What?
The Art for Futures Lab (AFFL) is a framework for participatory worldbuilding and strategic foresight. It brings together artistic research, futures thinking and collaborative design to support diverse stakeholders in co-creating, visualizing and prototyping desirable futures in response to complex societal and ecological challenges. AFFL connects an online archive of sustainable innovations with hands-on workshops where participants explore existing solutions and transform them into future scenarios, actively engaging in the co-creation of preferable futures.
It is cross-sector and participatory in nature, primarily inviting civil society to contribute to the development of future visions. Through collective processes, it activates citizen participation for knowledge exchange and the co-imagination of new narratives. Futures are co-creatively visualized and designed as foundations for active communities, enabling the discovery of relevant and potentially adaptable solutions, while increasing the reach and impact of innovative ideas.
We integrate artistic research with futures thinking and collaborative design practices, combining strategic foresight with creative and interdisciplinary methods. Through this approach, AFFL enables participants to move from exploration to tangible future-making, responding directly to urgent social and environmental challenges.
Currently, the environmental impact of our human activities is too high. In the past decades, the consequences of human’s destruction of the planet have become apparent: loss of biodiversity, climate disasters, rising sea levels, and many more.
To tackle these 21st century challenges, the question arises how we can positively shape the future when most of its conventional visions mainly depict dystopias.
Since solutions to pressing global issues are to be found by humans, answers can only be obtained through engaging in broad and interdisciplinary dialogues that include many: those who make decisions in politics and business, those who form opinions in science and media, and those without whom all rescue models and visions of the future must remain theory. Each and every one of us needs to raise their voice in our fight towards sustainable and regenerative futures. By joining forces interdisciplinary and cross-culturally, will we be able to turn the dystopian narrative around?
Cinematic sci-fi visions of the future are usually dystopias. By focusing on utopia-based solutions for 21st century challenges, the contemporary widespread fear of the future will be replaced by positive narratives. In other words, acting in the present gets a new, meaningful focus as an important driver for the sustainability transformation.
Why?
How?
The Art for Futures Lab combines worldbuilding, design thinking and future prototyping, with futures thinking at its core. Rather than predicting the future, it creates a collaborative space to explore and shape preferable futures for today and tomorrow. It brings together artistic research and strategic foresight, moving from abstract ideas to tangible future narratives. Through storytelling, media creation and collaborative experimentation, participants work with a curated archive of sustainable innovations to co-create speculative scenarios for 2050, inspired by technological (“Technotransformation World”) and nature-based (“New Greening World”) futures, blending science, art and imagination.
The process unfolds through five stages. It begins with sensing and framing, focusing on current realities through data, stakeholder perspectives and lived experiences. It continues with worldbuilding, where speculative narratives are developed, including alternative and multispecies perspectives. In the prototyping phase, these scenarios are transformed into formats such as film, AR/VR, installations, theatre or storytelling. Reflection and negotiation then open dialogue on ethical and systemic implications, followed by transfer and impact, where insights are translated into policy ideas, educational tools and public engagement.
Through collaboration across disciplines, cultures and generations, AFFL fosters collective imagination and expands the ways in which possible futures can be explored and shaped together.
