#OurFutures

Futures Garden: Pioneering Policy Innovation through Speculative DesignAt 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 designFutures 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 LabCommissioned by the DG for Research & Innovation through the Foresight on Demand framework contractSupported by the European Commission Partners:Austrian Institute of TechnologyFraunhofer ISIFutures2allFuturlabInstitutul de Prospectiva (Lead of pilot project)ModemNormals

We implemented the ForSI (Foresight for Social Innovation) project with the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, with the Unit of Social Innovation. The aim of this collaboration was to identify so-called social time bombs - in our definition, problems that will be significant in the future or are already known today, but not yet sufficiently addressed by the state administration. The learning process itself was also a framing goal of this collaboration, where the unit team wanted to learn some foresight methods and implement them into certain processes of the department's work. The project involved desk research, two expert workshops, expert interviews, and also working closely with leading experts on social issues to develop a set of social issue cards. The final list of social time bombs was used by the unit to define calls for grant programs for nonprofits seeking to address diverse problems through social innovation. Foresight was thus used in this case to direct public funds more effectively, thereby addressing the problems that need to be focused on with an eye to the future.

Democracy across Europe has experienced immense challenge, change and uncertainty in recent years (Canal 2014; European Commission & Merkel; 2019) - from the rise of populism to decreasing levels of public trust in governance institutions and processes, to the war in Ukraine. Set against the backdrop of these issues, EUARENAS has been investigating how cities and urban spaces can strengthen legitimacy, identification and engagement within the democratic public sphere. Specifically, EUARENAS has been exploring how participation and deliberation in democracy and decision-making can be increased, and how voices and communities who are excluded from such arenas can be more actively involved. Foresight is one of the research strands present in EUARENAS. In this project, foresight is both a tool for understanding democratic innovations as they emerge, and for engaging citizens and other actors in such innovations within the participatory and deliberative realms. Mixed method approaches to foresight that incorporate a diversity of activities such as media discourse analysis, lived experience storytelling, social media analysis, three horizons mapping, driver-mapping, scenario and visioning exercises and policy stress- testing have been used in EUARENAS to investigate and hypothesise over future trends and scenarios in participatory democracies. From this work, we propose the following recommendations for Cities wanting to strive towards more equitable local democracies:Address structural barriers to participation Build relationships of trustInvest in formal and civic educationMake decisions for the long-termA more equitable, inclusive local democracy landscape is not too far in the distance for us to conceive it being possible. In fact, the future is now – the seeds to create it are already being planted, they just need nurturing by:Scaling and mainstreaming existing pilot or niche practices that are working locally – whether that beparticipatory budgeting, citizen assemblies or other smaller-scale projects – so that these become thenew ‘status quo’Adopting test and learn approaches to promote experimentation and on-going learning – this will enableongoing innovation and be responsive to society's needsFinding ways to celebrate and connect-up the small changes that are taking place - this will help peoplesee that progress is being made, even when it feels like things are changing too slow

The Millennium Project is a global participatory think tank established in 1996 under the American Council for the United Nations University that became independent in 2009 and has grown to 73 Nodes around the world (an MP Node is a group of institutions and individuals that connect local and global perspectives). Purpose: Improve humanity’s prospects for building a better future. Mission: Improve thinking about the future and make that thinking available through a variety of media for feedback to accumulate wisdom about the future for better decisions today. Vision: A global foresight network of Nodes, information, and software, building a global collective intelligence system recognized for its ability to improve prospects for humanity. A think tank on behalf of humanity, not on behalf of a government, or an issue, or an ideology, but on behalf of building a better future for all of us.