Futures Garden
Enter a living garden of futures where Europe’s next chapters begin to sprout.
Futures Garden brings policymakers and society together to explore what the future may hold. Using speculative artefacts - tangible or visual tools that make possible futures concrete, spark imagination, evoke emotional responses, and inspire reflection - and cultivating a collaborative environment where questioning, imagining, and co-creating become possible.
Diverse perspectives converge here to envision bold possibilities and shape a vibrant, resilient, and inclusive future for Europe.
Proactively preparing for bold futures requires experimenting with new policy ideas and anticipating emerging challenges.
Futures Garden provides a dedicated environment for policymakers to explore and ‘provo-type’ (think proactive + prototype) these futures, allowing emerging ideas to be planted, tested on a small scale, nurtured, and refined before being scaled into full policies.
This iterative process fosters reflection, experimentation, and evidence-informed decision-making, enabling innovative solutions to take root, grow resilient, and blossom in response to complex societal challenges. Preparing adaptive policies that are ready to navigate uncertainty and shape the future with intention.
Futures Garden artefacts - glimpses of tomorrow
Artefacts from the future bring to life potential scenarios, offering tangible starting points for in-depth and critical discussions. These artefacts encourage us to reimagine everyday life and society.
Set in the Symbiocene era of the 2050s, a time marked by an expanded understanding of intelligence beyond human confines, Symbiotic explores a revolutionary breakthrough: our interconnected humanity and our relationship to the ecosystems of planet Earth and all life.
The 2050s are a time of deep social reconfiguration. No longer believing in the myth of perpetual economic growth, recipes for self-empowerment, and technological fixes, citizens of Europe seek to regain agency by turning inwards.
After Jubilee is a speculative radio show set in a future Europe, a after Jubilee; a mass erasure of debt, a new calendar system, and a restructuring of societal and economic priorities.
Lost and found is an interactive and collective experience set in a future Europe.
How Futures Garden works
Each seed in the garden follows this journey to grow and flourish.
- Horizon Scanning: We dive into cutting-edge ideas and emerging trends, identifying opportunities that could shape Europe's future (Horizon Scanning - ESPAS)
- Speculative Design: Our creative process transforms abstract concepts into tangible, thought-provoking scenarios, making future possibilities more accessible and engaging
- Citizen Engagement: We delve into the societal implications of these speculative scenarios, gathering diverse perspectives and insights from citizens of the EU.
- Policy Reflection: The final step involves analysing the potential impact of these innovative ideas on policymaking, ensuring that future EU policies are forward-thinking, inclusive, and impactful.
Context
How did it come about
To give some more context of why and with whom the project was initiated:
- Support future-oriented policymaking – in line with the Foresight and Innovative Policymaking Portfolio of the JRC.
- Engage in collective visioning – using speculative design to create artefacts that make futures tangible, imaginable, emotionally engaging, and easier to discuss.
- Provide policymakers dedicated spaces – to 'provo-type' with the future through experimentation and ideation, exploring emerging directions and possibilities.
Partners
We are grateful to our partners, supporting us at an early stage: Directorate General for Research and innovation and Foresight on Demand team (Institutul de Prospectiva, Austrian Institute of Technology, Fraunhofer ISI, Futures2all, Futurlab).
This is a collaborative effort and your involvement makes a difference.
Interested in contributing or have questions?
jrc-eu-policy-lab
ec [dot] europa [dot] eu (> Write to us)