Written by Laura Pouru
About 50 graduate and post-graduate students gathered to Finland Futures Academy’s and Finland Futures Research Centre’s annual Summer School held on June 14–15th in Turku after the FFRC’s 25-anniversary conference Futures of a Complex World.
This year’s summer school was organized in the form of Futures Literacy Laboratory (FLL) in co-operation with UNESCO. Head of Foresight Riel Miller from the Research, Policy and Foresight Section at UNESCO joined the summer school and led the participants through the FLL.
Futures Literacy Laboratory is a participatory method developed as part of the UNESCO Management of Social Transformation program. The overall goal of Futures Literacy Lab is to give participants a broader understanding of their own assumptions about the future, reframe those assumptions, and use the reframed perspective to have new questions about the future, new ways of perceiving the present, and new ways of “using the future” in the present.
The theme of the summer school FLL was Complex Futures of Human Settlement in 2050. The participants explored the theme through three phases 1) Tacit to Explicit, 2) Reframing/Aha Moments, 3) Nuances/New Questions. During the Lab participants also played an experimental futuring game Metaphor Molecule developed by Nick Balcom Raleigh from the FFRC.
The co-organization of the summer school FLL is a first step in the work of UNESCO Chair in Learning Society and Futures of Education in developing educational modules for a greater global futures consciousness.
Pictures: Anne Arvonen
