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/