Futures Garden

Futures Garden: Pioneering Policy Innovation through Speculative Design

At Futures Garden, we embark on a visionary journey to redefine policy-making for Europe's future. Our unique platform collaborates with leading futurists, innovative designers, and engaged EU citizens to envision a Europe enriched by diverse potential futures, each with its own opportunities and challenges. Our mission? To revolutionize policy creation by intertwining speculative design with creativity, empathy, and analytical insight.

Our four-step approach ensures a comprehensive and impactful exploration:

Horizon Scanning: We dive into cutting-edge ideas and emerging trends, identifying opportunities that could shape Europe's future.

Speculative Design: Our creative process transforms abstract concepts into tangible, thought-provoking scenarios, making future possibilities more accessible and engaging.

Citizen Engagement: We delve into the societal implications of these speculative scenarios, gathering diverse perspectives and insights from EU citizens.

Policy Reflection: The final step involves analyzing the potential impact of these innovative ideas on policy-making, ensuring that future EU policies are forward-thinking, inclusive, and impactful.

Creating fictional artifacts through speculative design

Futures Garden aims at creating inspiring alternative future scenarios through the use of fictional future artifacts that invite to reflection and debate. The pilot project addressed two themes:

“Dealing with future selves” explores new ways of being, individually and collectively, examines new practices and technologies that enhance self-reflection and sharing of emotions, which help shape our choices in life and nurture a renewed sense of togetherness.

“Extending human perception to new scales” explores the richness of non-human intelligences, expanding our attention and appreciation for their unique sensory worlds, their “umwelt” – what they “feel” and how they “think”. In doing so it departs from the human-centric worldview towards a deeper understanding and celebration of life on Earth.

Futures Garden initiated by the EU Policy Lab

Commissioned by the DG for Research & Innovation through the Foresight on Demand framework contract

Supported by the European Commission

Partners:

Austrian Institute of Technology

Fraunhofer ISI

Futures2all

Futurlab

Institutul de Prospectiva (Lead of pilot project)

Modem

Normals