Having the opportunity to ‘test-drive’ the future, to experience different versions of the future, can help us feel they are possible (or, conversely, that we really don’t want to go there). And play is central to that. It can bring the future alive, to the extent where we can see it, feel it, taste it, smell it.

Unlike a traditional classroom, a studio is a social space, where the social nature of learning is nurtured;

Daniel Raven-Ellison of London National Park City. ‘I’m more excited’, he wrote, ‘about the tipping point where enough people are asking “what if” that eventually the question converts to becoming “why not?” What if all the children in our school had the opportunity to play on a regular basis? Why not?! We need more people asking “what if?” and

we want to nurture young people who are resilient, self-reliant, entrepreneurial and adventurous – and I argue that we need to – we have to let them take risks. Risk-aversion is the last quality we need to be building in our children. As Stephen Moss put it in a report on play for the National Trust, ‘A potential risk is that children who don’t

‘Ignoring something … requires a form of attention. It costs us attention to ignore something.’17 And that takes a toll.

We underestimate the power of these kinds of dreams, these kinds of visions, and the stories we can tell that bring them to life. In fact, one of the things all great movements have in common – those that have brought about real change like the Civil Rights movement, the suffragettes and LGBT rights campaigners – is that the participants are able

Our attention and imagination are inextricably linked. One does not exist without the other. Together they are, quite possibly, the most valuable tools we have to envision a positive future and fight for it.

It’s about more than the question per se, however. The question simply begins to open the door, creating a crack through which we might push and rush to the other side. It is an invitation as much as a question. It is a space we create and hold, and the question is the beginning of that, what the authors Eric Liu and Scott Noppe-Brandon call the

could be because, as recent research shows, the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the slower our minds get, the cloudier our thinking becomes, the more difficult it is to generate new ideas, the harder it is to formulate complex thought and take in new information.