We always enjoy attending Festival of Place, and this year we were asked to devise an activity to help connect people and break the ice after a couple of years of limited social contact.
Inspired by The Good Ancestor, by Roman Krznaric, Aileen Tatton-Brown’s future thinking essay in 1937, ‘Britain and the Beast’ and the work of our good friends Univited Guests, we took people on a journey to the future, asking them to look back in time from 2052, thinking about what challenges and changes we as individuals and a society faced. Players used loose parts to represent their challenges, joys and legacies and then created a 3D badge that told their story.
Through the game we crowdsourced a poem of the future- a premonition of the coming decades. Each person told us about one thing that would happen in the next 30 years. We loved the mix of personal and societal, magical and mundane. Most of it is optimistic, let’s hope we get to that place together.
Premonition is available for conferences, to engage the public at festivals and events, or as an exercise with your teams and colleagues. Get in touch to find out more.
Premonition Festival of Place 2022
More people get rid of their cars.
Mark becomes a grandad
Deborah will live by the sea.
Norma will have grown older and be healthy.
Easton is full of trees.
The world will get hotter.
A collective mental health crisis will trigger an evolution of change.
The world will have transformed to a regenerative global economy.
There will be more kindness in the world.
Twitter no longer exists.
Plastic is not an option.
Fossil fuels are redundant.
Hugo will stop wanting so many things (there will be less of a culture of consumption)
Abby has a family.
Lisa accepts herself in a positive, healthy way.
Market forces are no longer posing as the fundamental model.
Alison will be a grandparent.
Jonathan will have retired.
Boris is no longer Prime Minister! (we didn’t have to wait long for that one!)
Catherine has retired.
Everyone is cycling AND you can take your bike on the train comfortably.
Architecture has stopped building prisons.
Animals have returned to the city.
Thousands of swifts are now in the sky.
