✨Futures Meet-ups This Month: Email 2 of 2
All about Future Days Festival 🤯
Hi👋 If you're new here, *welcome*. I'm Lydia and I work with foresight strategy and policy, currently freelancing with public and private sectors from my homes in Brazil and Portugal. Find out about my work here and get in touch so we can (e-)meet!
Future Resources has been growing and transforming. Stay tuned in to hear the updates! Future Resources is a part of the United Nations SDG Acceleration Actions. With over 8,000 members worldwide (Global South majority), we are radically democratizing access to foresight.
As promised, you can now watch my contribution to Women Who Future(s) here:
To say that March was a busy month is an understatement, hence the unusual amount of emails to cover all of it. Last week I talked about my participation in some events, including School of International Futures meet-ups, Teach The Future and The Millennium Project's World Futures Day, Futures Friends dinner, and Lisbon Breakfast Club. Read here👇
This one is fully dedicated to the festival I helped envision and organize: Future Days Festival.
Future Days is a participatory foresight festival. This means that we carefully curated members of governments, private sector, academia, activist movements, and civilians to sit together and make horizontal decisions about what our lives should look like.
This was only made possible due to the support of Câmara Municipal de Lisboa. Lisbon Cityhall's openness to our ideas and willingness to make it happen was fundamental, as was the support of School of International Futures, With Company, Ageas Group Portugal, Istituto Europeo di Design, Sónar +D, PWC Japan, +351, Musa Cervejaria, Revista Sábado and many others.1
The full experience happened over months of preparation, videocalls, email exchanges, Slack messages, WhatsApp groups, Notion pages, etc. On my side in particular, as curator of the speakers lineup, this meant handpicking 7 (s e v e n!) people who would contribute with worldviews and understandings of what futures are and can be. Thankfully, I was not alone in this. Uri Casademont, Monika Bielskyte and the FD team were there to share the responsibility for this tough challenge. How could I pick 7 incredible brains out of the vast, diverse and magnificent world of futures?
Well, we did it. And my teammates delivered nothing but the best on the lineup for the labs (workshops), the choice of challengers and policymakers to guide the final activity, and inspirations (immersive experiences).
Still, it was largely due to the attendees that Future Days was such a success. The ~400 people who joined us from all over the world invested their full hearts and minds into bringing each talk, each lab, each lunch, etc, to life in such an enthusiastic way. Shout out to some familiar and some new faces who I am beyond excited to have seen at Future Days:
Sarah Owen, Amiyra Perkins, Amy Daroukakis, Kasia Kaminska, Murillo Albanez, Júlio de Abreu, Emmanuelle Naranjo, Carolina Messias, Thays Prado, Rafaela Englert, Sofia Dias, Neil Redding, Miguel Jimenez, Phil Balagtas, Lourdes Rodriguez, Dominika Cupkova, Silvio Cioni, Allison Rowe, Marite Irvine, Joscha Raue, Jessica Chatteron and many more.
I was also soooo happy to finally meet part of the international Future Days team for the first time in person! Soukarni Barai, Alessandro Ianniello, Jason Musaka, Kristin Fung, Christina Bifano, Gea Sasso.
FD24 SPEAKERS:
Eva Xavier (Portuguese youth activist)
Pau Garcia (Domestic Data Streamers)
Phoenix Perry (University of the Arts London)
Monika Bielskyte (Protopia Futures)
Cecilia Tham (Futurity Systems)
Gustavo Nogueira (Temporality Lab)
Nyangala Zolho (Innovation Growth Lab)
FD24 LAB MODERATORS (WORKSHOPS):
Nicklas Larsen and Lovisa Volmarsson (Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies)
Leila (11-year-old workshop moderator)
Erica Bol (European Union Policy Lab) + Tanja Schlinder (Futures2All) (FuturesGarden)
Katrien Buys (Grupo Ageas Portugal)
Catarina Batista, Mireia Sierra & Ole Anton Werner (CERN IdeaSquare)
Henrique Nascimento (Transformative Times)
Ana Oliveira and Rui Quinta (With Company)
Charlotte Lin and Jan Rod (PWC Japan)
Mónica Isfan and Francisco Furtado (PlanAPP)
FD24 COLLECTIVE DEBATES MODERATOR:
Paula Cardoso (Afrolink)
FD24 CHALLENGERS AND POLICYMAKERS FOR THE LISBON-FOCUSED FINAL WORKSHOP:
Cat Tully (School of International Futures)
Sophie Howe (the first Future Generations Commissioner for Wales)
Hugo Warner (Footprints Africa)
Ana Valinho (Extinction Rebellion)
Daniela Marzavan (Lecturer)
FD24 INSPIRATION IGNITERS:
Zinzi de Brouwer
Nicole Vindel
John Willshire
Day 1 was about warming up to getting your brains on fire, with a signal scavenger hunt in the neighborhood of Marvila that ended up at Musa Brewery for light, fun connections over pizza and free beer (or non-alcoholic beverage)
Attendees arrived at With Company's office to register, get their badge & c00l (and sustainable - thank you +351!) tote bag, and be allocated into groups with facilitators who would walk them around the neighborhood of Marvila to look for futures artifacts. Future Days partnered with a series of local galleries, businesses and shops that opened their doors for us during this tour. This fun walk on the present looking both at past and futures through a hyperlocal lens ended up at Musa brewery, where everyone could enjoy food and drinks on a rooftop filled with like-minded people passionate about creating purpose-driven futures.
Day 2 took place in the most magical venue one could imagine: Estufa Fria de Lisboa. We tried to convey how wonderful this place was online through Future Days newsletters and social media but it was just impossible. You had to be there to really understand the privilege it was to walk through nature whilst being provoked and inspired by our program, fellow attendees and the FD team.
From 9am to 6pm, day 2 tackled two big themes. Each theme comprised two 30-minute talks, 3 labs (workshops) - of which attendees could only participate in one (I know) -, and a collective debate with those respective speakers and lab moderators, plus Paula Cardoso, the unmatched collective debate moderator.
The two themes were:
01. Post-urban lives in large-scale ecosystems
02. Equitable governance for tomorrow’s societies
Translating them into plain English: Theme 01 was about reimagining the cities and everything in them - mobility, energy, work, etc. Pau Garcia talked about different types and uses of maps including how some communities used maps to track time, and Eva Xavier talked about the serious issue of emigration in Portugal, how interlinked it is with education, gender and politics and why youth should be taken seriously in political decisions today. The labs that followed for the next hour and 30 minutes were: Leila, the 11-year old who made grown-ups and youth alike join her in creating children-first cities with cork, PWC Japan who asked participants to explore how we might create, collaborate and bond at the workplace of the future, and Grupo Ageas Portugal workshopped the future of micromobility through trends and future horizons.
Theme 02 was about dismantling our Western and capitalist notions of societies - education, health, democracy etc. Cecilia Tham talked about her work in stress-testing their What Ifs (hypotheses) with “is it scientifically possible?” to support engineering. Monika Bielskyte inspired us to envision a world guided by principles of pluralism, celebration, and regeneration. The three simultaneous labs were just as wonderful. CERN put attendees in extreme (imagined) situations to stimulate thinking about what’s important, what are our values, needs, and bring those conclusions into the present. PlanAPP took participants into a journey to the future based on their megatrends report for 2050 and what the impacts could look like in Portugal. Futures Garden immersed attendees on five speculative videos to stimulate debate on the desirability of the depicted future.
Day 3 was also in Estufa Fria, and was split into two parts. The first was diving into theme 03 with the same formula that we saw on Day 2. The rest of the day was about focusing on issues and challenges that the city of Lisbon faces (across culture, economy, mobility, immigration, housing, etc). We had amazing local challengers and renowned policymakers pushing us to create futures-proof solutions
Theme 03 was ‘Pluricultural creations and the AI era', and it investigated our relationships with innovation, creativity and technology. We had 3 thought-provoking talks: Phoenix Perry talked about bigger data not equaling better data, and that small data can shape a more equitable, inclusive generative AI. Gustavo Nogueira spoke on temporality beyond Western imaginaries and why we should reconsider our linear approach to time. Nyangala Zolho highlighted the significant impact policymakers have on innovation ecosystems and why we should embrace decoloniality. These talks were, again, followed by three simultaneous labs: Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies’ lab encouraged participants to challenge dominant tech-led narratives of the future and to focus on today’s critical challenges by embracing them as opportunities for innovation and progress. Transformative Times’ lab provided participants with the canvas to prototype parliaments for other species (how cool where these masks??). With Company's lab created a playground for adults to let go of all inhibitions and to explore technological meaning.
After these three global themes, we dove into a local lens and focused on Lisbon 🇵🇹 🎯
The unparalleled first Futures Generations Commissioner for Wales, Sophie Howe, stepped on stage to talk about what thinking about future generations’ wellbeing means, and how that shapes everything from a country's healthcare system to education, green spaces, food, etc.
The whole audience - including speakers, lab moderatos and FD team - was then divided into smaller groups to work on specific issues that Lisbon faces. Guided by wonderful facilitators and kick-ass templates, we were able to imagine desirable solutions for these challenges, always considering how to be the most inclusive and sustainable possible.
Now that the festival is over, the Future Days team is working on a summary report with strategic recommendations for the City of Lisbon. Stay tuned!
And just to make sure everyone was recharged and inspired throughout those days, we had amazing immersive experiences throughout Estufa Fria, including guided meditation and embodied awareness activities, as well as (free) coffee, food and beer! Thank you Zinzi de Brower and Nicole Vindel for making us connect to the space we were in.
We had an overwhelming amount of attendees spontaneously sharing their experiences about Future Days online. Here are just a few, so you can hear from them directly: Veriteer, Romano Theunissen, Júlio de Abreu, Joana Leitão Santos and:
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Images by Joana Azevedo and Angel Bambu for Future Days