Come join us for an exciting first ever international card game session of our project where we discover future sustainable transition pathways using a novel card game. The event is on 30.09 (Wednesday) in the library at 14.30. See you there!
How can we make sense of alternative futures at a time when sustainability transitions require changes across technologies, institutions and everyday practices? How can scenarios help us understand the dynamics of these changes and consider our capacity to shape them? This interactive workshop invites participants to explore these questions through a facilitated card game focused on the future of mobility systems.
Conducted by Johanna Vallistu, Joanna Raidal and Karmen Kütt-Ehala from Tallinn University of Technology, the workshop brings together two approaches: sustainability transitions thinking and foresight through scenario exploration. We combine them into a novel participatory method that connects alternative future worlds with the processes through which systems change. The card game provides a shared structure for exploring how emerging developments, established arrangements and wider societal pressures interact, and how these interactions can produce different mobility futures.
Mobility offers a concrete setting for this exploration. Moving towards sustainable mobility involves changes in infrastructure, public policy, business models, spatial planning, cultural expectations and everyday routines. Yet – multiple sustainability pathways are ahead of us at the moment. Participants will consider how different answers to these questions shape both transition processes and their possible outcomes.
The session is designed for participants interested in sustainability, mobility, governance, innovation or futures methods, with no prior experience of scenario work required. By the end, participants will have practised interpreting alternative futures, examining the systemic dynamics of transitions and discussing choices under uncertainty. The workshop also creates space to assess how a playful, structured format can support interdisciplinary dialogue and make complex questions about sustainability transitions more tangible, accessible and open to collective inquiry.

https://www.domusacademy.com

In our conference contribution we explore the idea of the generative ouroboros—the automated autophage—in application to foresight. Foresight is by definition a participatory activity and made by humans. In our futures exhibition we try out what happens if we make scenarios about AI with AI.

Together with the visitors to our exhibition, we want to find out how AI influences and changes foresight practice. Does AI increase the plausibility of future scenarios or decrease human expertise and participation?

Will AI render foresight practice irrelevant altogether—substituting for human expertise, imitating human intuition and making participation unnecessary? Or will AI help to improve foresight processes—through better design, more efficient organisation, or more creative future scenarios?

We invite you to visit our futures exhibition “Generative Ouroboros: A Futures Exhibition of AI-Generated Radical Alternatives of AI” taking place on 30th September, from 19:00 to 21:00 as a side event at the Futures4Europe conference and to explore not only AI generated future scenarios but to discuss together with us the role of AI in future foresight practice!

You can start by asking yourself whether this blog was written by a person or by an AI! And would you have interpreted it the same way, before asking yourself this question?

We look forward to seeing you at our AI futures exhibition and to discussing the automated autophage further with you! 

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.

I am a Ghanaian visual artist exploring future imaginaries through painting. My work, Brushes of Tomorrow, is a three-part visual narrative that reflects on survival, identity, and emotional resistance, inviting viewers to imagine more inclusive and hopeful futures through African perspectives.

Where Art Imagines Tomorrow.

The Futures4Europe 2026 conference, “Daring to Imagine Otherwise”, took place in Rome on 30 September and 1 October 2026 as part of the Eye of Europe project. Conceived as the project’s closing event, it followed the first Futures4Europe conference held in Vienna in May 2025. This second edition focused on the role of imagination in foresight and in shaping futures, with the ambition of broadening the European foresight community and encouraging unconventional approaches to societal futures. 

Interest in the event significantly exceeded initial expectations. The call for contributions, launched in January 2026, received 148 proposals, spanning academic presentations, workshops, visual and artistic formats, installations and other experimental approaches. Following the opening of registration, more than 250 registration requests were received.
This strong response led the organisers to substantially adapt the original format. The final programme featured 49 oral contributions, 8 workshops, more than 30 posters and a range of side events, creating multiple opportunities for exchange, experimentation and collaboration. 

A sincere thank you to everyone who contributed to making Futures4Europe 2026 possible. We hope these conversations and collaborations will continue well beyond the conference and contribute to imagining a wider range of possible futures.

Event and post-event materials will be shared in the coming weeks. Scroll down to have a look and bookmark this page in your favorites tp stay up to date !

About the conference

Europe and the world are living through times of profound change, marked by discontinuities, systemic crises, and far-reaching transitions. These challenges can also be understood as products of inherited and increasingly inadequate imaginaries. Such conditions urgently demand to re-open the future through renewed ways of probing the possible.

Foresight creates spaces where future imaginaries are produced, negotiated and contested and new relations between knowledge, values, and action can emerge. At the same time, foresight cultivates awareness of imaginative processes and supports their reflexive examination.

The Futures4Europe conference invites foresight practitioners, Research & Innovation experts, and future-sensitive thinkers, artists and creators to reflect on and expand imagination as a collective epistemic force—one that shapes how societies sense, interpret, and act toward the future. 

Themes for the 2026 edition

1. The role of imagination in anticipatory processes. This theme examines how imagination shapes the way futures are perceived, explored, and enacted. It focuses on the cognitive and affective mechanisms that enable futures imagination, as well as the methods and practices that cultivate, guide, or constrain imaginative capacity within foresight processes.
2. Collective Imaginaries and the Myths of the Future. Futures are shaped by shared narratives, metaphors, and myths. This theme examines how collective imaginaries organise social expectations, how cultural production acts as a laboratory for the future, and how foresight can disrupt and renew dominant imaginaries of progress, crisis, or salvation.
3. Plural Futures and Inclusive Foresight. This theme invites perspectives from diverse epistemologies and ontologies (e.g. Indigenous, postcolonial, feminist, ecological, AI-mediated), and explores how futures literacy, technologies, and inclusive foresight practices enable the imagination of multiple worlds.
4. Foresight, Imagination, and Policy Action. Imagination shapes how futures enter policy and decision-making. This theme focuses on imaginative approaches to anticipatory governance, the translation of scenarios and visions into institutions, and the tensions between creativity, evidence, accountability, and political realities.
5. Experiential, Embodied, and Affective Foresight. Beyond analysis and cognition, foresight often engages emotions, bodies, and lived experience. This theme highlights embodied, immersive, and artistic approaches, such as role-play, performance, installations, and XR, that deepen engagement with futures while raising ethical, relational, and inclusion-related questions. 

From 1st to 3rd July 2026, the 6th Conference on Anticipation will be held at the Politecnico di Milano, Design Department. Anticipation 2026 invites participants to explore the entangled relations between futures, unknowing, and design. The overarching aim of the Conference Series and of the emerging field of Anticipation Studies is to create new perspectives on how individuals, groups, institutions, systems and cultures use ideas about futures to act in the present.

The 6th International Conference on Anticipation will be held at the Design Department of Politecnico di Milano, one of Europe's leading institutions for design research and education. Located in the heart of Milan, a global capital of design, fashion, and innovation, the department stands as a site for examining the contemporary and future roles of design within complex societal, technological, and ecological systems. Politecnico di Milano’s Design Department is renowned for fostering experimental, practice-based, and transdisciplinary approaches that challenge conventional boundaries of design. It cultivates a vision of design as a powerful mode of inquiry.

From critical design to foresight, from service design to post-human aesthetics, design at Politecnico di Milano nurtures an ecosystem where research, pedagogy, and practice interact to explore how futures are made and contested. The department brings together a diverse network of researchers, educators, and practitioners committed to advancing critical, speculative, and anticipatory design approaches while benefitting from ongoing exchanges with industry, cultural institutions, and grassroots communities. Its interdisciplinary structure includes dedicated labs and centers focused on areas such as communication and product design, service design, sustainable transitions, and design for social innovation. These spaces foster a culture of inquiry where prototyping, material experimentation, and reflective practice converge. The Bovisa campus offers state-of-the-art facilities, from fabrication workshops to immersive environments, supporting collaborative and transdisciplinary engagement.

The Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) are undergoing a rapid transformation, driven by emerging technologies like AI and immersive realities. This fast-moving landscape presents a crucial challenge: how do we effectively guide current professionals toward the emerging career opportunities of tomorrow? This is one of the questions we aim to tackle within the ekip project, the European Cultural and Creative Industries Innovation Policy Platform.

The EKIP initiative, funded by Horizon Europe, is dedicated to understanding and accelerating these transitions through research, policy, and collaboration. For each sector it studies, EKIP brings together policymakers, researchers, and creative practitioners to translate emerging needs into actionable frameworks for change.

Our foresight exercise, conducted within ekip's identification phase , addresses this challenge by mapping actionable career paths from the future back to the present. Our method employed social media listening to track real-time conversations across sectors, helping stakeholders anticipate change and enabling the co-creation of smarter innovation policies .

Sustainability in the Post-Global Era

In the aftermath of decades of global integration, the model of hyperconnected markets is showing signs of retreat. Geopolitical instability, trade disputes, and resource scarcity are catalysing a structural shift that could reshape not only economies, but the very principles underpinning sustainability. Drawing from trend intelligence by Nextatlas, two pivotal developments emerge, developments that invite foresight professionals to rethink sustainability not as a static ideal, but as a dynamic field responsive to systemic transformation.

The post-global era is not simply a reconfiguration of trade routes or supply chains; it marks a fundamental reframing of what society deems “sustainable.” In a world where inflation, scarcity, and volatility dominate headlines, environmental goals are becoming increasingly intertwined with economic and geopolitical concerns. 

Nowhere is this reframing more evident than in the European Union, which has positioned itself as a global leader in linking sustainability with regulatory and economic frameworks. Through initiatives such as the European Green Deal, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, and stricter ESG reporting standards, the EU is setting benchmarks that extend far beyond its borders and reshape how sustainability is understood in practice.

Nextatlas’ foresight model suggests a pivot: environmental degradation is no longer perceived as the singular sustainability threat. Instead, resource access, economic resilience, and supply chain transparency are becoming the new fault lines. This conclusion is grounded in more than a decade of Nextatlas’ machine learning work in cultural trend forecasting, built on a proprietary pipeline that ingests millions of data points each month from over 300,000 carefully selected sources, including social media users, niche influencers, scientific literature, design portfolios, and startup ecosystems. 

Through natural language processing, semantic clustering, and visual analysis, these unstructured signals are structured into a dynamic semantic knowledge graph of thousands of interconnected micro-trends. By identifying early adopters with a demonstrated history of trend foresight, the model captures weak signals and emergent cultural dynamics before they reach the mainstream. With a 93% accuracy rate in trend prediction, this methodology provides a robust foundation for understanding the evolution from ecological awareness as individual virtue to sustainability as collective infrastructure.

The Wasteless Economy
The intentional rejection of overconsumption

What was once framed as consumer minimalism is evolving into a more resilient, system-conscious behaviour: the Wasteless Economy. As global citizens face the tangible consequences of rising costs and diminished availability, consumption habits are adjusting accordingly. But unlike past recessions where thrift was reactive, today’s restraint is increasingly proactive and value-driven. In this new context, value is redefined by longevity, utility, and purpose. Careful selection, durability, and circular practices now consciously outweigh constant acquisition.

This transformation has implications beyond market dynamics. It reflects a recalibration of what constitutes value and well-being in an era of systemic constraint. The Wasteless Economy aligns closely with long-term sustainability goals, emphasising durability, circularity, and resource efficiency, not just as ethical choices, but as strategies for social and economic stability. Amid persistent inflation and renewed tariffs on consumer goods, households are tightening their belts and are naturally drawn to buying less, buying smarter, and investing in lasting value. 

Feeling the squeeze of both rising operational costs and evolving regulations, businesses are pivoting toward circular models, designing for durability, repairability, and reuse, not for sustainability branding, but as a smart financial strategy. Circular design reduces exposure to volatile supply chains and tariff-prone imports, while reinforcing consumer loyalty through accountability.

This shift is most visible in food & beverage, fashion, and retail, industries where overproduction and disposability once defined the norm. Food companies must now design out surplus, embracing precision, seasonality, and resourcefulness as new standards of value. In fashion, longevity and modularity are replacing trend cycles, with resale and repair moving from fringe to fundamental. Retailers, in turn, are being called to transform from providers of endless choice into curators of care, offering fewer but better options that align with the values of restraint and longevity.

For foresight practitioners, the shift underscores a key signal: in strained environments, sustainability flourishes not through moral appeal but through necessity. Efforts to design policy or governance around future-proofed systems must therefore centre not only on carbon metrics, but also on material longevity, repair ecosystems, and new models of sufficiency.

The introduction of a new technology is never an isolated event and never concerns only one market or one domain. There are invariably socio-cultural, political, economic, and environmental implications, as well as impacts, influences, “cross-pollination”, and correlations among different technologies.

The very broad definition of technology itself betrays its intrinsic complexity: a vast field of research involving various technical and scientific disciplines, which examines the application and use of everything that can serve to solve problems. The term “technology” also refers to the aggregate of knowledge, skills, and tools used to design, create, and utilise objects, processes, systems, or services to meet human needs.

An emerging technology, in particular, is one that is radically new and relatively fast-growing technology [it is not necessarily exponential, as the common dialectics of recent years have conditioned us to expect, yet this has little to do with the mathematical concepts of exponentiality; rapid growth does not imply exponentiality]. It is characterised by a certain degree of coherence (or consistency) that persists over time and has the potential to have a substantial impact on the socio-economic-political domains (understood as the players, institutions, and models of interactions between them, as well as all the processes of knowledge production associated with these domains).

Its most significant impact lies in the future and thus in the emergency phase: an emerging technology is still quite uncertain and ambiguous. For this reason, it would be prudent to analyse its potential impacts in a timely manner, to avoid getting trapped in Amara’s Law.

WE HAVE A SOCIAL MISSION: TO STIMULATE CRITICAL THINKING ABOUT EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES.
We focus on Futures & Foresight (Futures Thinking / Futures Studies & Strategic Foresight), with a specialization in Technology Foresight and ETS, Emerging Technologies Scanning. We are also dedicated to Futures Literacy, which involves the theoretical and practical literacy of Futures Studies and Futures Thinking. Through a Slow Journalism model, we disseminate and promote knowledge of emerging technologies, analyzing their potential impacts on our possible and alternative futures.

Delivering solutions for a more sustainable future

ISINNOVA provides research services and strategic consultancy to public and private actors pursuing sustainable visions, solutions, and policies.

Five Pillars of Our Approach

1. Anticipate – Apply systems thinking and foresight methodologies to identify emerging challenges, reveal interdependencies, and inform proactive, future-resilient strategies.

2. Integrate – Connect disciplines, sectors, and knowledge systems to foster richer analysis and tackle complex challenges holistically.

3. Align – Ensure research, innovation, and governance processes reflect the values, priorities, and needs of society through ethical, participatory, and responsible approaches.

4. Co-create – Engage diverse stakeholders — researchers, policymakers, citizens, and industry — in collaborative processes to design solutions that are inclusive, relevant, and impactful.

5. Transform – Drive systemic change by translating shared knowledge and co-created solutions into sustainable, scalable actions, supported by continuous assessment to ensure applicability, effectiveness, and long-term value.

Track Record

• 50+ years in the game (and counting).
• Involved in over 130 research projects (ISINNOVA designs, develops, and manages sector-specific & cross-sector EU and global projects)
• 15 staff members with multidisciplinary backgrounds (engineering, statistics, economics, politics, law, social sciences, computer science and media studies)
  

In the small seaside township of Diano Marina, Liguria Region, Italy, the local community has been organising frequent meetings to help people overcome growing fears of an increasingly uncertain future. This initiative, called ‘Fridays of Knowledge’, aims to equip the local community with scientific tools and knowledge to understand the risks and implications of new technologies in a dialogue together with students, academics, and journalists. Communication Manager for Fridays of Knowledge, Damiana Biga, tells Futures4Europe how this initiative sparks debates across different generations and backgrounds, fostering a sense of shared responsibility and curiosity.

The municipality of Diano Marina, a seaside town in the northwestern Liguria region of Italy, in collaboration with the National Research Council of Italy, has launched an initiative in 2022 called “I Venerdi della Conoscenza” (Fridays of Knowledge, hereafter VDC). Link to the webpage.

The awareness of the possible impacts of emerging technologies and global changes on the society and the economy, prompted the mayor of Diano Marina to ask a group of scientists to design and develop activities for involving local communities in reflection on the future.

The aim of VDC is to promote and structure a dialogue between young generations and decision makers, using science as an interface.

A Scientific Committee has identified different aspects to be addressed during meetings that engage the participants to access the state of the art, and discuss them. The ultimate goal of VDC is to involve the local community in becoming more informed and active in shaping the future, which is often regarded as distant from the territorial contexts, and which constitutes the basis of the foresight exercises. The Scientific Committee consists of a selection of the experts who coordinated the Science and Technology Foresight Project of the National Research Council. The involved scientists are a representation of high-level national and international communities.

Students and teachers from some high schools are involved in advance, in order to brief and prepare questions during the meetings. On scheduled Fridays, the Sala Consigliare of the municipality hosts approximately 100 citizens. Students open the debate with lectures identified the week before, then a moderator initiates a debate with the scientists to elaborate the main concepts and challenges on the selected topics. Open questions from the audience conclude the dialogue, which includes the local public authorities that are invited. The meeting are accessible via streaming for a wider participation.

Some of the topics also anticipated or were suggested by those identified by a project funded by the European Commission named the Eye of Europe, whose aim is to support the European decision makers to reflect on the research and innovation priorities through foresight processes.

Results for the working group Energy are available at: http://foresight.cnr.it/working-groups/wg-energy.html 

The Science and Technology Foresight Project has carried out initiatives of great relevance, in order to define research strategies able to address crucial social problems related to energy, food, health, water, as well as the cross-sectoral topic of breakthrough innovative materials. Link to the webpage.

Both, the holist ic approach applied to the analysis of the topics, as well as the innovative format of the invitation only workshops, enticed the participation of internationally acknowledged experts. This framework guaranteed all participants the necessary conditions to carry out an open interactive debate, consolidating a collective intelligence, which assisted in achieving a consensus on research priorities, knowledge gaps, and funding needs.

Regenerating the ecosystem of science learning by developing a future-oriented model to enable creative thinking, foresight and active hope as skills needed in formal and informal science education.

FEDORA was a 3-year EU-funded project, which started in September 2020 and deployed its activities until August 2023. It gathered 6 partner institutions from 5 European countries. It conducted reasearch and practice towards the regeneration of the ecosystem of science learning, by developing a future-oriented model to enable creative thinking, foresight and active hope, as skills needed in formal and informal science education.

https://www.fedora-project.eu/