Six Principles for Designing Public Experiences About the Future
Over the past decade, Changeist has had the opportunity to research the futures of arts and culture globally, with the additional privilege of collaborating with designers, curators, technologists and institutions to imagine exhibitions and experiences that make complex futures accessible to diverse audiences. This work has supported our collaboration with curatorial teams to explore future landscapes with rigor and methodological grounding.
The experience we have gained by working on exhibition concepts has enabled us to bring a futures orientation to research, storytelling, journey design and new kinds of sensory engagement in what our colleague Dr. Kristin Alford calls “emerging practices at the intersection of futures studies and museum practice” (Alford, 2025)
We have learned from those with relevant domain expertise how to effectively experiment by learning and listening to those tasked with presenting a coherent future vision. The true challenge isn't merely imagining possible futures — it's making them tangible enough to inspire meaningful engagement and, hopefully, a sense of agency in the possible.
For the public, the future is often entangled in a heavy dose of popular entertainment, which challenges little in the average visitor's orientation to our shared future. Now that futures have been elevated as an important theme in the consciousness of institutions and their sponsors, the push to inject aspects of futures or foresight into content and experience is more urgent, but not always more coherent.
Foresight isn't only imagination, inspiration or exposure to what futurists call "images of the future," or temporarily time traveling through a brief engagement with an artifact or some media. It's also a means of surfacing actions in the present that can redirect a visitor's own future, what Alford and co-author Brooke Ferguson of MOD. have called “a negotiated space where diverse voices play a crucial role” (Alford and Ferguson, 2025). This represents not only the voices of artists and communities, they include the voice of the visitor as well.
Our aim when participating in these projects is to enable an understanding that everyone has the agency to make change and shape their future, an ability to gain insights about the world and its systems, build the skill of anticipation, create or experience different possibilities, then shape or choose a pathway to a better future through action. This is affected by creating a broader environment that signals to, and actively invites visitors to be an involved part of the experience.
Through these challenges, we’ve brought some consistent principles that guide our contributions to the amazing teams we work with. Each represents a hard-won lesson about what transforms abstract futures into experiences that people can grasp, debate and act upon, that is, what moves us from contemplation to activation.
1. Create Recognizable Entry Points Within Novel Territories
The most engaging futures work happens at the sweet spot between the novel and the familiar. When working with design partners, we've learned not to drop visitors into disorienting abstractions, but instead to thread familiar formats and frameworks through unfamiliar terrain. This enables visitors to more confidently move through spaces, emotions and choices that will be less familiar or comfortable.
Think of an illustrated field guide using a known form to explore an unknown terrain, a kitchen or garden presenting a novel domestic frame, or a fictional newspaper which presents stories from a future, but in a recognizable medium. These are cognitive tools that respect both audience intelligence and the inherent complexity of presenting possible futures.
2. Embrace Complex Realities Beyond Simple Binaries
The world is messy and contradictory. In our experience, so are authentic futures. When collaborating across disciplines, we push back against the tired tropes of chrome-plated utopias or ash-gray dystopias. Neither serves audiences well.
Instead, we aim to craft narrative frameworks where technologies fail as often as they succeed, where communities find unexpected resilience alongside genuine struggle, where progress is unevenly distributed. Not because we're pessimists or optimists, but because we're realists. Visitors recognize this complexity from their lived experience, and engage more deeply when futures reflect similar nuance. The binary view is comforting but false — and people feel it.
3. Integrate Consequence and Experience
This field has clearly moved beyond the exhibit as a static display case, now drawing more explicitly from narrative and experience design. Futures worth exploring are ones where visitors don't just observe possibilities — they navigate them, shape them and witness the ripple effects of their choices. When designing with partners, we look for opportunities to transform passive consumption into active engagement.
This means building decision points into narrative flows, creating physical artifacts that invite manipulation and designing for embodied understanding of systemic relationships. It's the difference between reading about climate migration and experiencing how your resource allocation decisions affect community outcomes in real-time. An exhibit can become a laboratory for exploring causality and connections, not just a showcase for others' speculations.
4. Foster Collaborative Meaning-Making
The lone genius model of futures work is as outdated as flying cars and food pills. Meaningful foresight emerges from collective insight. When designing experiences, we create frameworks where multiple disciplines are contributing and visitors actively construct meaning rather than passively consuming it.
We've seen the power of exhibitions where engineers, historians, academics, designers and the public collaboratively unpack artifacts and narratives. The future becomes a contested space requiring negotiation rather than an inevitability to be accepted. This participatory approach recognizes that publics aren't audiences to be educated but agents with stakes in tomorrow.
5. Balance Reflection and Action
The most effective future experiences create a productive tension between contemplation and activation. Rather than rushing visitors toward predetermined conclusions or actions, we craft narratives with breathing room — spaces where insight can percolate before crystallizing into intention.
We might develop an evocative scenario that reveals structural challenges, then help design tools for visitors to reimagine those structures on their own terms. The goal isn't just awareness, but the capacity to move from awareness to considered action, whether that’s personal, professional, or political.
6. Integrate Intellectual and Emotional Engagement
Human beings don't experience the world through siloed channels of cognition and emotion — why would they experience futures that way? Working with our partners, we resist the false choice between substantive content and affective engagement. The most resonant futures work speaks to both.
This doesn't mean sugar-coating complexity with special effects. Emotional responses gain power when anchored in substantive understanding. It also means being human and acknowledging the human experience. A light touch, a knowing wink, or an absurd detail can create breathing room around heavy topics and remind participants that behind these futures are people, not oracles.
Co-Creating Futures Across Disciplines
These principles aren't rigid rules but evolving practices that guide our collaborations with design teams across many disciplines. Each collaboration teaches us something new about bridging the gap between present perception and future possibility. The goal remains consistent: making futures real enough to provoke, not just thought, but action by creating the emotional and practical impact that drives consideration and change.
Future experiences become crucibles for developing foresight as an applied skill. If we can enable that, we’ve helped change something in a visitor’s life and perhaps the future of themselves, their community or culture.
