What are the Windows on the Future?
To support creative thinking and seek a broader impact, SMOTIES has developed an open-source methodology to support creative teams in co-creating activities for better solutions for the well-being of small and remote places: the SMOTIES Toolbox.
Designed to support a foresight process, the “Windows on the Future” are the driver of the methodology: they provide guiding perspectives for the future, and serve as narrative and thematic lenses through which we can look into the future to start regenerating remote places into more liveable environments. They consist of a set of possible scenarios based on the analysis of trends and can help shape present objectives and activities.
How the Windows on the Future were developed
The design discipline has extensively investigated scenario-building and foresight methodology, using diverse approaches, perspectives, and techniques, including Future Studies and Strategic Planning. We aimed to achieve medium-term outcomes for 2024 through forecasting and backcasting processes that look further into the future toward more significant impacts in a hypothetical 2100. Based on long-term thinking, the foresight process translates future uncertainties detected in the present into future trends and challenges. Looking far into the future, we can understand the challenges of uncertainty and come back with some guidelines to develop project pathways in present situations.
Discover the future trajectories addressed by SMOTIES
By looking at trends related to specific areas of interest of the socio-economic systems, the SMOTIES Windows on the Future look at the following themes: active citizen participation and new kinds of governance; creative solutions for sustainable living; new balance between leisure and work time; cross-generation knowledge exchange; the future of local cultural and creative knowledge.
The Windows take the form of a Polarity Map: each axis represents a trend and its evolution in time (from a closer future to a far one), determining four possible scenarios. The scenarios describe the identified pathways to explore how culture and creativity might work in the future in remote contexts and represent the setting in which projects on the ground may arise. The top-right quadrant, specifically, represents the most unpredictable yet most impactful scenario, whereas the bottom-left quadrant represents what may already be happening today.
Explore the Windows on the Future