Announcing the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Awards for 2022

What will the future be like when our populations are predominantly aged?" Adam will use gamification to engage intergenerational audiences in the exploration of the long-term consequences of population decline on our world. The inputs will contribute to the development of a serious game to enable policymakers, leaders, and concerned citizens to better anticipate and prepare for the impacts of demographic change. The ultimate goal of the game is to raise awareness of demographic change as a critical megatrend, to engage diverse audiences in the topic, and to inspire policies and behaviours that integrate the concerns and respect the rights of present and future generations.

Alija will facilitate collective speculative art-making workshops to prototype artefacts of just climate transition futures that centre the visions of historically marginalised communities directly impacted by climate change. This collection of artefacts will then be part of a multimedia sensory platform to visualise the collective imagination of frontline communities about climate futures. The platform will serve as a global resource for climate preparedness, civic engagement, and collective decision-making towards futures that benefit humanity and broader impacted ecologies. Alija envisions climate futures where legacies of harm are disrupted and the planning process for our collective futures is regenerative.

Vote Bot is an artificial intelligence solution to increase youth and women's participation in elections in Zimbabwe. Accessible on WhatsApp, the platform makes it easier for young people and women to register to vote and educate them about their electoral rights and the electoral process in the country, in compliance with Zimbabwe's Constitution and Electoral Act. This is one of the projects run by Courteney at his Justice Code Foundation, an organisation focused on legal tech and civic tech solutions. Vote Bot was created in consultation with local communities, using a human-centred design approach, and is now being disseminated in rural areas, in partnership with two community-based organisations.

By working within the Startup Support, Advisory, and Investment Ecosystems across the African continent, Daniel has observed that startup founders are not only more prone to failure due to the extreme volatility of their political, economic, and financial landscapes, but also fail by copying Western solutions that do not necessarily work for their context. For him, the antidote is increasing founders' Futures literacy and foresight skills. He will deliver participatory futures workshops for startup founders across the continent and provide a web platform for interaction between African entrepreneurs. Daniel's hope is to catalyse Africa's economic development through forward-thinking innovations with the potential to transform societies; take people out of poverty and improve the quality of life for all.

Solar geoengineering refers to a set of speculative technologies to lower global temperatures by artificially intervening in the climate systems of our planet. Up until now, the discourse, development, and governance around it has been largely dominated by the Global North. As a Social Scientist, Dhanasree is investigating whether or not solar geoengineering would be an option for developing countries to tackle the climate crisis in the future, whether these choices would limit their mitigation and adaptation options, and to what extent this would have implications for geopolitics and security. She will conduct research with Global South countries to explore these questions and uncover their imagined futures around climate justice and equity.

Tackle social problems like poverty through entrepreneurship education and skills development for grassroots community members across ages and demographics. Edson and his team are creating empowerment spaces that equip marginalised people to become the next generation of leaders, start their social businesses, and solve the biggest problems in their communities. His project uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a guide for participants to develop social business ideas that tackle significant issues in marginalised communities, such as poverty and poor healthcare. Using strategic foresight, Edson and his peers decided to set up an organization to facilitate replicating their model in different countries. So far, they have been able to set up eight empowerment spaces.

Goodness is committed to increasing efficiency in crop and livestock farming. He has a business which uses the System Dynamics technology to manage and integrate the production of several agricultural and livestock products into one sustainable, more productive, and profitable system. When updated with a farmer's data, the technological model projects future operations, provides valuable insights on possible growth patterns and challenges, and offers suggestions for risk mitigation and resources needed. Goodness plans to train farmers on how to use and operate this model so they can do business projections, forecast, run scenarios, interpret results, and extract valuable information on the current and future state of their businesses.

Julie will conduct workshops with scientists and civil society communities to explore perceptions and imaginaries around climate engineering - large-scale interventions on Earth's climate system. She believes that, be it positive or negative, the impacts of climate engineering on our lives can be difficult to comprehend. It requires collective imagining as well as telling nuanced and place-specific stories. She will, then, use language reflective foresight tools to create new narratives and climate-engineering metaphors to enable more democratic public technology debates.

Prismatic is a futures game targeted at climate action groups. Julius envisions that, while climate action groups working across Canada play the game, they navigate through current society, sectors and trends, and build future climate scenarios. Through a crowd-sourced platform, these groups, climate change and foresight experts synthesize the data generated by the game. Indigenous and Afro-futurist artists then create various art expressions based on the synthesized dataset, and their art is disseminated to different communities, creating change in the current paradigm around climate action in the country.

Calendar Collective is a design-led research investigation that challenges the normative understanding of time as linear, objective and neutral. Through co-designed workshops, Kalyani wants to expose foresight practitioners to other ways of occupying time. Insights from these workshops will be used to develop alternate calendars or timekeepers that could enable people to inhabit temporalities of their choice. Responding to the erasure of indigenous temporalities through global imposition of the Gregorian calendar, she proposes alternate calendars as decolonization tools to unearth notions of time that have always existed and still do. Calendar Collective is a reminder that calendars are designed tools and can, therefore, be redesigned.

It is currently hard for newcomers to a field - especially related to technologically advanced tools - to be given work opportunities due to a lack of real-world experience, which creates a vicious cycle. With her Non-Fungible Token (NFT) project, Navyashree is willing to give opportunities for people looking to break into a certain technical field to work on real-world organisations projects. They start with micro-tasks, earn in crypto currency, get displayable badges verifying their contributions and skills gained, besides accessing mentorship and networking opportunities. At the same time, organisations will be assisted with framing their micro-tasks via futures thinking tools.

Olga and Nikolay believe that schools' curriculums are not currently fully supporting their students' development for the world they will live in as adults. To tackle such challenge, they will develop a knowledge graph and handbook to be incorporated into schools' curriculum and increase students' futures literacy. Students will be taught to spot signals of change in various domains, identify emerging futures and generate insights for scenario building. Olga and Nikolay hope students will be enabled to apply futures thinking to actively create their personal and professional strategies and become agents of their own lives.

Salime's Planetary Health for Planetary Futures is a student-led initiative that brings together medical sciences students from all over Iran who are passionate about planetary health and planetary futures. She will train this next generation of health workers in foresight and futures thinking so they can anticipate, respond to, and address global health challenges in such a way that they simultaneously provide people with sustainable health care services and promote the planet's wellbeing. As a result, Salime envisions health professionals minimising the negative health care footprint on the climate, safeguarding the well-being of the planet, and promoting a culture of hope through planetary consciousness.

Sangam strongly believes that the relationships and mindsets that people have around nature influence the kind of futures that we move towards. He will carry out a storytelling project, with stories of individuals and communities living in different scenarios of 2030/2040 Singapore. Each scenario will be informed by a specific mindset and relationship established with nature. His objective is to raise awareness on how various possible futures can be created based on the different ways we interact with nature and initiate important conversations that lead to environmental action.

Tonny and his team at Jangu International developed a self-organised, self-governed, cost-effective, and “freesponsible” learning space, where disadvantaged youth unleash their potential for positive change as social entrepreneurs. They provide a pathway, foresight tools, and the mindset for participants to shape a vision for their future and create new solutions in the form of social and environmental enterprises. As many of the local areas around the NGO are not yet familiar with the digital world, they are now seeking to develop an ICT centre and expand its support to tech-based social enterprises.

Barranquilla+20 is a youth-led organisation dedicated to educate and empower children and youth, so they can be the advocates for a greener future, lead climate and biodiversity actions, and secure the planet's natural heritage to the next generations. Xiomara, Barranquilla+20's founder, focuses her efforts particularly in educating historically marginalised communities and civil society organisations, and uses foresight as part of her training methodologies. Her vision is to support cities and residential areas to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, protect their biodiversity and preserve their waters in order to achieve climate and social justice, intergenerational equity, and rescue traditional knowledge across regions in Colombia.

"What would technology look like if it was developed in smaller places like Melghat instead of Silicon Valley?". This is the question that inspired Siddhi to co-create an accessible speculative design process with farmers from the tribal community of Korku, in the region of Melghat, India. Together, they have created prototypes of alternative agricultural futures. Siddhi now wants to offer a storytelling platform for farmers to participate in future scenarios building and share their dreams, hopes, desires, and needs related to the use of emerging farming technologies. Such narratives will then not only support them to create their own solutions and interventions, but also inform action plans and investment of NGOs, development agencies, governments and international funders in the region.

Whenever there is great uncertainty about the future, experts tend to opt for the use of different approaches. A widely used is the Delphi-based Scenarios (DBS) development process, a creative process that uses the expertise of a panel, and iterative rounds to obtain experts' opinions convergence. The downside of it is that it is very time-consuming. Yuri developed the "Real-Time Geo-Spatial Consensus System" platform to increase, via Real-Time Spatial Delphi, the method's efficiency in the development of complex future scenarios. The open-source platform will be first used with academic experts, governments, and citizens to develop climate change spatial scenarios in some European coastal areas in 2050 and 2100. Results will inform climate policy development.