Undergraduate Creative Futures session led by Emily Spiers
Outline:
Students are to come to the seminars having selected a big-picture, global challenge that they consider suitable for workshopping. Students will be clustered in small groups around a selection of these themes or challenges.

Emily will use these big picture sketches as a springboard for a fun, ‘creative futures’ session, in which students work together to create future scenarios relating to their themes. Doing so will allow Emily to link in specific futures thinking tools, including such things as scenario design, creative writing, casual layered analysis, and trends analysis. This will allow her to get students to think about the degree to which mentally casting back to the past informs the ways in which we think about the future, and the degree to which that back-casting is useful. (The reading will help them consider this, too.)

Learning:
For students to make themselves open to what futures thinking might entail, to begin to experience this thinking as something that can be done collaboratively, and for them to begin to realise that futures thinking is found everywhere: in creative and scientific work, in daily stories, and in government legislation. In short, for them to understand that thinking about ‘the future’ is one of the ways we come to understand what matters today – wherever that thinking is done.