Often, in workshop settings, it is useful to begin with a light exercise that stimulates participants’ interactive participation, encourages them to think outside of their ordinary lines of thinking, and which therefore helps prep them for the events to follow.
This is perhaps especially true for participatory foresight workshops with participants not trained in or familiar with foresight are tasked with imagining futures and supplying information and creative solutions beyond their ordinary and traditional expertise. This is not easy, and participants often feel a little uncomfortable about this, at least at first. Asking a simple question that the participant is able to relate to, while simultaneously taking them outside their traditional modes of thinking, is often an effective way of starting to build the trust and comfortability that a good outcome of the workshop requires.
For this reason, as part of Eye of Europe we have built a set of tried and tested Foresight Starter Prompts that organizers can use in workshop settings. These prompts provide questions that organizers can used to initiate workshop conversation and get the workshop off to a good start.
By making this standard set of Foresight Starter Prompts available, we want to lower the barrier for organizing workshops and lower the barrier for inviting new groups of people into the workshops.
The prompt really is a simple question aimed at stimulating thinking, discussion, and participation. Not all questions are explicitly related to the future or to foresight and futures thinking, but as you can see in the material, they all have their use for stimulating this.
Foresight workshops come in various settings with participants with varying backgrounds. The intention behind the series of prompts was therefore that between the individual entries, it would cover prompts suitable for workshops in different settings (face-to-face, online) and with different participant types (new to foresight, experienced with foresight). Based on piloting, prior experiences, and author reflections, the sets developed are categorised with where they are considered most useful. This is indicated by tags listed on the prompts ‘title page’.
Furthermore, for each prompt additional slides are created with 1) Example response, 2) How to use this prompt, and 3) Design intent of the prompt. Each individual prompt therefore comes with strong guidance for foresight workshop organizers in how to get the most out of using it, and what to expect from its use.
This help you decipher whether and which prompt will work for you. But really, go ahead and test for yourself with your own foresight audiences!
Note: The prompts are modified and adapted from a previous European project (FLxDeep 2020, supported by EIT-ClimateKIC). For the full set of the original prompts (their described as recipes), see Raleigh & Richards, 2022.
