The Tomorrow Party: A Creative Futures Method for Policy Making
Creators: name: Watson, Chloe
name: Trust, The Wellcome
Publisher: name: F1000 Research Limited
Year: 2024

description: <i>This report sets out the findings from one of four projects commissioned by Wellcome Policy Lab to pilot creative approaches to policy development. In this project, Monash University researchers developed a futures method called the Tomorrow Party. Using innovative props and ‘party’ inspired accessories, participants co-created an experience that invited them to picture and describe different futures.  </i><br>
<br>
<b>Report text:</b><br>
<b>Acknowledgements</b><br>
<i>We acknowledge the Bunurong and Wurundjeri/Woiwurrung people of the Kulin Nations on whose land the research team gathered and designed the Tomorrow Party. Paying respect to First Nations Elders past and present enables us to recognise how Indigenous ways of knowing, doing and being have shaped the Tomorrow Party’s approach to folding time and our commitment to designing reciprocal encounters. We consider our research sites as always emplaced and in relation to Country, as situated within complex knowledge systems and connected in time and place to future and past generations.</i><br>
<br>
The interdisciplinary research team is indebted to the Tomorrow Party guests for playing along with the speculative mode and sharing with us their insights about the party.<br>
<br>
Consistent with the value we place on learning from peoples’ experiences, the guests’ words appear throughout this report.<br>
<br>
We thank Briony Rogers and Adriana Keating our Fire to Flourish partners for their invaluable support, subject-matter expertise and extended network. Our gratitude for helping us understand the affordances of the Tomorrow Party is extended to fellow Monash University collaborators Stacy Holman Jones and Jane Fisher for their creative and psychological expertise respectively. Thank you to Laelie Greenwood and Alisdair Gurling for stepping in as party planners.<br>
<br>
The Wellcome Policy Lab was much more than a funder of this project. Chloe Watson, Tom Harrison and Martin Smith were valued co-thinkers who helped us make the most of a rare opportunity to refine a creative futures method. They also created a community of other researchers and practitioners who inspire and motivate us.<br>
<br>
Finally, we want to acknowledge the core idea that animates the Tomorrow Party: that respect for first hand lived experience is best expressed by creating a reciprocal encounter that is grounded in relational forms of care for the communities in which we live.<br>
<br>
<b>Executive Summary</b><br>
<i>The Tomorrow Party started as a response to a Wellcome Trust Policy Lab call for creative methods that could support policy development. It grew into a technique that uses conversation, creativity and guided time travel to renew collective commitments and hopes for better futures.</i><br>
<br>
The Tomorrow Party is a creative method for imagining how firsthand experiences can inform policy making. During a party, guests imagine themselves in the near future and improvise a conversation with a partner about what that future looks and feels like.

 Productively, this presents a way to engage with the uncertainty of the future, offering personally contextualised insights that abstract predictive models or policy precedents cannot reach.
 Within policy processes, it is most useful for scoping intentions, forging partnerships and mobilising stakeholders.
 The party complements methods designed to generate specific insights into detailed policies.

The method has proven valuable for anyone directly invested in a specific policy space - from policy makers to advocates or community members. For all guests, the party builds the essential skill of imagining possible shared futures beyond current trajectories.


 A better understanding of the potential real-life impacts of policy emerges for policy makers.
 A shared sense of hope for the future is generated for allied professionals and community members.

The deep connections the party affords proved to be very effective for building rapport and surfacing shared commitments among a diverse range of stakeholders.


 A party’s policy objectives could be channelled into creative advocacy and strategic partnerships.

The scaffolded steps for sensing the as-yet-unknown future developed a collective capacity to imagine alternative responses to the present.


 Guests felt time travel helped them feel hopeful, motivated, and relieved that real change was possible.
 Guests wanted to co-create their futures with people who shared the same values and goals.

Every pilot of the Tomorrow Party revealed more about when the method might meaningfully complement existing methods and how peoples’ stories could be integrated into policy making.<br>
<br>
<b>Box. A Research Project</b><br>
We designed and refined the creative method over 12 parties in multiple cultural and professional contexts. Our interdisciplinary research team focused on three parties to closely analyse and understand the potential of the party.<br>
<br>
The Tomorrow Party, at its core, is a creative method that draws on peoples’ first-hand experiences to imagine what might be needed or desired in the future. This is relevant to policy be - cause people committed to more just, equitable, sustainable futures - government officials, com - munity members and advocates, NGO workers, independent foundations, researchers and more - have a stake in the futures policy initiatives create.<br>
<br>
The lessons of this report reflect our analysis of audio-recorded tomorrow stories, video and written guest feedback post-party and our experiences as hosts and facilitators.<br>
<br>
Our research approach is grounded in our collective research experience in policy studies, co-design, and methodologies for understanding peoples’ first-hand experiences. Some of this work is listed in the ‘References’ section (page 24).<br>
<br>
Further research and pilots would help explore the range of settings and topics to which the Tomorrow Party could contribute.<br>
<br>
<b>Section 1: What is a Tomorrow Party?</b><br>
<i>The Tomorrow Party is a creative activity during which participants time travel to a near but unknown future. Drawing on their personal and professional experiences, party guests create ‘tomorrow stories’ that express the futures they want and work out how they will know they have reached them. Its improvisational approach powerfully taps into people’s concerns and hopes about the future in a tangible and inspiring way.</i><br>
<br>
<b>Direct Experience:</b><br>
STARTING WITH PEOPLE<br>
The Tomorrow Party responds to the increasing value placed on peoples’ lived experiences in policy development. Rather than reducing people to single categories (such as ‘health service user’ or ‘policy maker’), it makes room for and values people’s multiple perspectives. This also encourages reciprocity amongst participants making it less transactional and more responsive to community needs.<br>
<br>
<b>First-person Futures: </b><br>
SENSE-MAKING WHAT MATTERS<br>
First-hand,lived experience insights for policy development usually focus on people’s past experiences. However, the shift from storytelling the past to storymaking the future empowers party guests to collectively imagine what a better future could look and feel like. This enables insight into what people value and why a better future matters to them. Sharing dreams with fellow time travellers also illuminate what is needed to make this world a reality.<br>
<br>
<b>Creativity in Policy Making:</b><br>
CO-CREATING RICH INSIGHTS<br>
Citizens’ speculative insights can be of high value across multiple policy design phases. Existing approaches to gathering policy ideas, such as lived experience interviews or predictions using big data models, although useful, are limited in their focus on what has already happened or what is easily quantifiable. The Tomorrow Party complements existing tools by engaging with peoples’ dreams and aspirations for how the world might be. Its focus on imagination allows a different type of evidence to be surfaced.<br>
<br>
The Tomorrow Party is typically a 2-hour gathering that unfolds over three acts. Early pilots helped us refine a party where diverse voices are respected, deep connection is valued and a level of trust is essential. Staying with the party theme helped us lean into the role of hosts — attending to how the gathering supported a convivial, care-based, creative atmosphere.<br>
<br>
Over the course of developing this method we came to understand that it is less an investigative exercise for sourcing policy insights, than a generative, social space for creating new imaginaries. The lightly facilitated experience is designed to support a diverse range of stakeholders to learn from the future about what is important with respect to a specific policy objective.<br>
<br>
We designed an imagination-fuelled method where people chat with peers to explore how their experiences of living in this world would inform the future they want to time travel to.<br>
<br>
The three acts of the Tomorrow Party are designed to help people think with the future in relation to their past experiences. The first act helps guests prepare to time travel. The focus is on noticing positive shifts toward the future in the present and speculating on what needs to change for a more just and equitable future world to be realised. The second act has guests travel to a possible future that is intentionally just around the corner. The party has guests meet at a specific event to make the experience located and as specific as possible. This specificity helps people imagine who they are and what they are doing in this world together. The last act has people braid together their visions for the future. This sharing allows all guests a sense of what is possible and desirable to be informed by the diversity of experiences at the party.<br>
<br>
The Māori proverb “Ka mua, Ka muri” translates to walking backwards into the future — folding how we perceive time.<br>
<br>
The decision for the three acts to collapse the past/present/future is influenced by Indigenous conceptions of time as non-linear. Folding time allowed guests’ lived experiences, and those of their kin, to be carried forth into a potentially liberating futures. Revealing as much about what is needed today as tomorrow.<br>
<br>
<b>Box. A Party in 3 Acts</b><br>
<b>ACT ONE: MINGLING</b> The first act is about preparing people to travel to the future. A slide or table-top card introduces a broadly outlined future with the phrase “In a world where…” To avoid conversations getting stuck on why change cannot happen, the first prompt to guests is to introduce themselves by sharing one moment when they can see this future world hiding in the present. The second prompt asks guests to reflect on how they individually would need to act differently to adapt to this future world. 20 minutes.<br>
<br>
<b>ACT TWO: IMAGINING</b> In the second act, people time travel in pairs to an event (such as a conference or awards night) five years into the future. Guests’ are asked to speak in first person experience in the present tense as they describe the world they are living in and what they see happening around them. The hosts demonstrate how to help unsettle familiar narratives and invite the listener to actively help the storymaker move beyond default talking points. 30 minutes.<br>
<br>
<b>ACT THREE: CONNECTING </b>After two or three rounds of time travelling with different pairs, people return to their first conversation partners and join another pair at a table. Staying in the near future, the time travellers make connections across the futures they have envisaged. With guests’ personal and professional experiences inevitably informing the future they have visited, this co-creative act of listening to different tomorrow stories adds more texture and colour by co-mingling the future worlds people imagined. The Party ends with toasts to the imagined future, as a whole group. 20 minutes + 10 minutes.<br>
<br>
<b>Designing the Tomorrow Party</b><br>
<i>Over a period of 8 months we playtested, iterated and refined the core elements of the Tomorrow Party. The insights shared in this report are evidence of what can be learned from piloting a method across multiple contexts.</i><br>
<br>
The three parties we hosted that formally included post-party feedback helped us understand the guests’ experiences. The extra parties played a critical role in making space to try new ideas, test what might break the party and ultimately refine what works.<br>
<br>
<b>MULTIPLE METHODS </b>Our research focused on guest reflections on what it felt like to time travel and if anything changed for them. Our methods included short video interviews and written guestbook comments directly postparty, and thank you letters inviting feedback and follow-up interviews a fortnight later. Understanding guest experiences helped us refine the party format and clarify the potential of the creative method.<br>
<br>
<b>MAKING SENSE </b>We recorded the Act 3 table conversations and transcribed a summary of the tomorrow stories. Co-hosts, like Fire to Flourish, could then use this material to advance their policy discussions. We also analysed the conversations to understand how first-person futures might be different from other methods for learning from direct experience.<br>
<br>
<b>MUTUAL LEARNING </b>Our responsible research commitment to creating a space for mutual learning required us to examine the policy potential policy and the guests’ experience. Similarly, the value placed on first-hand experience invited and challenged us to explore how our cultural backgrounds and academic orientations might productively guide how we negotiated our interdisciplinary collaboration.<br>
<br>
<i>479 PARTY GUESTS TIME TRAVELLED<br>
12 TOMORROW PARTIES HOSTED<br>
COUNTLESS TOMORROW STORIES, CUPS OF TEA, PINTS OF BEER, SCONES, LAMINGTONS &amp; CANAPES</i><br>
<br>
<b>GUESTS:</b> Policy makers, Social Innovators, Change-agents, Government Delegates, Co-designers, Public Servants, Educators, Community Leads, Researchers, Youth<br>
<b>THEMES:</b> Community-led Bushfire Resilience, Health and Climate Action, Neurodivergence and the Education System, Creativity and Policymaking, Indigenous-led Social Innovation, Lived Experience and Policymaking, Transformative Partnerships, Responsible Research, Transformative Change and Play Research, Doctoral Education and Social Impact<br>
<b>LOCATIONS: </b>Sydney, Australia; Melbourne, Australia; Online, Australia; Brisbane, Australia; London, England; Auckland, Aotearoa NZ; Dunedin, Aotearoa NZ; Kolding, Denmark; Prato, Italy; Dubai, UAE<br>
<br>
<b>Box. Key Engagement Insights</b><br>
Guests often asked if we could host one for them or if they could host one themselves. Here are some tips:<br>
<br>
<b>Engagement:</b>The party format works for about 95%. People described it as both exhilarating and uncomfortable, or energising and challenging. We witnessed the reticence up front and the deep engagement by the end. We observed someone always wished for more defined scenarios or simply rejected the speculative premise. However, many self-described pessimists commented on the value of thinking with hope.<br>
<b>Optimal Scale: </b>We hosted parties with four people and 100+ people. The ideal scale for facilitation is nearer to 20-30, but for the guests the larger parties generated a different type of positive energy.<br>
<b>Co-hosts: </b>Taking the time pre-party to work with the subject-matter expert co-hosts was critical to framing the future world and designing a meaningful experience.<br>
<b>Venues: </b>We hosted Tomorrow Parties in corporate offices, bars, open spaces and online. The online breakout spaces failed to create a party atmosphere, yet the chat sharing of worlds worked. The less corporate the space the easier it was to invite people to bring their whole selves. Yet a crucial consideration proved to be acoustics. A room full of people talking at once was challenging for many people.<br>
<b>Contexts:</b> The parties that were part of another gathering were highly successful. Conferences proved to be an excellent context for bringing diverse stakeholders together. The invite-only events worked best for connected communities with a shared purpose.<br>
<br>
<b>Section 2: Why a Tomorrow Party?</b><br>
<i>We designed the Tomorrow Party to be useful for policy making processes. We wanted to know how policy settings could support effective, fair and inspiring outcomes for the people they affect, even in the face of unpredictable and complex futures. We developed a dual approach: a method that draws on direct experience that is co-creative rather than extractive for participants, and a futures method that is anticipatory rather than predictive.</i><br>
<br>
In the Tomorrow Party, we want people to move beyond plausible futures that are limited by what is knowable today. Instead, we encourage people to creatively imagine a transformed tomorrow.<br>
<br>
Our approach complements current policy making approaches that engage people’s past life experiences to help inform future policy directions and decisions. It departs from approaches that value stability and individual visions of the future that aim to mitigate risk. Such methods seek to plan for what will happen by relying on policy precedents, demographic data, horizon scanning and economic models. The semblance of objectivity and certainty that predictive planning models, such as cost-benefit analysis, offer can be reassuring. However, policy decisions will play out in diverse and dynamic futures, which call for methods that can also navigate uncertainty and the not-yet-knowable. The Tomorrow Party responds to this challenge by building imaginative skills, along with a sense of shared commitment and purpose. It enables optimism and agency in the face of complex and accelerating social and environmental change.<br>
<br>
The Tomorrow Party’s engagement with first-hand experience and engagement with diverse futures is a unique contribution to policy thinking. The method privileges complexity and emergence over certainty and prediction, an approach that is increasingly relevant in the face of serious global challenges. The diverse perspectives the Tomorrow Party reveals can complement other policy methods by gathering high-context evidence of what it could feel like to live in the plural worlds where policy will play out.<br>
<br>
The Tomorrow Party connects the act of social mobilisation with the co-creation of tomorrow stories. The party is committed to creating a rewarding experience for participants and offering insights that speak to what matters for the people grappling with the consequences of policy choices.<br>
<br>
The reciprocal exchange of the Tomorrow Party makes it relevant to policy. Surfacing tacit beliefs and values is illuminating and empowering for guests. In exchange, policy analysts and researchers heard stories of people’s future hopes and dreams.<br>
<br>
The speculative ethos supported people to define problems, imagine implications, mobilise action and analyse policy options in this pilot. The method was clearly relevant at these stages of policy making. Further research could explore how Tomorrow Party prompts could be adapted to policy implementation and evaluation phases, for example by incorporating first-person perspectives.<br>
<br>
Tomorrow stories are uniquely helpful to reveal what the present policy environment is not delivering. Working with Indigenous conceptions of time, the Tomorrow Party intentionally collapses the past, present and future. The starting place for thinking with the future is individuals’ past experience, instead of abstract models or decontextualised scenarios. This encourages plural visions of the future. Such personalised futures are relevant to real-time decision-making because they signal the changes people want. By analysing recorded tomorrow stories, we can learn what might be needed to strategically plan, build preparedness and forge the coalitions needed for those future visions to materialise.<br>
<br>
<b>Section 3: A Tomorrow Party Case Study</b><br>
<i>Policy development phases align well with the potential contribution of the Tomorrow Party. Here we organise method insights under policy phases, along with case study insights from a Tomorrow Party co-hosted with our research partner Fire to Flourish. This party provided a proof of concept for multiple possibilities and potentials. It is a instructive case study for understanding the wider potential of the party.</i><br>
<br>
The Fire to Flourish Tomorrow Party gathered NGOs, policymakers, researchers, Indigenous community leads and disaster resilience professionals with experience of bushfire recovery. The party, held in a pub with about 60 guests, tapped into peoples’ first-hand experiences and shared purpose. The quotes reveal how the method supports people to imagine how they will action together their commitment to community-led resilience.<br>
<br>
<b>POLICY SCOPING AND PLANNING</b><br>
For Fire to Flourish, tomorrow stories enabled people to have wide-ranging conversations drived by their expertise and concerns. As one group worked on how government and insurance companies could come together post a 2027 flood, another explored how millenia-old Indigenous practices could mitigate bushfire risks. “It wasn’t like, oh, this community over here are facing climate change and rising waters. It’s like, no, no, this is about you. And whoever is in your orbit…making it in the first person makes us experts in our own space. That’s really lovely, which then allows for agency.”<br>
<br>
<b>BUILDING CAPACITY AND PARTNERSHIPS</b><br>
The Fire to Flourish party convened allies and partners from all sectors and regions on the evening before a national conference. “It was lovely to be in a space where you have a chat with two people. And we’re on the same page, but you think differently.”<br>
<br>
<b>MOBILISING AND ADVOCATING</b><br>
Fire to Flourish were clear in their objective that the party was an initial step to bring together the right people and build the relationships needed to do the ongoing work of developing a nation-wide agenda. “It’s a relief…a good relief…like a “Wow, that was achieved”. And now that that was achieved, what else can we achieve? Or what else can we help the community achieve individually and collectively?”<br>
<br>
<b>INTERROGATING AND IMAGINING</b><br>
Guests at the Fire to Flourish party noted how hierarchies were scrambled and diverse knowledges were valued. The focus on lived experience legitimises that all personal and professional expertise are relevant. “I think what’s changed for me is that I’m really reaffirmed in my conviction that it’s important to bring diverse ways of knowing about the world or any topic together in an environment that distributes power, that diffuses power and enables people to connect as people first.”<br>
<br>
The Tomorrow Party can support early policy scoping and planning in a distinctly creative, pluralistic approach by:

 Generating qualitative and affective insights for scoping new policy.
 Complementing decontextualised data sets with personalised, local stories.
 Learning what matters to people.
 Strategically looking back to backcast how to get to the desired future.

In bringing together a range of stakeholders, the method helps develop a policy position informed by professional and personal expertise. In return, the act of sharing futures with others elevated individuals’ sense of agency and created collective optimism about what would be possible working together by:


 Prioritising preferable over probable futures.
 Getting comfortable with future uncertainties.
 Co-creating with a range of stakeholders.
 Engaging with multiple senses, and valuing different types of evidence.
 Experiencing how small nudges can shift systems.
 Generating plural futures to respect difference.
 Imagining transformative futures that serve people and the planet.

Initial ideas for the party had us partnering with Fire to Flourish to invite community members with direct experience of the 2019/2020 Australian bushfires. We envisaged people with first-hand experience sharing their stories for the future in conversation with policy makers.<br>
<br>
Our partnership quickly laid bare two assumptions. First, Fire to Flourish recognised their policy objectives around community-led resilience would need a broad coalition and set of shared commitments. This expanded our guest list to people who had lived through Australia’s Black Summer; whether they had lost their home, been a volunteer fireman, or a Red Cross director. Second, we observed people co-created more detailed tomorrow stories if talking to peers with shared commitments and experiences, rather than conversing with a policy maker.<br>
<br>
The goodwill and optimism that came with imagining desired futures created a valuable starting point for mobilising partnerships and collectively advocating for what matters by:

 Listening to what motivates people.
 Building rapid rapport to mobilise partners.
 Valuing diverse experiences and perspectives.
 Generating hope by envisioning how change can be seeded.
 Forging a sense of purpose and shared commitments.
 Leaving people feeling agential and motivated.

The Tomorrow Party challenges people to build imaginative capacity by recognising that interrogating who a future serves and doesn’t serve is critical by:


 Respecting people as experts of their own experience.
 Considering how policy might unfold for the people affected by it.
 Learning from high-context perspectives.
 Being curious about lived experiences, and respecting multitudes.
 Reflecting on how present policies shape lives.
 Examining bias and assumptions so futures do not amplify inequities

<b>Section 4: Comparing Methods</b><br>
<i>The Tomorrow Party sits alongside a breadth of futures, lived experience and participatory methods. These methods are especially relevant for contemporary policy and change making practices. Here we consider how the creative layer of speculation within the Tomorrow Party contrasts and complements existing methods.</i><br>
<br>
<b>UNCERTAIN FUTURES</b><br>
Futures methods, like cost-benefit analysis and economic modelling, are useful for planning and preparing for what could happen. Alternatively, the Tomorrow Party, like experiential and simulationbased methods, is designed to explore possible futures. Given the dynamic unpredictability that comes with the extreme weather, emerging technologies and geopolitical conflict, it is important that we build our capacity to engage with the inherent uncertainty of the future.<br>
<br>
<b>FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCE</b><br>
A range of methods exist to observe or make sense of peoples’ experiences. For example, interviews can help to understand past experiences, and diaries can explore the present. In contrast, the Tomorrow Party’s interest in first-person futures aligns more with experiential futures and community visioning workshops. We value the increased commitment to including ‘lived experience’ insights in policy and yet are wary that some methods risk serving the policy maker at the expense of the person whose life story is being ‘captured’. This can be pronounced in contexts where people are called upon to revisit harrowing or dehumanising experiences. The Tomorrow Party learns from peoples’ pasts by exploring their hopes for the future. In doing so, guests are invited to draft a new story.<br>
<br>
<b>COLLECTIVE IMAGINING</b><br>
Community dialogues and co-design workshops are two methods that prioritise citizen participation in decision-making. Whereas these methods might favour consensus-building or solution-seeking, the Tomorrow Party embraces the plurality of individuals’ stories. We believe a crisis of imagination limits our capacity to see how we might create more just and equitable policies. We need methods that resist a pull to rationalise and generalise what is needed or wanted. By grounding the act of imagining in the Tomorrow Party in a social context, we ensure diverse perspectives, complex histories and personal values are not erased, but folded into interrogating social implications for the future.<br>
<br>
<b>Box:<br>
When the method fits best</b><br>
The Tomorrow Party method is relevant if you want to hear diverse voices, explore what mat - ters to guests, build connections and motivate people to act. Working across policy phases, tomorrow stories can help scope a policy, bring partners together to mobilise and advocate specific agendas, or potentially support the implementation of a policy by service providers.<br>
<br>
<b>When to try another method</b><br>
A creative method that respects subjective, plural futures will not work for an audience who seeks certainty and prefers quantitative evidence. Similarly, the speculative orientation would not translate if the objective is to fix plans for a probable future. From a cultural and accessibility perspective, people need to be able to communicate. We have hosted parties with pairs speaking different languages, and neurodivergent partners have chosen to walk and talk to escape loud chatter. However, the conversational method would not be appropriate if people are non-verbal or hear - ing impaired.<br>
<br>
<b>What is needed for a party to work</b><br>
First and foremost, guests need a shared sense of purpose. Without a reason to share their visions for the future, the mutual learning that comes with co-creating stories will be limited. No foresight experience is needed to participate, but we have observed guests who have struggled to improvise or be optimistic. Making things up or suspending judgment is not easy if you are: naturally critical, navigating power asymme - tries, recalling trauma, usually pessimistic, often definitive or simply unfamiliar with imaginative speculation.<br>
<br>
The creative sensibility of brainstorming or improv’s “yes, and…” calls on people to be more creative than critical. The playful togetherness and levity this brings supports fellow guests to be bold, vulnerable and imaginative.<br>
<br>
<b>Section 5: How to Facilitate a Party</b><br>
<i>To learn from people’s life experiences, we need more than detached, objective accounts. The Tomorrow Party calls for guests to engage holistically — to attune to what their experiences want from the future and how their expertise might be enacted. The creative invitation of time travel offers insights into what people long for that might not easily be voiced in other encounters.</i><br>
<br>
<b>ACTIVITY PROMPTS ACROSS THE THREE ACTS</b><br>
<br>
<i><b>Current to Future State</b></i><br>
<b>ACT 1: MINGLING</b><br>
Each party has a theme tailored by the hosts for the guests convened. Before the event, co-hosts define the world they want to guests to visit — this ‘In a World Where…’ prompt frames the party’s purpose. The first mingling prompt, “Share a moment you’ve witnessed where…” asks guests to collect some ‘evidence’ that the future world is residing in the present. The follow-up prompt asks guests to “Consider how your role or organisation would need to change: In a World Where…”. The ideas generated seed visions for the future grounded in everyday stories of the present.<br>
<br>
<i><b>Time Traveller Prompts</b></i><br>
<b>ACT 2: IMAGINING</b><br>
Carrying the past into the travel requires scaffolding. The host establishes the value of folding the past/present/future and demonstrates how to bounce ideas off each other creatively. The storymaker is prompted to speak in the first-person, present tense. The listener is guided to ask follow-up questions to support the storymaker’s imagining. ‘Look outward’ asks for basic details of what they are doing and who they are with. ‘Look inward’ turns toward what it feels like to be in this world. ‘Look around’ asks the storymaker to pull back and share when and how they knew this future was what they longed for.<br>
<br>
<i><b>Future World Questions</b></i><br>
<b>ACT 3: CONNECTING</b><br>
How to facilitate the third act depends on the reason for hosting the party. For a party focused on using first-hand experience to inform policy, recording the tomorrow stories discussed during Act 2 means that they can be transcribed for analysis. For a party focused on forging partnerships and building coalitions, the Act 3 table conversations can make strategic connections across stories. At a party with guests who already work together, sharing stories opens a space for aligning personal motivations and imagined outcomes - this can seed opportunities for purposeful impact.<br>
<br>
<b>TOP THREE FACILITATION TIPS</b><br>
<br>
<b>Invite-a-friend</b><br>
In the early parties we observed repeatedly how the first round of time travelling felt stilted. Extending the initial invite to include a ‘plus one ‘ended up doing much more than making the first round easier. People took to heart the offer to invite someone they would like to time travel with. They often deliberated on who they might invite: a colleague, an old friend, a partner. This led to greater diversity, more social ease, and gratitude to be asked. Guests reported that time travelling with their plus one first allowed them to dive right in and keep the future stories alive post-party.<br>
<br>
<b>Gift a wildcard</b><br>
Initially, our instructions were focused on how to tell your story. We soon realised active listening could support the challenging task of imagining. The questions above helped, but the game changer was a wildcard observation that simultaneously unsettled and empowered the person creating their story. Here the listener drops into the future a time they witnessed the storymaker in action. Guests repeatedly said the wildcard, whether a prompt to discuss a keynote they’d delivered or a project they’d completed, productively called for improvising. This often changed how they saw themselves and their capacity to make a difference.<br>
<br>
<b>Close with Toasts</b><br>
We noted at the first party how people stayed a long time afterwards, keen to hear stories from people they hadn’t yet interacted with. People wanted to learn more from the cocreated worlds, yet resisted transitioning from the party atmosphere to a formal share-out. At the Fire to Flourish party, our co-hosts suggested we close out the event with toasts. Sometimes invited, sometimes volunteered, the toasts from the future became a highlight. People toasted specific stories they heard, summarised emerging themes, or championed manifestos. However witty or ernest, the toasts from the future were a fitting bridge back to the changes needed in the present.<br>
<br>
<b>How to Host a Party</b><br>
<i>Facilitating a Tomorrow Party requires the host to centre the guests’ experience. Whatever the context we learned that being good hosts was essential when creating a sociable, playful environment that made guests comfortable enough to do the uncomfortable work of imagining an uncertain and as-yet-unknowable future.</i><br>
<br>
For people to feel open to sharing deeper personal narratives and values it is important to attend to how to host, scope and scaffold the imaginative process. This list signals some of the ways the party can make that happen.<br>
<br>
<b>Hosting: Caring and Playful</b> 


 A playfully designed and open-ended invite sent in advance
 Time dedicated to guest lists, catering and venue
 Personal responses when people RSVP
 Greeting people with a reception card outlining the sequence of events • Creating space for mingling when people arrive
 Acknowledging that imagining the future is not easy
 Playfully demonstrating how to time travel
 Using time travel as a creative invitation to be audacious and dream

<br>
<b>Scoping: Storymaking and Purpose </b>


 Working with community co-host to frame the future world to explore
 Introductions frame the value of coming together to imagine
 Underscoring the individual’s experiences and expertise as critical
 Locating the individual in the future (not their organisation)
 Beginning with people reflecting on how their role in the future
 Offering questions that add detail to the tomorrow story
 Travelling with multiple people to move from storytelling to co-creating
 Ending with toasts from the future to forge the collective sense of purpose

<br>
<b>Imagining: Hope and Agency </b>


 Establishing hope by sharing evidence of the future in the present
 Speaking in the first-person to sense what the future is revealing
 Low stakes rehearsing the future helps build confidence
 A specific event to travel to to give context for the guests’ interactions
 Scaffolding the steps to imagining the future they are visiting
 Fast forwarding only five years focuses the imagination on personal shifts
 Wild Card prompts that centre the guests’ capacity to be an agent of change
 The specificity of a Wild Card helps guests from being too abstract

The most exhilarating and yet challenging part of the gathering is travelling in time. We learned to model how the guest listening can stage questions that help the storymaker’s hard work of imagining the unknown a little easier. At the beginning of Act 2 we would demonstrate shows how a wildcard question might leave people temporarily unsettled, which is not just okay, but necessary if we hope to imagine another way forward.<br>
<br>
We observed early on in Act 2 that people needed a few rounds to rehearse their tomorrow story before sharing in Act 3. We structured the first five minute round of time travel as simply telling their story or asking for more details. The second round, called for more colouring in. With each round guests would visibly settle into their futures and begin to build on the collective stories they are hearing.<br>
<br>
<b>Section 6: Lessons from the Party</b><br>
<i>With the Tomorrow Party we set out to develop a different approach to learning from peoples’ first-hand experiences. Through reciprocal encounters amongst participants, the creative method is designed to empower the person sharing their experience as well as to generate informative policy insights.</i><br>
<br>
The key lessons from the Tomorrow Party pilots can be distilled into the following qualities, affordances and commitments.<br>
<br>
STORYMAKING &amp; PURPOSE<br>
The Tomorrow Party folds time to bring first-hand experience together with visions of the future, and connect this to policy goals. Its conversational, speculative approach builds imaginative skills in guests (page 12).<br>
<br>
POLICY &amp; PARTNERSHIPS<br>
Through its design, the Tomorrow Party can speak to different stages of policy making. It is great for building goodwill and shared purpose, supporting other methods that plan specific policy details (page 14).<br>
<br>
SITUATED &amp; ADAPTIVE<br>
The Tomorrow Party can be adapted for different policy phases, taking on the distinctive character of the context. As a relational, creative futures method, it is most effective at navigating uncertainty and mobilizing diverse actors for future action (page 08, 16).<br>
<br>
CARING &amp; PLAYFUL<br>
Speculation can feel unsettling. Hosts must care for party-goers through a purposefully supportive atmosphere built through facilitation style, and design of materials, demonstrations and prompts (page 18,20).<br>
<br>
CONNECTION &amp; COMMITMENT<br>
The Tomorrow Party builds rapport and a sense of commitment to better futures. It complements policy development techniques that adopt more quantitative or predictive ways of thinking about the future (page 12, 16).<br>
<br>
HOPE &amp; AGENCY<br>
The imaginative force that animates the Tomorrow Party creates a feeling of agency toward the future. Imagining new futures shifts peoples’ perception of the future, in return seeding a belief that transformative change is possible (page 14, 20).<br>
<br>
<b>Box:</b><br>
The distinctive nature of the Tomorrow Party is its commitment to respectful, reciprocal and relational engagement with peoples’ stories.<br>
<b>Purpose-led: </b>We work with community co-hosts to outline the reason we are gathering and the world we will travel to. The guest list is as considered as the party’s purpose. The guests commitment to the future is deepened by speaking in the first-person of what it feels like to live in the co-created world. The shared purpose further catalyses connection and invites the sharing of personal experiences.<br>
<b>Playful Atmosphere: </b>The party atmosphere is intentionally convivial and light. The experience needs to feel unfamil - iar enough that people can let go of work - place rules and get out of their heads. While simultaneously being a familiar enough social experience that guests can take risks together. This playfulness is baked into the novelty of the event, the invitation to time travel and the improvisation that comes with engaging your imagination.<br>
<b>People-centred: </b>To host a meaningful yet playful party requires that every touchpoint signals to guests that they are being taken care of. Workplace meetings centre the agenda, whereas a Tomorrow Party centres peoples’ lives. Business etiquette is superceded by party rules that make it okay to be audacious, uncertain, bold. Liberated from the need to know the answers, guests can let themselves feel unsure, excited, vulnerable, relieved, optimistic and hopeful.<br>
<br>
<b>Section 7: The Authors</b><br>
Our research practices as policy makers, designers and researchers deeply informed our approach to developing and evaluating the party as well as how we positioned ourselves in this project.<br>
<br>
As a co-design researcher, Professor Lisa Grocott brings to the transdisciplinary collaboration an understanding of creative research engagement and how to design transformative encounters. The party’s commitment to a relational and reciprocal approach is further shaped by Lisa’s Indigenous perspective as a Māori (Ngati Kahugnunu) woman raised in Aotearoa.<br>
<br>
Associate Professor Shanti Sumartojo’s expertise in human geography, atmospheres and ethnography illuminates the context of research impact as placebased and grounded in lived experience. Shanti and Lisa are Co-Directors of WonderLab at Monash University.<br>
<br>
Professor Michael Mintrom’s expertise in public policy and his commitment to creative policy making allowed for an informed yet expansive approach to piloting how the Tomorrow Party could play a role in effective and equitable policy development. Michael was the founding Director of Better Governance and Policy at Monash University.<br>
<br>
The three co-investigators were joined by Professor Stacy Holman Jones and research fellows Dr Hannah Korsmeyer and Myf Doughty. Stacy’s experience with storymaking and embodied methods helped create party processes that encouraged collaborative, meaningful and fun ways to influence how people might perceive the present and imagine more just and equitable futures. Hannah’s expertise in designing futures workshops and focus on anticipatory thinking is anchored by her experience working on large public and private sector climate transition projects. Myf’s relational and creative approach to exploring how and why we gather ensured we bought a carebased approach to party hosting and analysis of the tomorrow stories.<br>
<br>
<b>Section 8: References</b><br>
These research practices, scholarship and social in - novation practices that has influenced our approaches to lived experience, policymaking, creative practice and transformative change.<br>
<br>
<i><b>A selection of our research projects and books</b></i>


 TheTomorrowParty.com
 DesigningSocialImpact.com
 DesigningTransformativeLearning.com
 Advancing Policy Design for Robots in Public Space
 Policy Entrepreneurs and Dynamic Change
 Public Policy: Investing for a Better World
 Contemporary Policy Analysis
 Design Ethnography: research, responsibilities, and futures
 Affective Movements, Methods and Pedagogies
 Atmospheres and the Experiential World

<br>
<i><b>Who we’ve been reading</b></i>


 Nora Bateson, Tyson Yunkaporta, Nikolaj Schultz, Lucy Kimbell, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Emma Blomkamp, Karlijn Muiderman, Adrienne Maree Brown, Jenny Odell, Arturo Escobar, Erin Manning.

<i><b>Projects that inspire us</b></i>


 Storytelling for Systems Change (Centre of Public Impact)
 Places to Practise: Everyone. Every Day. Initiative
 Systemic: a game for applying systems change thinking to policy (Policy Lab UK)
 Auckland Co-Design Lab: exploring our relationship to data and evidence
 FuturGov Game: Knowledge for Policy
 Three horizons framework to seed futures (Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation) 
 Marshmallowlaserfeast.com
 ClimateFresk.org
 Sustainable Futures Game: Creatures-eu