Oxford Futures Forum (OFF 2017)

The 2017 Oxford Futures Forum was an invitation-only event designed to enable professional

dialogue, reflection and collaboration. It helped approximately 70 participants explore how

plausible, challenging, and usable climate change imaginaries can be constructed, articulated and engaged with in ways that open up spaces for dialogue, for exploration, for participation, and for action.

The forum focused attention on the human and social dimensions of climate change and assessed the ways that art, literature, design and trans-media might be mobilised to better enable a different understanding of erratic climate futures in turbulent, uncertain, novel and ambiguous (TUNA) settings1. Marrying such climate imaginaries and relevant arts and humanities scholarship with the theory and practice of scenario planning is intended to broaden the range of people engaged, and the modes of action inspired, by such futures.

Lara Penin, Eduardo Staszowski, Dani V. Sánchez, Lauren Atkins and Haijing Zhang were invited to participate the full two days conference. During the conference, they shared their cutting edge thinking and practice related to climate imaginaries. Topics related to artificial intelligence and block chain, the new luxury, sustainability and behavior change, poetics of concern and so on were discussed and developed into more tangible ideas.

The 2017 Oxford Futures Forum took place at Saïd Business School, Oxford, UK, 2–3 June, 2017.

Read the complete final forum report HERE