All the needs and interventions identified through this process focus on people, emotions, social relations and social negotiations.

From dominant trends to “ways of being”

The pathways or imaginaries described in this report pick up on technologies because of the dominant trends which we asked participants to use when building their future pathways. By focusing on technical artefacts, conventional foresight methods can be bounded and framed in a way that allows us to imagine what we are already familiar with.

It is easy to imagine a future artefact, for example a technology, its material form and function, however it is difficult to imagine more intangible things like the future of social negotiation, future sources of wisdom, or the way humans might relate. A significant outcome of the pilot was that the participants were able to explore future “ways of being”, whether that was described through future states of emotion or future sources of wisdom. This opened up a place of creative problem making, one where issues that we might not know how todeal with are brought to the fore.

More practically speaking, it was difficult for participants to recognise or understand the meanings behind the “official” futures. Is the vague, jargon language used in many “official” futures reports a way to circumvent real engagement with civil society and society at large? If civil society struggles to understand what is put forth by the “official” futures, what does this then mean about how we can relate to and contextualise those futures?

The role of civil society

Through the interventions, participants also questioned and challenged the role of civil society organisations. The questions that arose included:

• How closely should civil society align with incumbent power?

• Should civil society step in to compensate for day-to-day systemic failure, or seek revolution and architect new systems?

• Should it do all three of those things — and where does governance sit when civil society takes over and runs systems that support the status quo?

What next?

The next challenge for this process is to understand how these outputs might be most useful to those who need them. What alternative funding strategies or policies might they inspire — and what greater depth of data and analysis would be needed to support their development?

While the group of participants in this process was relatively small, the process of relational investigation freed them to work deeply and collaboratively. Some participants experienced discomfort in working with imagination and uncertainty, while others adapted quickly to the process; this difference in cadence allowed

a natural pragmatism to emerge, and while the scenarios may seem remote from current life, they capture some of the deepest and most difficult to resolve dilemmas of our present age. Belonging, repair and care have been deprioritised in favour of growth and productivity; the easiest way to restore them is to imagine them on some future plane. Restoring them will require courage, vision and investment.

The imaginaries set out here show the need to midwife and invest in infrastructure that ameliorates fear and division in the face of numerous existential crises.

The trails left by the brief flourishing of togetherness experienced in the pandemic inspired and gave hope and inspiration to our participants; our hope is that they have also laid a foundation for a shimmering constellation of alternative futures.