Teave
Marina Gorbis, the Executive Director of the Institute for the future shares here views on making the future:
“To paraphrase Margaret Mead, we are all immigrants to the future; none of us is a native in that land. The very underpinnings of our society and institutions—from how we work to how we create value, govern, trade, learn, and innovate—are being profoundly reshaped. We are all migrating to a new land and should be looking at the new landscape emerging before us like immigrants: ready to learn a new language, a new way of doing things, anticipating new beginnings with a sense of excitement if also with a bit of understandable trepidation.”
According to futurists, the 10 years ahead is a good timescale to think about the future. This period is optimal - enough long for substantial transformations to happen and not too long to still be able to have an idea of what may happen.
You can have this mind exercise:
- Think of the future one year from today: How young people will be learning in your city or region? How will they engage as citizens? How will they build their careers?
- Increase the time scale of the futures thinking up to 2, 3, 5 and finally 10 years. What trends suggest future directions? Which signals of future change you see already today? What are you especially uncertain about how young people will learn, be civically engaged and build their careers in the future?
To continue, let’s become future detectives.
- Search for publicly available videos, visual images, articles, podcasts where people communicate about the future of your city or region.
- Find people and organisations who share about the future, best about your city or region. Start following them on social media and professional networks (such as LinkedIn).
- Look for some visionary documents, studies and concept papers which present the future of your city or region.
- Start conversations about the future of your city or region with people closest to you - friends, family members, school mates, co-workers. Listen to what they have to say.
To get a badge for this activity:
- use this worksheet to imagine and describe the future of your city or region.
- upload the print screen, image or file with your ideas for the future and reflect on the badge task.
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Get inspiration from the videos about futures of cities.
The Network of Cities of Learning offers this learning activity within the capacity-building project ‘Youth co-design learning, civic and career pathways’. We are grateful to the EU’s Erasmus+ Programme for co-funding support for this project.