‘Africanfuturism is concerned with visions of the future, is interested in technology, leaves the earth, skews optimistic, is centred on and predominantly written by people of African descent (black people), and it is rooted first and foremost in Africa. It's less concerned with "what could have been" and more concerned with "what is and can/will be". It acknowledges, grapples with and carries "what has been"’ - Nnedi Okorafor, PhD

What to expect
Inspired by the quote of sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor, Spoken Word Artists Hope Netshivhambe and Puno Selesho will present and facilitate a workshop exploring the role of storytelling in shaping Africanfuturism. As Hope explores the integral role of stories in our cultural and historical identities, Puno will challenge the audience to imagine an Africa that breaks out of the limitations and boundaries placed upon it by old and dated narratives.

The workshop will be immersive and transcendent as both speakers use poetry to transport attendees to the past and springboard all back to the future.

Our speakers
Hope Netshivhambe is a SAFTA winning international storyteller through multiple mediums. Her work is a form of literary activism for human rights and social justice. Netshivhambe lives by her self-coined mantra ‘’ Do what you came for’’ which speaks of purpose.

Puno Selesho is an exceptional Spoken Word artist and social entrepreneur who has performed on both international (including Re:publica in Berlin) and local platforms for 12 years. Puno possesses a deep appreciation for words and people, which has inspired a journey of collaboration with a wide range of entities.
Through words, Puno has brought many projects to life and hopes to help people see the world through a creative lens, challenge social norms, and share the modern African narrative.
She founded Harvest House, a creative agency which focuses on using communications to serve purpose driven businesses and projects.

Event details
Date: 08.02.2024, 6:30-8:30pm CET
Waiting rooms will be available via the Zoom link from 6:20pm CET

The Event
Our workshop draws inspiration from experiential futures, sign language, a female gaze, and sensorial digital assets, creating an immersive and interactive space where participants can explore futures free from the constraints of traditional language. By shifting our focus from verbal communication to embodying futures, we open ourselves to a wider range of senses, allowing for a more complete understanding of potential futures.
During the 1.5-hour online session, participants will embark on radical experiences that challenge conventional thinking and expand their sensory horizons. We will encourage them to see, feel, hear, maybe even smell and taste futures, uncovering the wealth of sensory information available to us. Afterwards, the facilitators will provide brief introductions, and participants will have the opportunity to share their own experiences and insights. The workshop will conclude with a collective reflection, allowing participants to solidify their learnings and explore practical applications of the alternative language and sensing methods discovered.

By challenging the dominance of words and embracing an embodied approach, our workshop aspires to push the boundaries of how we sense and connect with the future in futures literacy and foresight.

Note: In this session of "Without Words," we will be exploring the Futures of Addictions. We encourage you to bring different multisensory artifacts, such as your beverage of preference, essential oils, fabrics, food, lights, etc.

Our speakers
Lena Tünkers is an independent curator and facilitator for experiences with speculative futures having worked across Europe, Kenya, Australia, and Mexico. Driven by a passion for the unconventional and the odd, she uses the approach of Futures Literacy in combination with Experience and Speculative Design to challenge rigid present beliefs. Besides, she is the upcoming president of the Foresight Europe Network and mentor for environmental start-ups of the EIT Community New European Bauhaus.

Abril Chimal currently serves as the Chief Pollinator for the Participatory Futures Global Swarm and as the Technical Editor for the Journal of Futures Studies. She is the winner of the Second Futures Research Grant from the Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd Center for Futuristic Studies (PMFCFS) and the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF) for her project titled 'Futures of Circular Economy in Mexico City.'

Event details
Date: 23.11.2023, 6:30-8:30pm CET
Waiting rooms will be available via the Zoom link from 6:20pm CET

The Project
Imagine FLOW is part of Future Lives with Oceans and Waters (FLOW), a Research and Innovation Action funded by the EU. It supports the EU's Oceans Mission and explores changing human-nature relationships in the context of aquatic ecosystems. The transdisciplinary project brings together foresight, research on socio-ecological interactions, marine science and natural resource management with young people from across Europe. FLOW aims to create knowledge and connections to reinforce a new perception of the importance of aquatic ecosystems in the Anthropocene. To do so, the project combines horizon scanning, ethnographic fieldwork, experiential futures workshops and co-creation in an innovative way.
FLOW Partners are Radboud University Nijmegen, Fraunhofer ISI, Arctic University of Norway and Volonteurope.

Our Speakers
Benjamin Lehn has a background in design research and is now, next to his work at Fraunhofer ISI, deepening his knowledge in Futures Studies at FU Berlin. Currently, he is most interested in topics such as applied utopian thought, public imagination and participatory formats to facilitate the former two.

Max Priebe is a sociologist who engages with governmental foresight and mission-oriented policy approaches. He is intrigued to study how experiential futures become socially performative and translate, or fail to translate, into action.

Sabine Reitmaier has experience in interaction design, design research and critical futures studies. She is interested in language-reflexive approaches and building imagination infrastructures with others.

Aaron Rosa has been a working alternative futures and foresight researcher for the past 18 years. Aaron earned his M.A. and PhD in Political Science with a focus area of Alternative Futures from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa with James A. Dator as the chair of his dissertation committee. His research interest: distributed experiential design for governance futures.

Event Details
When? 26.10.23 6:00-8:30pm CEST
Where? Ellery Studio, Glogauer Straße 19, 10999 Berlin
Doors open at 6:00pm CEST.

The Project
The serious game, “The TechEthos game: Ages of Technology Impact” is a low-threshold approach to introduce citizens to the world of emerging technologies and future applications like Digital Extended Reality, Neurotechnologies, and Climate Engineering. Developed in co-creation with science communication professionals, social scientists, and game designers, the game is a collaborative and playful method to elicit citizen’s perspectives on the trade-offs and unintended consequences in the evolution of technologies. It aims at giving a voice to citizens and using their feedback and emotions about important social and ethical issues to inform ethical guidelines for the development of these emerging technologies.

During the Meetup-Event, you’ll hear from the game developers and researchers about their experience with the game, including its application in different contexts.
As participants you will also get the chance to attend a demo session and explore a physical copy of the game, play through a game round in small groups, and hear about our findings, including what worked and what could be improved. We hope the game's modularity and open access will inspire others to take up and enhance the resource and develop new sets in their areas of work.

The TechEthos project aims to inform ethical guidelines for technologists and researchers, putting values at the center of an ethics-by-design approach. Overall, TechEthos represents a concerted effort to engage the public in important ethical discussions and decision-making processes concerning new and emerging technologies, contributing to a more informed and value-driven approach to their development and implementation. For more information, visit http://www.techethos.eu

Our Speakers
Wenzel Mehnert is a futurologist who researches, writes and teaches experimental methods of futurology on the intersection of speculative fiction and assessment of emerging technologies (e.g. A.I., Neurotech, Quantum Technology, etc.). He worked as a researcher at the Berlin University of the Arts, co-founded the Berlin Ethics Lab at the Technical University of Berlin and currently lives in Vienna, where he is part of the research field Societal Futures at the Austrian Institute of Technology.

Michael Bernstein is a senior scientist at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology and Associate Professor (part-time) at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. He applies descriptive and participatory social science research methods to align research and innovation with long-term societal interests, like sustainability. He currently focuses on ethical assessment of new and emerging technologies for the EC-funded TechEthos project and is leading the research field Societal Futures at the AIT.

Event Details
When? Wednesday, 13.09.23 6:30-8:30pm CET
Where? Ellery Studio, Glogauer Straße 19, 10999 Berlin
Doors open at 6:00 CET.

The Event
Scenona Cards are a collection of future personas that zoom-in into different futures of fictional people in the year 2050. The future personas present their everyday life, skills and challenges according to a role they take on in society. You will get to know the Bee Counter, the Buddhist Nun, the Avatar Surgeon, and the Bicycle Repair Woman. They all give a deeper insight into a future that might one day materialize. The Personas are based on trend research, Sci-fi elements and storytelling and an AI-generated graphic. The workshop concept around it is based on neuroscientific evidence on how to help our brain make sense of future thinking. We invite you to take on different Personas this evening and think and feel into these multiple future zoom-ins. Together we unpack your experiences and reflect on probability and desirability of the described futures and detect biases to reframe for more alternative futures.

Our Speakers
Friederike Riemer
As a trained futurist and creativity coach Frida designs extraordinary learning experiences and strengthens your imagination for today and tomorrow. She trains your "future muscle" and makes you fit for the 21st century. Frida works with future science, neuroscience and speculative design. She loves giving talks and lectures as well as workshops about co-creating desirable futures. She wants to build future visions with a pull.

Felix Wieduwilt
Felix M. Wieduwilt is a futurist philosopher, author, and creativity expert. I have studied philosophy, art history, management, and communication. As a philosopher and manager, I am trained to switch perspectives and radically question the status quo in order to make bold strategic decisions. My four-year-old daughter challenges me the most honestly to question my own perspectives on life almost daily.

Event Details
When? Tuesday, 25.04.2023, 6:30-8:30pm CET
Where? Ellery Studio, Glogauer Straße 19, 10999 Berlin
Doors open at 6pm CET.

The Event
Franziska and Isabella will present the Handbook and their individual contributions that open up a multiverse of future outlooks ranging from new forms of cooperation and solidarity in the face of ecological trauma as far as to new automated global politics enabled by algorithms making the world a better place – or does it not? This will be a starting point for discussion on the insights gained, the relevance of the endeavor and the potential application in science, politics and beyond. But more to that, the participants are invited to a small workshop session to think about their own discipline, job or occupation in a science-fiction way – in order not only to critically deconstruct current structures, but to constructively redesign them.

Our speakers
Isabella Hermann is an independent analyst and speaker in the area of science-fiction. Holding a doctorate in political science, she focuses on the question of how the genre reflects new technologies, socio-political value systems and global politics. She also acts as Co-Director of the Berlin Sci-fi Filmfest and is member of the board of Stiftung Zukunft Berlin, a Berlin-based foundation on democracy and the future.

Franziska Müller is Professor for Global Climate Politics at the University of Hamburg. Her work engages with climate justice, climate coloniality, energy transitions and the (Pl)Anthropocene. The fight for just climate futures will last much longer than their live, which is why she has found hope, dreams, and despair in science fiction politics.

Event details |
Date: 21.03.2023, 6:30-8:30pm CET
Waiting rooms will be available via the Zoom link from 6:20pm CET

The Event
From a manned habitat on Mars, to SolarPunk and climate-resilient floating cities, the Speculative Futures world is awash with fascinating preferable futures. However, as we get excited by these visions we often forget that we’ve only focused our lenses on one tiny slither of the world and how we may be trying to solve political issues with technological solutions. Hence, we are less encouraged to think about who might be left out of these visions. Who isn’t going on that first colony ship to Mars? We may forget to ask whose labour will be required to create these new realities. Who is mining the quartz required for a SolarPunk world? Or we try not to think about the communities that may no longer exist when we reach our preferable futures. Who’s home will be swept away long before floating cities are built?
At this event, Sadia and Fred will present their work and thoughts in relation to these important topics. After which, they will invite everyone to join a workshop that will challenge our assumptions and guide us to approach futures more holistically.

Our speakers

Sadia Mounata
Trained as an architect, Sadia Humayra Mounata is a researcher and speculative designer practicing her alternative realities in @alt-topia.com platform through different approaches and scales, from detail to speculative world building, that can generate innovations and projections for future wellbeing in the face of converging crises and wicked problems.
https://alt-topia.com/

Fred Wordie
Fred is an artist, critical designer and creative technologist whose work attempts to create new insights about the power technology, and the companies who wield it, have in our society. He employs the discipline of critical design to create provocative artefacts as stimulus for debate, and has taught on the subject at both the Royal Collage of Art and The Glasgow School of Art. His notable work includes 'Cookie Consent Speed.run' a game which parodied GDPR enforcement, ‘Ventually’ a fictional venture capital firm that explores the impact of emerging technology and 'Big Data Girl' an illustrated children's book on Big Data.
https://www.fredwordie.com/

Event details
When? Thursday, 16.02.2023, 6:30pm to 8:30pm
Where? Ellery Studio, Glogauer Straße 19, 10999 Berlin
Doors open at 6pm.
Please sign up for this event with a valid account. We will include every signed-up participant on a guestlist. We kindly ask you to be on time so that the event can start accordingly. During the event, we offer a small selection of drinks (1€) and snacks for all participants.

Looking forward to your participation!
Your Speculative Futures Berlin Team

As futurists, we know how much power alternative futures can have and what kind of shaping force can be found in the desirable. So why not reimagine our own futures of ageing in a more positive light?
What better time than the end of the year approaching to take the time to reflect our personal stereotypes and playfully reimagine them as ‘superpowers’. In this interactive workshop, Futures Probes will share some of their ageing research with you and take you on a journey to create future avatars based on the question: How do you want the future of ageing to look like?

Futures Probes | Futures Probes is a feminist futuring collective based in Berlin, Germany, that focuses on desirable futures. The collective supports people in their futures literacy journeys, exploring future wishes and creating positive and courageous images of the future. Next to their own research on different topics like ‘ageing’, Futures Probes teaches futures thinking in the academic, private and public sector and accompanies various futuring projects.

Visit links for more information:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/futuresprobes/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/futuresprobes/

Event details
Date: 14.12.2022, 06:30-08:30 pm CET

Waiting rooms available via Zoom-link from 06:20 pm CET
Sign up for this event with a valid account (MeetUp/Eventbrite) and provide your email address in case we need to send a new link due to unforeseeable circumstances during the event. You will receive the entry link a day before the event via your MeetUp/Eventbrite account. We ask you to enter the link with your full name so we are able to find you on the guest list.

This event is limited to 100 participants. We ask you to enter the waiting room on time (06:20 pm CET). If the maximum capacity for this event is reached, we are obliged to apply the ‘first come, first serve’-principle, regardless of when you signed up for the event.

We are looking forward to your participation!

Design Futuring ist ein neues Wirkungsfeld für Gestalter*innen, dessen zentraler Auftrag lautet: Stakeholder*innen aus allen Bereichen der Gesellschaft mit den Mitteln des Design zu befähigen, sich unterschiedliche (wünschenswerte) Zukünfte vorzustellen und verhandeln zu können. Im Vordergrund steht dabei das Gestalten von Zukunftsszenarien, die greifbar, erlebbar und fühlbar sind, um die Entscheider*innen aus Wirtschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft zum Handeln zu bewegen. In einem strukturierten Kreativprozess ermöglichen verschiedene Denkwerkzeuge eine analytische und systematische Auseinandersetzung mit vielen verschiedenen Zukunftsszenarien. Unterschiedliche Kreativitätsmethoden erweitern die Vorstellungskraft für »bessere« Zukunftsszenarien, die das Leben im Alltag normaler Menschen porträtieren.
Denn die eine scheinbar unabwendbare Zukunft gibt es nicht.

Die Vortragenden:
Prof. Benedikt Groß
ist ein anti-disziplinärer Designer mit Schwerpunkt Design Futuring und Computational Design. Benedikt ist Co-Autor mehrerer Fachbücher z.B. des Standardwerkes »Generative Gestaltung«. Er ist Alumnus des Royal College of Arts in Design Interactions (unter Dunne & Raby), des MIT Senseable City Lab und dem CMU Studio for Creative Inquiry. Seit 2017 ist er Professor für Interaction Design und Strategic Design an der HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd und leitet dort den Masterstudiengang Strategische Gestaltung.

Prof. Dr. Eileen Mandir
vereint auf unkonventionelle Art und Weise mehrere Disziplinen: 30% Ingenieurin, 50% Designerin, 20% Change Agent. Eileen studierte Technische Kybernetik an der Universität Stuttgart und promovierte anschließend im Bereich Traffic Management. Heute begleitet sie unternehmens- und institutionsinterne Transformationsprozesse und öffentliche Akteurs- und Zukunftsdialoge. Seit 2022 ist sie Professorin für Systemisches Design im Kontext von sozialem Wandel und transformativen Prozessen an der Fakultät für Design der Hochschule München.

Mehr Info zum Event hier und hier

Speculative Futures Berlin meldet sich zurück aus der Sommerpause! Dieses Mal mit einem analogen live Event in Kooperation mit driversity –Netzwerkinitiative für nachhaltige Mitarbeitenden-Mobilität der Deutschen Bahn. Wir laden Interessierte zu uns ins Ellery Studio in Berlin Kreuzberg ein, um zusammen mit driversity über Mobilitätslösungen der Zukunft zu diskutieren.

Mobilität ist einer der größten Hebel für Unternehmen, um CO2 einzusparen. Das umfasst zum Beispiel Geschäfts- und Dienstreisen, aber auch Pendeln und Veranstaltungsmobilität.

Wie können also erfolgreiche Mobilitätslösungen in der Zukunft aussehen und nachhaltig umgesetzt werden? Welche Rolle spielen die Mitarbeitenden in den Unternehmen? Wo befinden sich Schnittstellen zwischen verschiedenen Unternehmensbereichen?
Bei unserem interaktiven Meet-Up wollen wir genau diesen Fragen nachgehen und gemeinsam weiterdenken. Egal aus welcher Branche oder Arbeitsumfeld ihr kommt und welche Themen euch sonst so umtreiben, eure Perspektive ist gefragt!

In diesem analogen Event möchte das Team von driversity mit euch gemeinsam identifizieren und ausloten an welchen Stellschrauben wir nachhaltige Mobilitätslösungen anstoßen können.


Mehr Info zum Event hier

How can we design more inclusive, imaginative and impactful participatory futures?

In this online workshop you will get to know an open-source game built to inspire and provoke. Learn to play the "Our Futures" game to take on 21st-century challenges and develop out-of-the-box ideas for developing participatory futures. The game "Our Futures" was designed to help us collectively explore answers to the above question and pose those we have not considered. To help us expand our horizons of how we conceive participatory futures and design more inclusive and impactful participatory futures for us all. This workshop provides an overview of research on participatory futures, including global cases, and, most importantly, offers a hands-on opportunity for participants to play, localize, and mutate our futures.

What is Participatory Futures?

As a practice and concept, participatory futures refers to a range of approaches for involving citizens in exploring and/or shaping the future.

Why do we need participatory futures?
– To engage larger numbers of people in long-term thinking to strengthen democratic approaches to various futures.
– To create convergence on decisions that account for the future (generations, species) which can help to rebuild trust in institutions.
– To foster new ways of thinking (art, embodied, and experiential processes) and tap into the collective intelligence.
– To support future-informed citizens that can drive actions and behaviours in the present and address 21st-century challenges.

Who should attend?

– Anyone who wants to enhance their capability as a practitioner and/or researcher.
– Everyone who wants to help leverage citizen involvement, collective intelligence, and critical creativity to enhance decision-making and strategy development processes.
– No background in futures/foresight or participation required.

Was sind mögliche, wahrscheinliche und wünschbare Zukünfte der Bioökonomie?

Bioökonomie wird aktuell groß diskutiert. Mit Hinblick auf gegenwärtige und zukünftige gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen – wie Ernährungssicherung, Klima- und Umweltschutz, Ressourcenschonung oder nachhaltiges Wirtschaften – bietet sie verschiedenste Lösungsvorschläge an. Doch aufgrund komplexer Ansprüche stellt die Gestaltung einer nachhaltigen Gesellschaft eine Herausforderung dar, die nicht nur von Politik, Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft angegangen werden kann. Denn Bioökonomie geht uns alle an!

Wie bringt man so ein abstraktes Thema an die Öffentlichkeit? Es braucht ein Format, das möglichst viele Menschen erreicht. Design Fiction im Format der Instagram Story kann dabei helfen abstrakte Vorstellungen an ein großes Publikum zu kommunizieren. Die fiktiven Zukunftsvisionen erschaffen Möglichkeiten, um Chancen und Risiken zu diskutieren und stellen die Frage nach dem „Was wäre, wenn...?“. Sie können uns helfen, herauszufinden, wie wir leben wollen und was wir für Veränderungen brauchen.

In diesem Panel stellen wir das bio:fictions Projekt vor, das vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung im Rahmen des Wissenschaftsjahres 2020/21 gefördert wird. Wir geben Einblick in das Thema, das methodische Vorgehen, die kreative Umsetzung und die Kooperation mit Influencer:innen.

Often, this calls for an employment of existing techniques such as the development of advertising campaigns to provide focus. Advertising campaigns, as controversial parts of society, can be integrated in approaches of design fiction and speculative futures. This mixed approach is what we call Campaign Fiction. The approach was first presented at the PRIMER 21 conference and tested with participants from all over the world.

Society has mixed feelings about advertisement. However, it is a fact that advertisement often captures core socio-economic relationships in a condensed way. That is why it has the potential to be valuable for futures thinking techniques. Present narratives of people, gender roles, social clichés, media usage patterns, humour, and values are all parts of a consumer's zeitgeist which are captured in advertising. When thinking about the future, these issues also source societal expectations about what may come and can be useful to conduct future-oriented storytelling in a structured way.

In this session we will give a brief insight into how to use the worldbuilding potential of advertising campaigns. Unfortunately, due to the short time available, it is not possible to experience the whole process in practice. However, there will be working groups in "sprint mode" to work along the Campaign Fiction approach.

The overall approach is clustered in three steps which makes it possible to converge the desirable futures from a micro to a macro perspective.

Step 1: Prototyping
→ Micro perspective: The product or service

Step 2: Campaigning
→ Meso perspective: People, technology and markets

Step 3: Visioning/Worldbuilding
→ Macro perspective: The society

—

Christian Grünwald is from Z_punkt The Foresight Company. At Z_punkt, Christian is responsible for the Public Foresight division. His work focuses on scenario planning and vision development as well as trend projects in the public sector and industry. He explores the consequences of technological change for politics and society, the future of work and the innovative application of foresight methods. Before joining Z_punkt, he studied political science and religious studies, followed by a doctorate, and worked for eight years in a large German communications agency. He also works as a part-time lecturer at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

Z_punkt is an internationally active consultancy for strategic future issues. Z_punkt designs strategic future dialogues in the public sector and supports companies in developing sustainable future markets.

www.z-punkt.de