Welcome, time traveller.

Imagine a wild and wonderful place where all alternative future possibilities co-exist at once 鈥撯€� and can be physically encountered in real life. A kind of multi-dimensional exchange, in which tangible objects are on offer from countless possible worlds. This is the Futures Bazaar.

In more practical terms, a Futures Bazaar is a design jam or creative gathering, where people bring in "junk" items from home, and transform them into unique "artefacts from the future", to provoke, amuse, and inspire one another. Every participant helps imagine and produce these future artefacts, and every artefact tells a story.

The first Futures Bazaar was staged at the 鲍鱼tv as a way to playfully lower the bar to entry to thinking about change through alternative futures, across the organisation. Soon after that, a second bazaar was held in a completely different setting. Both events went so well that the process seemed to be crying out to be shared with a wider audience.

Which brings us to our latest publication. Thinking concretely about times to come is harder and rarer than it should be, so 鲍鱼tv GEL has teamed up with Situation Lab to publish The Futures Bazaar: A Public Imagination Toolkit, to help make such thinking a bit easier and more common. The bazaar can now be adapted and run by anyone, anywhere. The entire toolkit is available at above.

鲍鱼tv

History

Publication

Filippo Cuttica

Stuart Candy