Last week, we kicked-off the Futures Rooms with two co-creation workshops! We took the participants on a time travel journey into space with the mission to find a “new planet” because our planet Earth had become uninhabitable by the year 2050. We split the participants into small teams each with the task to explore a different planet ruled by an element and where different “properties” as characteristics were more prominent: Earth, Fire, Air, Water & Life.
The PLANETS are then fictional spaces with different properties, and without implicitly mentioned, each planet had an aspect of the European Green Deal embedded in the narrative.
Earth (2.0): chaos, climate change, collapse, hope → Food & Agriculture
Fire: warmth, destruction, rebirth, energy → Energy
Air: freedom, fast-pace, new mindset, transformation → Zero Pollution
Water: spiritual, peace, tradition, resources → Oceans
Life: action, activism, diversity, new beginnings → Biodiversity
After arriving on their planets, participants had to complete five different exercises to discover their planet and report back to Earth in 2021.
ACTIVITY 1: NARRATIVE
Participants had to read a narrative that described the planet they were assigned to, and imagine what the new world looks like. We asked them to picture this world, how inhabitants interact, move around, gather and live, the interconnection between the different entities in this planet and their respective actions and reactions.
ACTIVITY 2: MESSAGE FROM THE FUTURE
After the participants had familiarized themselves with the initial narrative of their planet, we asked them to individually send back a message from their planet in the future to Planet Earth, reporting on their first impressions. For this activity, we provided a template with a series of prompt questions to help them describe nature, resources, people’s creations and more, with the option to add visuals for a more detailed outcome.
ACTIVITY 3: WORLDVIEW
The third activity brought participants together to dig deeper and understand the different worldviews that existed on this special planet. For this, the initial ideas written on the messages were collected and clustered around the areas of purpose, mindset, resources, culture, creations and nature. The participants had to discuss the different perspectives collected from each message and decide whether these items were plausible and coherent or they needed to be dismissed to continue the planet’s exploration.
ACTIVITY 4: SYSTEM
After looking at the worldview on each planet, participants were asked to unpack system-level characteristics in a wheel, to start fleshing out their world in more detail. We used the well-known framework STEEPV but we added a letter H for Habitat. Below the prompt questions that guided participants through this exercise.
S - Which social structures does the planet have?
T - What new technologies have been developed?
E - How is the relationship with nature?
E - Is there an exchange of goods/services? If so, how does it work?
P - How does governance look like?
V - What are the key values or ethical principles?
H - How do inhabitants live on this planet?
ACTIVITY 5: THE PITCH
The last activity of the workshop was to create a 1-2 min pitch to report back to Planet Earth and the other groups about their planet and share whether people should visit or avoid this planet, and why? Each group had to answer the questions below, before returning back to Earth and presenting their planet to the plenum.
What is the name of your planet?
What is happening on the planet?
How was your experience on this planet?
What did you learn?
Should others visit or avoid it?
WORKSHOP RESULTS
Click on the image below to access the overview workshop canvas that guides you to each of the planets with the consolidated results of both kick-off events.
WATCH THE RECORDING
NEXT STEPS
You made it this far, please continue with the following three steps:
Read the New Narratives we've created from the consolidated workshops' insights.
Join our Persona Challenge and imagine a figure living on each of the planets
Share your Character in the Futures Rooms dedicated to each planet on this platform
FUTURES ROOMS
