Shaping Future

Seeking to enable the »experts in everyday« to co-shape long-term trajectories of socio-technological advances, Shaping Future has developed an original participatory foresight methodology that draws from both design know-how and the social sciences. In a multi-staged co-ideational process, laypersons – people with a non-professional interest in technology – develop original notions of prospective human-machine cooperation and articulate their ideas in a variety of original formats. By engaging multiple senses, these formats help transcend the limitations of purely verbal expression and provide accessible forms of presentation.

In a round-up session, a group of specialists from a range of professional fields projects the outcomes of these workshops into participatory technology roadmaps by estimating when anticipated developments will become technologically feasible and by arranging them on a timeline based on these estimates.

The results were made available to the public in the form of exhibitions in order to promote further exchange about desirable futures.

funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research 2015-2017.

Fraunhofer CeRRI