How to Future

In futuring, the artefact is the minimum viable expression of a future situation, which lives inside a scenario that, as futurist Wendy Schultz says, contains ‘upsides and downsides’.7 Artefacts are not an attempt to demonstrate a means of resolving problems that exist within the larger world. As we’ve written elsewhere, in the futuring context we

Ultimately, a narrative prototype has to work as a narrative first in order to create the kind of engagement that yields meaningful insight.

Stories are one of our oldest technologies.

Canadian researcher Keith Oatley calls fiction ‘the mind’s flight simulator’.

but the key elements of the narrative are expressed here, establishing a problem, an action, relevant details about the world, and a resolution. Not all scenarios will express a resolution, but in this case we were bringing the ‘official’ activity in the story to a close.

Due to a steady increase in climate-driven disruption – intense storm seasons and flooding of densely populated coastal areas in Asia, drought-intensified conflict in the Mediterranean, Maghreb and southern Africa, and fires in South America – hundreds of thousands of people are left homeless and unable to remain in place. In 2026 alone, upwards of

Speculative designer and academic Anab Jain addressed her own take on this challenge: ‘These speculative forms of evidence are created not only from deductions taken from data, but from weak signals, ethnographic observations, and the stories of people’s experience. Based on this rich tapestry we create “speculative evidence” from multiple futures,

Most people don’t want to read hundreds of pages of analysis. A well-crafted narrative that builds in the most salient takeaways in story form can be an effective way of communicating complex futures simply.

Scenarios should also give a sense of the broader dynamics of the world in which they take place. They can convey urgency, optimism, difficulty, harmony, dissonance or other attributes that might characterize the context in which the trends unfold. Remember, however, that scenarios aren’t meant to ‘sell’ a future but to give it depth and believabil