APF First Friday: Stuart Candy & Filippo Cuttica

Thinking concretely about alternative futures is harder and rarer than it should be. THE FUTURES BAZAAR is a public imagination toolkit to make exploring times to come easier, more fun, and more common. Released by Situation Lab (publishers of The Thing From The Future) and the British Broadcasting Corporation, the kit has already been used by groups in various parts of the world, and recently won the APF’s inaugural Most Significant Futures Work award for Inclusive Foresight.

A Futures Bazaar revolves around participants bringing in ordinary household objects that might otherwise be thrown away, and, step by step, turning them into artifacts from diverse future worlds. Funny or sad, thrilling or scary, the collective imagining of the gathering can be taken in whatever directions are important to the group. Whether the context is a community festival, a classroom, or a professional team seeking a creative retreat activity (the pilot event was staged for 200+ designers from across the BBC), the toolkit includes everything a would-be organiser might need to start planning their own event.

In an effort to spread futures fluency more widely, the self-contained kit requires minimal resources to run, and has been made available in open access for download, adaptation and non-commercial use by anyone. For this free webinar presented by the Association of Professional Futurists, the project’s authors Stuart Candy (Parsons School of Design, NASA JPL) and Filippo Cuttica (LEGO, Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design) will speak about the project, followed by a live Q&A. Anyone curious about what a #FuturesBazaar is, and what’s involved in staging one, is warmly invited to attend.

#ExperientialFutures #ParticipatoryDesign #PublicImagination #ForesightTools