Participatory futures

Office of Non-Human Standing · 2026

A speculative civic registry invites visitors to turn ecological observations into filings on behalf of non-human species.

Carbon Care Commoning Kit · 2024

Scents, stories and collective exercises make alternative carbon futures tangible through shared experience.

Sensory Salon · 2024

Youth and staff envision spaces for care through valuestorming and spatial dioramas, informing the finished installations.

New Public Hydrant · 2022

A youth design workshop develops new uses for shared water infrastructure, translated into full-scale prototypes.

Climate Futures · 2021

Youth develop neighborhood scenarios and inventions responding to climate change and energy transitions.

Metro Test Zones · 2019

Workshop participants and actors rehearse alternative urban futures through collaborative theatrical experiments.

Testing Hypotheticals · 2018

Queens residents imagine preferable futures for their neighborhoods and prototype ways to experience them.

Transition Habitats · 2017

Public proposals and ecological research become prototypes for communication between species and decision makers.

Weaving Fabulations · 2025

Collaborative storytelling and artifacts give form to worlds organized around mutualism, repair and coexistence, drawing on Haraway and Le Guin.

Futures Gazing · 2023

Immersive, playful experiences introduce doctoral candidates to a method for working backward from societal outcomes.

Integrated Prototypes/Products · Spring 2023

Students take a research trip to Interference Archive, a volunteer-run archive of social movement materials, which hosts the class as a course partner.

Precognitioning Post-Oil · 2021

Guided role play and immersive installations let participants rehearse everyday life, social values and new kinships in a New York beyond fossil fuels.

Testing Tomorrows · Fall 2016

Observations of New York become speculative devices tested in everyday settings, inviting public responses to how emerging technologies might change city life.

Modeling Futures · Spring 2016

A course offering at Pioneer Works extends futures inquiry into a teaching setting.

Future Present and Coastnatural Trail · 2015

An evening workshop produces postnatural species that become a fictional 2041 field guide and trail pop-up for Headlands’ Spring Open House.

Variable World: Bay Model Tour & Salon · 2015

A ranger tour of the San Francisco Bay Model and a salon at Headlands, co-organized with Javier Arbona, trace how simulation has shaped ideas of the future.

Futurematic · 2014

Participants use scenario prompts to make artifacts from possible futures, then circulate them through a vending machine.

99¢ Futures · 2013

Workshop participants turn forecasts into stories and products, brought into an everyday neighborhood store.

TBD Catalog · 2012

A three-day design fiction workshop in Detroit, organized by Near Future Laboratory, produces a catalog of ordinary products from a near future.

Extrapolation Factory Operator's Manual · 2016

A bilingual publication shares methods for organizing collaborative futures explorations.