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Futures Frequency — accessible futures tools

This case explores how Sitra designed an accessible futures toolkit and workshop format for 8-20 people to get started with anticipation. Futures Frequency is freely available for everyone to use and includes a facilitator’s handbook with thorough guides on how to facilitate the workshop, video instructions, audio snippets from the future, and a wealth of other tools and resources.

The case provides an introduction to Futures Frequency and explains how it might help you get started with anticipatory innovation.

Description

It is becoming clear to most that we need to collectively challenge our view of our future for us to break free from the doomsday-like trajectory we seem stuck in. More and more organisations are recognising that working with alternative futures might be a way to do so. For many, however, this is a challenging new way of working that can seem abstract and hard to get started with.

The Finnish Innovation Fund, Sitra, wanted to make working with the future more accessible. To do that, Sitra developed Futures Frequency, as an immersive and easy-to-use workshop method for building alternative futures.

Design

Based on Sitra’s extensive experience within foresight, Futures Frequency was created with the goal of helping a group of participants through a well-tested workshop format with the aim of constructing a preferred future and identifying actions that might help realise it. The workshop method is build around 3 themes:

  1. Challenge existing assumptions about the future
  2. Imagine new desired futures
  3. Take actions and shape the future

An interesting aspect of Futures Frequency are the audio dramas, which are short voice-acted sketches. Each sketch tells a story about the present from a future perspective. The stories are like small fragments. Quick and easy ways to immerse yourself in a future for a few minutes before returning with new perspectives.

Impacts

According to Sitra, three of the main take-aways of Futures Frequency are:

  • It helps establish creative spaces where participants are encouraged to reimagine how they view the future together.
  • It helps challenge some of the very basic assumptions that we might take for granted but which have a huge impact on how we engage with the world around us (e.g. how dominating the Western perspective is in many domains).
  • it helps create a sense of optimism and opens up the opportunity space, giving participants a sense of how they might help realise a brighter future.

Further information

For more information visit the Futures Frequency website.

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