Welcome, time traveller.
Imagine a wild and wonderful place where all alternative future possibilities co-exist at once –– and can be physically encountered in real life. A kind of multi-dimensional exchange, in which tangible objects are on offer from countless possible worlds. This is the Futures Bazaar.
In more practical terms, a Futures Bazaar is a design jam or creative gathering, where people bring in "junk" items from home, and transform them into unique "artefacts from the future", to provoke, amuse, and inspire one another. Every participant helps imagine and produce these future artefacts, and every artefact tells a story.
The first Futures Bazaar was staged at the BBC as a way to playfully lower the bar to entry to thinking about change through alternative futures, across the organisation. Soon after that, a second bazaar was held in a completely different setting. Both events went so well that the process seemed to be crying out to be shared with a wider audience.
Which brings us to our latest publication. Thinking concretely about times to come is harder and rarer than it should be, so BBC GEL has teamed up with Situation Lab to publish The Futures Bazaar: A Public Imagination Toolkit, to help make such thinking a bit easier and more common. The bazaar can now be adapted and run by anyone, anywhere. The entire toolkit is available at above.
Created by Filippo Cuttica and Stuart Candy, and designed with the support of the BBC GEL team, The Futures Bazaar toolkit is for use by players of all ages, in all fields. It is intended for use in public and private organisations, government bodies, schools, NGOs and charities alike. We suggest at least 12 participants, but the more the merrier. A main organiser is needed –– that might be you? –– and then you and your colleagues, coworkers, students, or guests will bring it all to life.
Just as people travel in order to have new experiences and see how others live, creating a Futures Bazaar is a way to journey into each other's imaginations. It offers a chance to expand horizons, explore new ideas, and develop capacities for foresight, creativity, and storytelling, all in just a few hours. Everything you need to start organising your own can be found on this page.
The toolkit is made up of three elements: Manual, Slides, and Printouts. The Manual helps you plan your own event. The Slides help you run it. And the Printouts are for distribution to participants on the day.
The Futures Bazaar may be set up as a stand-alone event, such as a company away day, or within a larger workshop, course, or event series. Conceived in the traditions of experiential futures and participatory design, it might be part of a journey towards building foresight capability, engaging alternative futures in more open and creative ways. Or you could simply use it for fun –– teambuilding through worldbuilding.
As more and more folks run their own Futures Bazaar, it will leave behind a growing commons of imaginings, questions, and provocations about possible worlds. To contribute to this shared resource, we invite participants to post their favourite pictures and videos of artefacts, stalls, merchants and customers on social media using #FuturesBazaar. The toolkit has been packaged into a single ZIP folder containing the full set of PDFs for free download at the top of this page.
