the same emotional and physiological circuitry as a real one, so that a person — and, in application, a team — can try a future on at the level of sensation rather than argument.

Two capacities are easily collapsed into one. Affective foresight is the anticipatory projection of a future emotional state: a reading, made now, of how a coming situation is likely to feel. It works predictively, which is why it inherits the fragilities catalogued in the affective-forecasting literature — we overestimate intensity and duration, and we fixate on the triggering event while the rest of life fades from view. Emotional foresight, as I use it, works on the near side of the same process. Here the affect is generated in the present through simulation and registered in the body: a felt state produced now, and treated as evidence about the future it belongs to. Affective foresight estimates a future feeling; emotional foresight elicits one. RFSF operates entirely in the second register.

This is deliberately not affective forecasting, the well-documented and error-prone act of predicting how one will feel later. The relevant construct is affective episodic future thinking, or pre-experiencing: generating a genuine present affective response through simulation, rather than a cold estimate of a distant one. The distinction is what keeps the method out of reach of the classic "impact bias" critique — the claim here is about present elicitation, not predictive accuracy. It also has a current mechanistic basis: under predictive accounts of emotion, affect is constructed partly from the brain's reading of internal bodily signals, which is why the felt channel carries information an analytical read-out skips.

Lineage. Felt Futures does not claim to invent this terrain; it stands on it and says so. Its overall arc — interview participants about their felt futures, mediate the material into concrete artefacts, and show it back to a wider audience — independently reconstructs the Ethnographic Experiential Futures cycle described by Candy and Kornet, within the broader Experiential Futures tradition developed by Candy and Dunagan. What RFSF contributes is a tightened five-position protocol and, because the setting is a media-innovation conference, a specific role for AI-generated film and sound: here they are treated as part of the method, not merely its output — a way to reach senses and emotions that pure analysis passes over.

The pilot. Ahead of the conference, a first phase of individual sessions brings together five participants from different fields and countries: 

Prof. Dr. Stephan Böhm (RheinMain University of Applied Sciences),

Prof. Dr. Petra Ahrweiler (TISSS Lab, JGU Mainz), 

Prof. Dr. Matthias Harter (Hochschule RheinMain), 

Prof. Dr. Júlio Monteiro Teixeira (UFSC, Brazil), and 

Dr. Andy Banburski-Fahey (OCTO & MSR Deep Learning, Microsoft). 

They are deliberately not a leadership team. Comparing the felt futures of five people who share no company, no decision and no stake in the same outcome is the harder case; a team that already shares context stops looking like the difficult part.

On site, and what follows. The centrepiece takes place in person in Nice, where the group convenes — original participants plus new voices — to work through where their felt futures converge, diverge, or do not match at all. As a pilot (n = 5), its outputs are provisional interpretive instruments, not measurements: the affective maps drawn across participants encode ordering and resemblance, not coordinates, and any applied use is aggregate and anonymised by design. Findings from the Nice sessions will be reported in a second contribution.

Results to follow.

References
Barrett & Simmons (2015) — Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16(7), 419–429
https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3950

Candy (2010) — dissertation, The Futures of Everyday Life
https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.1.1840.0248

Candy & Dunagan (2017) — Futures 86, 136–153
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2016.05.006

Candy & Kornet (2019) — Journal of Futures Studies 23(3), 3–22 (open access)
https://jfsdigital.org/articles-and-essays/vol-23-no-3-march-2019/turning-foresight-inside-out-an-introduction-to-ethnographic-experiential-futures/

Moeck, Grewal, Mehta, Greenaway, Koval & Kalokerinos (2026) — Affective Science
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-026-00364-x

Schacter, Kalinowski & Wilson (2025) — Cerebral Cortex 35(1), 77–83
https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhae388

Schreiber, Schneider, Newen & Voigt (2024) — Emotion 24(6), 1481–1493
https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001345

Wilson & Gilbert (2005) — Current Directions in Psychological Science 14(3), 131–134
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00355.x — free PDF: https://dtg.sites.fas.harvard.edu/WILSON%20&%20GILBERT%20(2005).pdf