Back from the future
A program for participatory futures research and making in the social city life context
This project was born from the growing resentment of observing isolation, consumerist attitude and helplessness in our city. The designers would like to live in a city that catalyzes creative power for co-creating the environment they live in, where people feel agency and responsibility to do so. They worked with various groups of citizens of Munich to extrapolate trends and forecasts of today into possible futures in several full day workshop sessions. They created more than 80 future scenarios around diverse topics relating to the city context with correspondent stories of the society living in it including the design of everyday objects from those futures to make them tangible and therefore more immediate. In the current phase of the project, designed futures are used in interventions in public spaces to irritate the broader society in the city creating resonance around the potential futures and describing the futures Munich citizens want to live in.