FIVE GOLD THINGS: DAY FIVE

It’s our final dispatch about the ideas intriguing us in 2024, and we leave you with…

WHO MAKES THE FUTURE?

Everything could change in five years, we’re told, putting us in a particular moment of strangeness in our efforts to predict the near future.

It’s been incredibly exciting to see such a shift in who is given the tools to think about what’s on the horizon. A once closed and mysterious profession is becoming much more open. For a fascinating perspective on this, check out the work of forecaster Geraldine Wharry, who has been interrogating the futures industry in her brilliant newsletter, and who recently shared news of the upcoming Future Days Festival in Lisbon in March 2024.

This event will bring together lots of different constituents, including children, politicians and older people, to explore what could be coming across society and culture, with the aim of democratising futures and finding language that connects specialists and the public.

A lot of futuring work focuses on the WHAT and the HOW. We’re often so desperate to create the big vision that we don’t spend as much time on how it feels in the attempt. In the studio this year we’ve been doing a lot of work on the emotions of forecasting. What is it like to have a moment of realisation — whether together or alone — even if it’s not necessarily predictive of the future?

In 2024 we will be bringing a vision of one possible future to life so that healthcare policymakers can grapple with how to achieve a net zero NHS. The project will offer tools to explore the opportunities and tensions that might be raised. In the development of this we’ve involved everyone from the Chief Sustainability Officer of the NHS to medical students who have been campaigning for their training to include sustainable healthcare.

This is about rethinking current power dynamics and healthcare models, but it’s also about how participants feel in these potential scenarios, in all their identities — as professionals, as citizens with complex lives and as patients themselves.

Offering people an opportunity to experience that fluttering, delicate potential of agency… it’s of course not enough on its own if power imbalances remain. But this year, we’ve really seen the thrill of personal agency across all our projects, which at times has been incredibly moving. As we close 2023, this is the feeling we’d most love to bottle.

And that’s a wrap! Thank you so much for following this series. Please share if any of this is on your radar too, and we look forward to catching up more in 2024.

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Contributions from Lizzie Olstrom