Dear community,

Welcome to the last Futures4Europe newsletter edition of 2023!

Together with you, we would like to take a moment and look back at the past months on the Futures4Europe platform before we dive into the new exciting content we have collected for you over the past weeks.

In the beginning of the year, we took some time to reflect on what makes up our community and how we can serve our members and visitors best.

The result was a new design, a revamped structure, and many new ways to contribute to and interact with Futures4Europe. We relaunched the platform on 24 May 2023 in an online event, with over 180 participants, many speakers and foresight projects presenting their work and overwhelming feedback from our community.

Since then, platform members have more than doubled, around 30 new foresight projects have joined our database, we have published 35 blog posts on relevant topics and collected over 70 stories on the future. By including eight projects on deep dives supporting EU R&I policy we had the opportunity to feature highly dense and relevant content for Europe’s Foresight community.

We would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to our community members and all contributors and interested visitors on Futures4Europe. We hope that the platform has enriched your work and has contributed to promoting futures thinking in Europe.

With this, we wish you a peaceful and joyous end of the year and will be back in 2024 with more updates and new features to come.

The Futures4Europe platform team

A Future of Kindness

The story author "would like to see a future where kindness and social justice are a priority to people. In the future I envision, social responsibility is deeply embedded in citizens' minds and everyday lives. The gap in income, education opportunities, skills, income, and access to healthcare between different groups of people is reduced and self-interest and collective interest are synonymous."

For more inspiring thoughts, visit our stories collection!

New story writing tutorials online!

The ability to tell stories is a uniquely human achievement. Stories give humans a powerful evolutionary advantage that allows us to collaborate at scale by learning from the experiences or ideas of others. The stories we tell about the future influence and are influenced by others people’s views of the future. What is more, they can steer our own and our collective futures.

On 15 November 2023, Futures4Europe hosted a workshop with Claire Marshall: "Stories shape futures", in order to explore this further. Learn about stories and narratives as tools to influence and shape how we think about the future in our tutorial videos.

Join us in exploring the possibilities of the future! Share your perspectives, discover other people’s visions, and engage in a dialogue on what Europe and the world may look like in the future. We collect, share and distribute your visions in our stories database. 

Futures Garden: Future Selves and Extending Human Perception in 2050

The project Futures Garden is warmly inviting you to engage with two fictional artifacts that showcase thought provoking future scenarios regarding “Dealing with future selves” and “Extending human perception to new scales”.

Join us for an immersive and interactive experience!

Who Should Attend?

· EU citizens interested in reflecting on and discussing future fictional artifacts, thus fostering new ideas and attitudes that may reshape their present lives and their future

· Policymakers looking for fresh perspectives derived from future scenarios

· Futurists, designers, and behavioral scientists exploring the power of citizen engagement in molding future imaginaries

On 2 November 2023, Dr Vanessa Andreotti and Cat Tully discussed "Decolonizing the future: a condition for survival in the anthropocene" in a much awaited online event. In case you missed it, we have uploaded a recording of the discussion on Futures4Europe.

Futures4Europe brings together members of the futures and foresight communities with EU policymakers and citizens. It aims to collect, host, and disseminate foresight activities in and about Europe. It is part of the HE-FE project - European R&I foresight and public engagement for Horizon Europe.

The European Commission support does not constitute endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.