What’s in your futures toolkit?
You’re at the grocery, planning a last-minute happy hour. You need those crackers, a few cheeses, some meat, pickled things and spreads—a jam, a mustard. You’re in the condiment aisle. Which mustard? There are 50 types. Dry, aged, peppery, yellow? Smooth, textured? Do you need to pick out everything else first, in order to figure out the mustard? Why is this such a challenge?
There are hundreds of toolkits out in the internets, buried in consultancy websites, waving from the homepage of a young non-profit with a mission to promote, and entombed in dissertations. They can be just as hard to decipher and exhausting to sample as the mustard aisle.
We’ve been collecting toolkits for years. While collecting and hoarding them is a wonderful way to procrastinate, it’s time to share them, too. Each listing has a short summary and/or key elements to summarize the its purpose and what it might offer for your imagination needs.
We’ll keep sharing, so check back for updates.
Futures Out Loud
Futures Out Loud is a design game to help participants think about futures in an engaging and approachable way. The game is intended to introduce participants to key futures concepts, weak signals about social, technological, political and other dimensions, along with prompts to stimulate a thought about how an issue could evolve over time. The game has been used in professional and educational settings.
Intended for groups of 3-4
Produced by North Highland
Release
2020
Equitable Futures Toolkit
The Equitable Futures Toolkit starts from the premise that today’s solutions need to be grounded in extraordinary visions of the future. They need to take into account past and present forces that are reshaping human society today as well as the first, second, and third-order consequences of any solutions society might propose.
Intended for informal or formal settings, a full-day workshop, a 4-hour workshop, and 1.5-hour workshop.
Produced by Institute for the Future
Release
2019
Trend Cards
A set of cards based on the trends identified by the Center for the Future of Libraries is available for you to use as you and your colleagues think about the future. Each card includes information about the trend and considerations for why it might matter for libraries. The cards can be used in many ways, including as conversation starters with colleagues and members of the community, as mapping tools to illustrate how trends fit together or how they fit into your community, or as starting material for innovation exercises. As the Center identifies new trends, supplement card packs will be made available.
Intended for conversations, unstructured. Two worksheets guide signal research or storytelling.
Produced by American Library Association
Release
2017
The Actionable Futures Toolkit is a set of canvases made to work for you in building and aligning a future for an organisation, service or a product.
The usage varies regarding the scope and the context, but so far we have run this with a large financial organisation, an advanced R&D unit, a media company and several startups. And it works beautifully. Now we want to share our work with the world, with learnings and instructions how to run the session once, consequently and in parts diving deep into the strategy and business models that make futures real. All parts can be executed over a long intensive day, or over several days session, one task each.
Intended for a large-ish diverse group around 6-10 people
Produced by Nordkapp
Release
2018
Related
Nordkapp on Medium
Imagining Feminist Futures After COVID-19 is a project coordinated by IWDA with support from actors across the feminist movement. It aims to enable feminist organisations and networks to imagine COVID-19 as a catalyst of future opportunity providing tools to think through the ways in which the COVID-19 crisis is changing the future trajectories – both positive and negative – for feminist social change.
Intended for 5-20 people over 3 hours
Produced by IWDA, IT for Change, Gender at Work, Oxfam International, Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, and Changeist
Release
2020
World Game
The World Game is a collaborative role-playing game about sustainability and resilience designed for groups wanting to activity their place into of view wide a current global challenges. It is a fun way to engage with the big picture of what is happening and what might happen in our world, that we will need to respond to. In the game, we role-play different ways of engaging with our real-world challenges than our usual one. This gives us permission to be creative and ‘think outside the box’. Like in any form of lateral thinking, often insights ideas generated in and the turn game out to be very useful in the real world.
Intended for 4, 6, or 12 people
Produced by International Futures Forum
Related
International Futures Forum
