Imagine Futures

A key aim of Imagine Futures is to help young people (in years 10-13) dream possible futures for themselves and their places in the context of an Earth crisis. This project, led by Climate Museum UK’s Norfolk-based members, will trial an arts-based workshop format that can help tackle ‘future anxiety’ and a lack of youth agency by tapping imaginations and by expanding pathways to effective action. A key outcome will be an online toolkit on creative methods to imagine possitopian futures with young people, and on future roles they can play. 

We are grateful to Festival Bridge (Norfolk & Norwich Festival) for supporting Climate Museum UK with this project.

Young participants will take part in a ‘live action role play’ day set in the near future, making decisions about two real sites in Norwich that are threatened by development and climate breakdown, with reference to broader issues such as energy, health, food and future work. These sites are Mousehold Heath, threatened with drought and fire, and the Wensum Valley, threatened by a road development. 

The ‘live action’ will use digital layering over maps, images and aerial footage as well as expert testimony to introduce the sites and to visualise the harm to them in c.5-10 years. 

The workshop will take place February 10th 2023 in St Martins at Palace Plain. Up to 50 young people from local secondary schools, supported by student volunteers and our facilitators, will move around a series of spaces occupying roles to generate ideas for interventions to avoid these future harms. 

These roles are: Healthy Lives Weaver; Planetary Activist; Water Flow Keeper; Movement Magician; Wild Voices Translator. These represent different expertise and capacities, and players would move with individual choice between them, drawing on and combining these different intelligences to explore tactics for futures of this place. The activity resources would encourage ‘adjacent possibles’ and ‘positively deviant’ attitudes to increase the diversity of ideas. 

The participants will use visual methods to explore and share ideas, for example, using paper-based clay, collage and large-scale drawings. An important aspect of this project is the embodied, physical and sensory engagement with the sites, accessed remotely, as a way to activate imagination. 

This will help them answer: What kind of positive future could be imagined for the human and more-than-human inhabitants here, and how can our creativity help? 

If you'd like to come along to the ideas sharing on Feb 10th, 2.30, please get in touch on climatemuseumuk@gmail.com