Imagining the future with young people
By: Finn Strivens
Tags: Design, Youth, Imagination, Foresight, Speculative Design

A year of doing and learning as an NGFP fellow

In August 2020 I won the NGFP walkabout award, a prize to support U25 year-olds engage young people with foresight. For this fellowship, I decided to develop experimental foresight methods to engage young people. This meant exploring media forms, formats, occasions and messaging that might make it appealing for young people to participate in imagining the future and that might give them an opportunity to share their perspectives.

The central and (I think) most exciting project of my NGFP fellowship has been TikTok futures, a workshop format I developed to empower young people to imagine possible futures. By handing young people a camera or phone and telling them to film their own future visions, it enables them to directly share their voice with their peers, and to add to a growing number of youth future visions on TikTok.

The workshop was co-developed through co-creation sessions with young people from Young Creators UK, a youth group in south London, before being run for their members in a 3-day event. In the workshop TikTok is first used as a worldbuilding tool; young people imagine what kinds of social media videos they will see in a number of future scenarios. Then young people make their own speculative videos to share directly with their peers and beyond. I’m looking for new groups of young people to try a shortened version with if anyone is interested…

The fellowship also supported me to experiment with role-play as a tool for exploring alternative futures. This included developing a role play citizens assembly about the future of wind energy, and a role-play session for the UN Development Program for future generations to explore possible implications of negative emissions technologies. In this session, participants stepped into the shoes of fictional members of local communities in 2060 where they compared two different futures where either BECCS or Afforestation had been the primary method of carbon capture. By discussing their various ‘un-lived experiences’, they explored together what negative emissions technologies might mean for society.

Finally, the fellowship supported my work on a virtual online game adapted from The Thing From the Future. Working with the Imperial College Geoscience department, I wanted to find a way to bring foresight into university science outreach with young people. Rather than being lectured about possible future careers, young people were empowered to imagine their own futures and their own possible geoscience careers in worlds adapting to climate change.

If I learned one thing…

If I learned one thing from the award it would be to try to trust my instinct when doing foresight work. When I graduated from my design degree my projects didn’t really look like other people’s — there were no nice product renders or beautiful branding — but I also didn’t think it counted as foresight. At that point I could easily have taken a different direction, but the NGFP award was a vote of confidence, saying “this is foresight and you should try this out”. Throughout the process Cat has encouraged me to follow my instincts and to follow my own vision of what a project should look like.

She articulates the value of the NGFP programme as a way to embody horizon 3 thinking, by planting seeds of transformational futures in the present. I am not worrying about how to ‘become’ or ‘mould’ myself into a foresight practitioner, but trying to do interesting projects, to stretch my comfort zones, and to prototype what foresight work could look like in the future.

Adapting my plans to enact a vision

I didn’t set out to do this strange assortment of projects. My original vision for NGFP was to start a youth collective — a group of 6–10 young people to creatively engage other young people about the future. The group would develop more youth-friendly futures methods that could engage young people through their languages and modes of communication and so unearth surprising insights from young people.

My challenge then was that I had a very clear vision for the purpose of the youth collective, a vision that I wanted to try, but also one that involved adapting or developing new foresight methods. Without any projects in the pipeline or methods to draw from, I struggled to put together a coherent group to make this ‘collective’ actually, well….collective. Eventually, I realised that meant starting small, building a practice with an identity, and then bringing people in through tangible projects at different scales.

This gave birth to Futurall, a small design studio with ambitions to use design and creativity to involve people, [particularly young people, in imaginative projects, consultations, and planning. With co-founder Eva Oosterlaken we are building a range of futures methods and projects, with a focus on involving young people in production and design.

So what now?

Where do I go from here? My first plan is to keep running TikTok futures. I want to find new groups to run it with, and experiment doing it virtually, in day-long or even hour-long sessions, and on a host of different topics. I have a vision of a TikTok account or hashtag that has hundreds of speculative future videos from young people all around the world. If you know some young people who might be interested then please do get in touch!

Finally, Futurall is in the final stages of branding — so watch this space! I can’t wait to share our vision and what it is starting to become.