WTF is Experiential Futures?
Most futures work happens at 30,000 feet.
You've seen it: polished trend reports bound in expensive covers. Scenario planning workshops where executives arrange sticky notes into quadrants. Strategy decks that reduce the next decade to bullet points and bar charts.
This work is analytical, abstract, designed for boardrooms and C-suites. It speaks in the language of probability and percentages. It asks us to think harder, look further, analyze deeper.
(No disrespect if this is your job. Someone has to translate complexity into actionable intelligence, and there's real skill in doing that well.)
But here's what that approach misses: the future isn't something we only think about. The future is something we inhabit. And humans don't rewire themselves through PowerPoints alone.
Experiencing the Future
Experiential Futures flips the script. Instead of asking people to think about tomorrow, it invites them to step inside it.
Imagine holding currency from a post-capitalist economy in your hands. The weight of the bills. The texture of the paper. The faces printed on them and what those faces represent about who gets remembered, who gets valued, who gets to imagine what comes next.
Imagine walking through streets half-submerged by rising seas. Not as a statistic about coastal flooding. As a physical experience of navigating new infrastructure, new social arrangements, new forms of grief and adaptation.
Imagine touching artifacts from 2075. A museum placard explaining how people in the 2020s lived. A product package for something that doesn't exist yet. A newspaper headline that makes your stomach drop or your heart leap.
This is what Experiential Futures does. It materializes possibility. It gives the future a body.
From Information to Transformation
Humans don't move on data alone.
You can show someone a graph projecting temperature rise. You can walk them through peer-reviewed models of ecological collapse. You can present ironclad evidence that the systems we depend on are breaking down.
And they'll nod. They'll say "that's concerning." They might even believe you. Then they'll go back to their lives largely unchanged. This isn't because people are stupid or in denial. It's because information alone rarely transforms us. We need something more visceral. We need to feel ourselves inside the future we're being asked to prepare for. Information tells us what might happen. Transformation shows us how it might feel. And feeling changes everything.
When you hold that post-capitalist currency, when you notice how it's designed, when you start imagining the economy that would produce it and the values that would sustain it, something shifts. The future stops being abstract. It becomes a place you can almost touch.
Who This Work Serves
This embodied approach to futures gains particular power with communities whose futures have been systematically written off. Think about who typically gets to do "strategic foresight." Corporations. Government agencies. Well-funded institutions. The people who already have resources, already have platforms, already have their visions of the future treated as legitimate. Meanwhile, entire communities get told their futures are foregone conclusions. Managed decline. Inevitable displacement. Survival at best, never liberation.
Traditional futures methods often reinforce this. They center expert analysis over lived experience. They treat communities as subjects to be studied rather than agents of their own becoming. They ask, "What will happen to these people?" instead of "What futures do these people want to build?"
Experiential Futures creates space for something different. It centers the wisdom that lives in bodies and communities. It lets people prototype possibilities that analytical methods dismiss as unrealistic. It treats imagination as infrastructure.
Liberation, Not Survival
I've used experiential futures in Tulsa, Oklahoma, working with descendants of the 1921 Massacre to build artifacts from a future where Black Wall Street thrives.
We didn't create business plans or economic projections. We designed objects from that future. Signage. Commemorative items. Newspaper articles. Each artifact posed questions: What would community ownership look like at scale? What institutions would exist? What would people value? What would they celebrate?
The work wasn't about predicting what will happen. It was about expanding what could happen. About giving people permission to imagine beyond survival, beyond resilience, into actual liberation.
I've worked with Black and Indigenous young men, worldbuilding futures where they aren't just avoiding violence or "staying out of trouble," but actively thriving in societies built around their flourishing. We created artifacts, wrote news articles from those futures, designed the material culture of worlds that centered their joy, their genius, their right to simply be.
These sessions don't end with people saying, "That was interesting." They end with people saying, "I didn't know I was allowed to want that." They end with people treating their own dreams as legitimate data points for what comes next.
Making Strategy Tangible
This approach works in institutional contexts too.
I worked with a media company navigating a major strategic pivot. They were moving away from one business model toward something centered on narrative strategy and community impact. The shift was huge. The stakes were high. And everyone was struggling to imagine what success would actually look like on the other side.
We didn't run another SWOT analysis. We jumped ten years into the future. We created mock streaming interfaces. Full show descriptions. Episode titles. Critical reviews. We imagined what their flagship programs would look like in 2032 if the pivot worked. What stories they'd be telling. What audiences they'd be serving. What cultural conversations they'd be shaping.
One artifact showed a Prime Video series called "Belonging, USA" set in fictional Los Cielos County, one of America's first rural "majority-minority" communities. The description read like it was already real: critical acclaim, awards buzz, cultural impact. We wrote fake think pieces about it. Imagined the podcast discussions. Created the merch.
This wasn't fantasy, it was a rehearsal. It let the team feel what success could taste like, which clarified what they needed to do now to get there. Strategy documents gather dust. These artifacts got passed around, argued over, refined. People kept coming back to them.
Why Now
Traditional forecasting was built for stable systems. It assumes continuity. It looks for patterns in the past and projects them forward. It works with incremental change over predictable timelines. That world is gone.
We're living through rupture. Ecological systems tipping past recovery. Political structures fracturing under pressure. Economic arrangements that worked for decades suddenly breaking down. The pace of change has outstripped our capacity to model it using old tools.
This moment demands methods that can work with discontinuity. That can imagine genuinely new forms of social life and economic arrangement. That can sit with uncertainty as a generative force rather than trying to eliminate it through more data.
Traditional foresight asks: "What's most likely to happen?" Experiential Futures asks: "What needs to become possible?" That second question matters more right now. Because what's "likely" is often just an extension of existing power arrangements. And those arrangements are precisely what's breaking down.
We need tools that can imagine beyond the probable into the preferable. Tools that center creativity and collective wisdom alongside expert analysis. Tools that treat the future as something we make rather than something that happens to us.
Thinking With Our Hands
Experiential Futures is one way through. It means thinking with our hands. Making things. Building prototypes of possible worlds. Getting physical with abstraction.
There's something that happens when you shift from talking about a future to building artifacts from it. You have to make decisions. What does the money look like? Who's on it? What materials is it made from? These aren't abstract questions. They force you to reckon with values, with power, with the texture of daily life in the world you're imagining.
You start noticing gaps in your thinking. Contradictions. Places where your beautiful idea doesn't actually make sense once you try to materialize it. This is good. This is the work. You're feeling toward possibilities that don't yet have language, building capacity for futures today's systems can't hold.
And crucially, you're doing this together. Experiential Futures is collaborative by nature. Everyone brings different knowledge, different imagination, different stakes in what comes next. The artifacts become conversation pieces, literally. They generate dialogue about what we want and how we might get there.
What We're Really Building
When the world as we know it is ending, the futures we need most aren't the ones we think into existence. They're the ones we must make tangible, embody, and practice together.
This is the core insight: rehearsal changes us. When you handle objects from a different future, when you move through spaces designed around different values, when you practice living in a world that doesn't exist yet, something rewires.
Your sense of what's possible expands. Your capacity to work toward that possibility strengthens. The future stops being this overwhelming abstraction and becomes a place you're already learning to inhabit.
Strategy documents end up in drawers. But a well-designed artifact from the future? People keep those. They show them to friends. They use them to explain what they're working toward. The object becomes a tool for building the coalition that might actually make that future real.
This is speculative work, yes. But speculation here isn't escapism. It's preparation. It's infrastructure. It's the difference between stumbling into whatever comes next versus practicing the moves we'll need to shape it.
Acknowledgments
This field has roots. Practitioners who pioneered the methods, developed the language, showed what becomes possible when you treat the future as something you can touch:
Stuart Candy pioneered the field and coined the term "Experiential Futures." His work showed that foresight could be immersive, participatory, genuinely transformative.
Jake Dunagan co-founded Situation Lab and became a master of immersive scenarios that put people inside future moments, complete with artifacts, environments, and embodied decision-making.
Dunne & Raby brought speculative design into the futures conversation, creating provocative objects that made distant possibilities feel immediate and urgent.
Superflux (Anab Jain and Jon Ardern) makes futures visceral through design that engages all the senses, creating installations you walk through and experiences you carry in your body.
