Recap: FutureOverflow Day 2020
What a day. Inspiring, engaging, fun — and admittedly a bit strange, due to it all happening remotely. We just wrapped up our first remote-only conference, the FutureOverflow Day. And we quite liked it.
It’s an interesting and intriguing time to talk about futures. With 2020 setting the stage of a year full of crises — political and social, economic and environmental — we invited about 40 experts, clients, partners, and practitioners to discuss who to shape constructive transitions from the challenges we all experienced throughout this year. For an entire day we talked about how to change our urban and public systems for the better, what that actually means, and who to engage with along the way. In a mix of inputs, shared panels, and hands-on working sessions we explored our own theses about the future and many ideas and additions from our guests.
Learning & Listening
The day was structured in two parts: We kicked things off in the morning with Justyna Król of the UNDP’s City Experiment Fund, who shared best practices and challenges from setting up a multi-national urban foresight and design framework in 10 cities in Central and Eastern Europe (spoiler: It’s complicated but rewarding). The morning sessions was wrapped up with a great discussion by Bart Rosseau, CDO of the City of Ghent, and Richard Gevers, Co-Founder of the Open City Lab in Durban, ZA. They shared their take on intersections of official and bottom- up city making, on engaging new groups of citizen activism into exiting processes of public management, and on urban data which should always be data for dialog, rather than decisions.
In the afternoon, we had the chance to spend some time with Katharina Meyer, Head of Research at the Prototype Fund of the Open Knowledge Foundation. She shared some learnings from about four years of building and promoting Public Interest Tech in Germany: From a genesis of the very notion of Public Interest Tech to highlights of four years of funding more than 200 projects in Germany to a perspective on a joint European effort to extend reach and longevity of Open Source technologies beyond national borders. And, wrapping up a day of ideas, we had an amazing discussion with Hanna Harris, Chief Design officer of the City of Helsinki together with Viktor Bedouins, designer and researcher at the Critical Media Lab in Basel. We discussed what it means to „design“ a city, how to connect beacon projects on the one hand with the „invisible“ design work behind the scenes and along organizations structures and shared rituals. We also explored the potential of urban commons — material and digital — for resilience and place making in the city. And we talked about scale: territorial, temporal, and organizational — from micro-interventions to long-term design programs. A truly inspiring discussion!
A team effort
In-between these inputs, we had the chance to actually dive deep and engage with everyone on board. We deliberately decided to limit the number of participants and break out into even smaller sessions for our working groups. It paid off well. In small groups of just up to 8 people we had the chance to really engage with the theses we laid out before — and collect stories, perspectives, and even concrete design challenges together. We did so in a moderated and coordinated discussion that was rooted in foresight and design methodology. We differentiated and structured the input we gathered into six dimensions:
- Current Challenges: Pain points, irritations, and motivations for change in the present.
- Current Trends: Weak signals of change one can already observe in the present and are believed to become increasingly important in impacting the future. Trends can be described on the macro, meso and micro level.
- Future Theses: Combination and extrapolation of current trends that describe an assumed possible future.
- Future Challenges: Expected challenges that emerge in the future within the context of a given thesis.
- Future Visions: A subset of possible futures that is reflecting a normative desirable outplay of current trends.
- Design Challenges: A set of “how might we” prompts that frame, brief and inform about motivation and need for change, as well as known or assumed challenges, limitations and opportunities.
Within the framework we then moved freely and collected resources, projects, ideas, and questions that would refer to a given thesis. The result was a differentiated take on potential urban futures that were not so much predictions as a collective positioning toward them.
Over the coming days we will review our notes, findings, and the many pointers from our audience and draft up a review of where we are standing today. For now we again say thank you to all those who spent the day with us, shared their time, knowledge, and ideas with us — and made it a special one!
