Future Stories
Quick facts
• Format: studio course or custom institutional lab
• Focus: narrative foresight, scenario worlds, and participatory artifacts
• Core outputs: scenario worlds, a narrative prototype, and a short world bible
Course overview
Future Stories treats the future as something we can rehearse-not predict. Students learn to build plausible worlds, identify the forces shaping them, and design narrative artifacts that make consequences visible.
The focus is not on science fiction aesthetics. It's on usable imagination: stories as tools for decision-making, ethics, and collective sensemaking.
What students practice
• Building scenario worlds with coherent social, cultural, and technological logic
• Turning abstract trends into lived conditions people can inhabit and debate
• Designing artifacts from the future (documents, interfaces, rituals, environments)
• Facilitating participatory storytelling so futures become collective, not individual
Outputs (examples)
• A set of 2-4 scenario worlds (each with distinct rules, incentives, and value systems)
• A narrative prototype (experience, performance, interactive piece, or media system) grounded in one scenario world
• A short "world bible" describing the causal logic of the designed future
Who it's for
• Artists, designers, and storytellers who want their work to engage real-world complexity
• Institutions looking for methods to help teams imagine and rehearse change
Practical takeaway
Institutional value: future literacy grows when teams can inhabit plausible worlds instead of only discussing abstract trends.