Most of the time, we speak about the future as something to be thought through.
We strategise it, forecast it, stress-test it, map transitions towards it. We build scenarios, prototype alternatives, design pathways and contingency plans. We’ve become incredibly fluent in the language of ‘what’s next’. And yet, for all that, we rarely pause to ask: how do we want any of it to feel?
Rather than jumping straight into fixes, Feeling Futures conversations invite imagination, emotion and creativity into the spotlight. It’s not about solving the future on the spot - it’s about giving ourselves room to notice, name and explore what feels right and why.
Meet Futurall
Futurall is a UK/Netherlands based, hybrid arts and consulting practice working across futures, design, participation and long-term change. Their work moves between communities, cultural spaces, governments and institutions, helping people imagine futures in ways that are playful, immersive and collective.
The studio was founded by Eva Oosterlaken and Finn Strivens, who met while studying in London and quickly discovered a shared interest in how people might have more agency in shaping the future.
Eva, describes herself first as a social designer. Her background began in industrial design, but her practice broadened over time toward transitions, social processes and bringing people together. Finn came to futures from a different direction altogether. Originally trained in biochemistry, now works as a designer, foresight practitioner and futurist, while also exploring drag performance as part of their creative life and expression.
Together, they describe Futurall as living in a generative in-between: part participatory arts practice, part strategic foresight studio. On one side, they work with communities to create visions, workshops and experiences that help people shape the futures they want to live into. On the other, they support think tanks, ministries and public institutions to think through long-term strategy and policy. The most exciting work, they suggest, happens in the messy middle, when organisations want to engage communities in futures work in ways that feel accessible, imaginative and alive.
They began with one foot in organisational foresight and the other in participatory art. Only over time did those strands begin to fully come together. And perhaps that combination is what makes their work feel distinct: rigorous, yes, but also inviting. Structured, but not stiff. Serious in its intent, without becoming over-serious in form.
Is play the way
When I first came across Futurall’s work, one thing seemed to run through much of it: playfulness. Interestingly, it wasn’t something they originally named as a method.
‘The elements of play weren’t necessarily something explicit in our practice,’ Eva explained. ‘But it came very naturally and it’s something other people started noticing.’
And surprisingly, the environments where you might expect resistance: ministries, governments, formal institutions, often respond positively.
For Finn, playfulness is less about games and more about tone.
‘When I think about play, I don’t think of us as game designers,’ they said. ‘It’s much more about making sure the process is fun and enjoyable and that we’re not taking it so seriously in an academic way that we forget to enjoy the work.’
Because futures work often ends up stuck in reports. ‘If we want to build a movement behind a future,’ they say, ‘people have to get excited about it.’
Eva added another layer. ‘Play creates a suspension of disbelief,’ she explained. ‘It opens a space where you can actually start to embody some of these future possibilities.’
And in that moment, something shifts.
‘There’s something about play that creates surprise. A different idea can suddenly appear.’
Not play in the narrow sense of games for their own sake, but a wider orientation. A sense of openness, experimentation, surprise. A refusal to let futures work become so academic, so polished, or so strategic that it forgets how to move people.
Risk, permission and the freedom of the artistic frame
Play can sound risky, especially in institutional settings. Artistic methods can be dismissed as unserious. Creative practices can be seen as unpredictable, politically sensitive or hard to contain.
But when I asked about risk, Futurall offered a more interesting answer: yes, playful and artistic methods can introduce tension, but they can also reduce risk.
In one project with a ministry exploring the future of work, they created speculative artefacts that provoked conversation about political themes. The process involved negotiation.
‘There was a lot of hesitation,’ Eva recalled. ‘They were worried it might look political.’
But creative framing can also open up freedom.
’When something is positioned as an artistic or speculative project,’it actually creates a space of freedom. You can say - this is not representing the official view of the ministry.’
And suddenly the conversation can go further.
Because once something is clearly marked as speculative, creative or artistic, it no longer has to present itself as the official voice of the institution. It becomes a space adjacent to policy rather than identical to it. And in that adjacency, people can often feel freer. They can explore more honestly, more boldly, more experimentally than they might within the usual boundaries of formal strategy.
In that sense, art and design don’t just provoke risk.
They can de-risk both seeking insights and sharing them.
Futurall are also interested in methods that ask participants not only to analyse a future, but to enact it.
‘Lots of speculative design puts an object in front of people, but as soon as we ask people to enact the future themselves, they have to put those analytical walls down.’ Finn reflected.
The experience becomes more personal.
’You’re stepping into the future rather than standing outside and analysing it.’
That changes the dynamic. It becomes harder to stay protected behind critique when you are being asked to role-play, move, respond, improvise. The analytical mind doesn’t disappear, but it is no longer the only mode in charge.
The body enters. Vulnerability enters. And often, so does insight.
Hope, joy, grief and the emotions we don’t always make room for
I was curious what emotions tend to surface when people imagine futures together.
‘When I tell people I’m a futurist or I work with groups to imagine the future, people often say to me, ‘Oh, that must be really pessimistic at the moment,’’ Finn said. ‘But actually it’s not.’
Exploring multiple futures can actually create possibility.
‘Through doing it, people start to understand how different futures could arise, and that often brings quite a lot of hope.’
But that’s only part of the emotional story.
Eva added another layer. What interests her is not only the collective future being discussed, but the very personal entanglement each participant has with it. How are people already bound up in certain images of the future? Which futures have they unconsciously bought into? What are they grieving when those futures begin to shift? What might they need to let go of in order to imagine otherwise?
Eva points out that futures work often touches something deeply personal.
‘There’s this personal aspect that interests me,’ she says. ‘How are you personally entangled with the futures we’re exploring?’
Sometimes the process challenges assumptions people didn’t realise they held.
That’s where more difficult emotions come in. Not as interruptions to futures work, but as part of it.
‘We carry images of the future that we’re very bought into,’ she explains. ‘And if those get challenged, that can bring grief.’
For Finn, the balance between hope and grief is delicate.
‘To me, they’re like the shadow side of each other. We have to hold people carefully between the two.’
Too much ungrounded hope, and people risk crashing into disappointment when change does not arrive quickly. Too much grief, and the work can collapse into despair.
‘We’re constantly oscillating between them,’ Finn said.
The task, then, is not to choose one over the other, but to move between them with care. To build spaces where people can feel enough grief to be honest, and enough hope to keep going.
When a future starts to feel real
What helps a future stop feeling abstract and start feeling possible?
For Eva, that shift often happens when people connect futures work to their own lives. A scenario becomes more real when it brushes up against memory, context, daily life. The future begins to feel less like a distant concept and more like something already partially present.
’Something happens where you realise: oh, I’m doing this already,’ she said. ‘It suddenly feels like it could be real.’ That moment can energise action. ‘If this is possible, then I can move towards it.’
Sometimes, she said, the shift comes when people realise: ‘I am doing this already. I know this feeling. Maybe some version of this future is already here.’
It suggests that futures work isn’t always about inventing something entirely new. Sometimes it is about noticing existing examples, small experiments, lived alternatives, community practices that already hold the texture of another world. Perhaps futures can be less about abstract projection and more about visiting worlds that already exist in fragments.
Finn extended this by pointing to the role of community. Individual insight matters, of course. People need to understand a future with their heads, believe in it with their hearts and see some pathway toward it through action. But change rarely happens because one person has a revelation in isolation.
‘Part of the value of doing this work collectively is that people leave the room with energy between them,’ they say.
Because real change rarely comes from individuals alone.
‘It’s activating groups of people that makes change possible.’
When conversations continue after the workshop ends. When people can reinforce each other’s courage. When imagination becomes collective enough to sustain itself.
That is where futures work begins to edge toward organising - ‘enactivism’.
Toward gathering, experimenting, activating.
Toward making the imagined social.
Values don’t need to be imposed, they need to be surfaced
As people imagine futures together, values inevitably begin to show themselves.
At first, Finn said, participants often reach for familiar, almost stock imagery of the future: flying cars, towers, technological spectacle. Those default visions are not failures. They are simply the cultural material people arrive with. The important thing is to stay with the process long enough to move past them.
Because beneath those first images, more interesting questions begin to emerge.
Whose future are we imagining?
Why this one?
What are we actually hoping for underneath the aesthetic shorthand?
In Futurall’s work, values are not usually imposed at the beginning. They are drawn out gradually through process. Through games, movement, stretching exercises, embodied prompts, creative facilitation. The goal is not to tell people what to value, but to broaden the imaginative field enough that different values can become visible.
That distinction feels important.
Especially in sustainability and social change work, there can be a tendency to frame certain values as good and others as bad, or to focus on nudging people toward a supposedly correct set of beliefs. Futurall seem wary of that. Values are not always absent; sometimes they are simply inactive. An organisation may already contain many possible values within it, but only certain ones have become dominant.
Futures work, then, can become a way of activating dormant values rather than importing new ones from outside.
That makes the work less about moral correction and more about recognition.
Less about instructing people what to care about and more about helping them notice what has been waiting beneath the surface all along.
Futures, queerness and learning to live with uncertainty
When I asked whether working with futures had changed the way they related to their own lives, both Eva and Finn answered with a kind of immediate yes.
For Eva, futures practice has transformed her relationship to uncertainty, but also to identity. She described a parallel between doing creative futures work and exploring her own queerness: both involve letting go of the pressure to choose one fixed path, one stable version of self, one singular future. Over time, she has become more at peace with pluralism, not only in imagined futures, but in herself.
That felt especially beautiful to me, this idea that futures practice might not only expand how we imagine the world, but also how we permit ourselves to exist within it.
Finn connected this to systems thinking too: the skill of holding complexity without fully resolving it, of acting inside uncertainty, of making sense of something too large to ever be comprehensively grasped. For both of them, futures, systems and queerness all seem to share a common orientation: an ability to live with multiplicity, with ambiguity, with movement, with not-fully-knowing.
Not as a lack.
As a practice.
And maybe that’s one of the quiet gifts of futures work. It doesn’t simply prepare us for change ‘out there.’ It changes our tolerance for openness in here.
Start With a Weird Party
At the end of the conversation, I asked: if someone wanted to try a Futurall-style futures practice in their own community tomorrow, what’s one small thing they could do?
Their answer came immediately.
‘Organise a really weird party.’ Eva said.
Finn laughed.
‘That was exactly what I was going to say.’
Give people strange roles.
Change the social script.
‘See what happens to the dynamics.’ Finn added.
See what new possibilities appear when people are invited to play, perform, experiment and inhabit something unfamiliar together.
Sometimes futures work does not begin (or end) with a report, a framework or a polished methodology.
Sometimes it begins with a room full of people trying on other ways of being.
A future that can be felt
What stayed with me after this conversation was the sense that play is not a soft extra in futures work.
Play can open trust. It can hold risk differently. It can surface values, move emotion, loosen fixed narratives and help futures become felt rather than merely discussed. It can create enough safety for experimentation and enough surprise for something real to shift.
And perhaps that matters, especially now.
Because in moments of uncertainty, we do not only need sharper analysis. We also need spaces where hope can be practised without denial, where grief can be held without paralysis and where people can experience, even briefly, what another world might actually feel like in their bodies and between each other.
Maybe the future does not begin only with answers.
Maybe sometimes it begins with gathering people in a room and making it strange enough, playful enough, alive enough, that something new can enter.
✨ Feeling Futures explores the emotional landscapes of what’s to come - through conversations with artists, thinkers, and dreamers imagining futures that feel good!
Feeling Futures isn’t a spreadsheet of predictions. It’s a warm invitation to imagine - with our full emotional range. To build agency in community. To notice which pictures still hold us, and to draw new ones we can actually believe in.
If this conversation sparked something for you, I’d love to hear it.
What does a better-feeling future include for you?
→ Share your reflections on Instagram @FeelingFutures, or reply here with thoughts and guest ideas. Thanks for reading - and for imagining, feeling and practising hope here.
