The Futures Inside Us

On 21st May 2026, I was invited to give a morning lecture and afternoon workshop in partnership with Wanås Konst Sculpture Park and Media Evolution, as part of the latter’s series on Foresight and Futures.

The specific theme of the day was Abundance, to work with the installation of Argentinian artists Chiachio & Giannone who are in residence at Wanås Konst during this time. Their work has two key aspects we were chiming with for the day; the textile collages they make with and for different communities, and the installation of two large Ekekos (the god of abundance and prosperity in the mythology and folklore of the people from the Altiplano) as a permanent feature of the park.

So we designed the day around the abundance of ideas, perspectives and more we have inside us as a social species. This page contains the slides from the day, some pictures of the sessions, and a few things at the end that came up through the day that I promised to point people towards.

It is worth paying attention to how we got to the park in the first place…

Inexpert Tour Guides

We were conscious of the fact we’d me getting an early morning bus trip with around two-thirds of the participants, so I suggested we make up a game to play on the bus.

I made a map of the route we were taking (using the old Stamen Watercolour maps), picking out the names of places we would be passing.

Everyone got a map in their packs as they got onto the bus. Then we passed through the bus giving them three randomised prompt cards – two from the New Metaphors kit from the Imaginaries Lab, and one from the Writer Emergency Pack.

Everyone was then invited to spend three minutes or so – whenever we reached somewhere appropriate – to tell a story about what had gone on there. As the tales unfolded, we covered so many different kinds of topics – from farming innovation to family disputes, mysterious underground power sources to how places got their names.

Crucially, I think, it warmed us up to the theme of the day – there are so many potential stories, connections and inventions we can create when given random prompts, our creativity is the greatest source of abundance we have.

Lecture – The Futures Inside Us

The lecture I gave once we’d arrived was designed to show a range of different tools, frameworks and approaches we use in our work. It was all rooted in the perspective that information is light, not liquid, and included a look at Kaleidoscopes, the Obliquiscope, Cognitive Debt, Zenko Systems, Assemblage Space and Three Future Frames.

All that seems like quite a lot to do in an hour, but the point was to give a varied light tour of some of the ways of seeing things in order to change things, then go into a deep dive in the afternoon.

After the lecture, Marco came up to me with a postcard he’d drawn of the talk, which was a wonderful and unexpected honour – thank you, Marco!

Workshop: Other Sculptures

When designing the workshop, given we were in a sculpture park I decided to riff on the idea of an armature. This is the wire frame that a sculptor might use as the very basic shape around which they build out the full sculpture in clay over time.

The session was designed around Three Future Frames, but replacing some of the work we’d do traditionally around this framework with appropriate interactions with the park and the artworks. So scenarios were shaped with a smattering of sample signals and some routes around certain sculptures in the park to discuss with colleagues, situations were created as collages, and the stuff were little wire armatures of things that the teams would like to see an abundance of in these particular futures.

Finally, we then walked to the Ekekos with Chiachio & Giannone and (as per the tradition) offered these miniatures as offerings to the gods, for the things we wish for an abundance of.