In July, Skye Nguyen, a Teaching Assistant at Dublin City University’s Primary School of Language, Literacy and Early Childhood Education Role facilitated a Futures Workshop in Binh Dinh, Vietnam, bringing together 14-17-year-old students from 12 different countries as part of the short course ‘Building Our Future’. This workshop offered a great opportunity for young people to collaboratively imagine and design sustainable communities. The event was a vivid demonstration of how Futures Workshops can engage youth in creative problem-solving across cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries.

The Futures Workshop guided students through four interconnected phases: Preparation, Critique, Fantasy, and Planning. Students began by creating collages envisioning positive community changes, which sparked discussions and helped identify key themes such as Cultural and Heritage Preservation, Transportation and Infrastructure, Waste Management, and Youth Empowerment. In the Critique phase, they examined the challenges facing their communities, fostering reflection and dialogue. The Fantasy phase encouraged creative thinking, using natural and recycled materials to transform challenges into ‘what-if’ visions, resulting in innovative designs such as tramlines connecting urban and rural areas and schools preserving minority languages. Finally, in the Planning phase, students mapped actionable steps toward their imagined futures, sharing feedback and considering real-world implementation, highlighting differences in civic engagement across diverse political contexts.

For Skye Nguyen, facilitating the Futures Workshop highlighted the importance of future literacy in 21st-century education. By providing young people with a safe space to imagine, collaborate, and plan, educators can empower them to become agents of change. She emphasised the importance of adapting the workshop to participant diversity, using a mix of visual and auditory instructions, and ensuring sufficient facilitator support for small-group collaboration.

‘The Futures Workshop is not just a tool for civic engagement in democratic societies,’ Skye noted in the project report. It is also an invitation for young people in more restrictive environments to believe in their capacity to shape a better future, for themselves and others.

With international participation and creative outputs documented through photos and recordings, this workshop serves as a model for scaling Futures Workshops globally, engaging young people in the co-creation of sustainable futures, one of the key objectives of the ENHANCE project.

The full report of the workshop can be found here.

In May 2025, teacher education students at Linköping University participated in a futures workshop on the future of teacher training. In 2023 the Swedish government made an inquiry to review teacher education programs. The current teacher education reform has been in place since 2011 and is now set to be reformed again. The new focus will be on subject didactics, cognitive science, and practical methodology. At the teacher education program in Linköping, students have long desired ‘more methodology’ to feel prepared for their future careers. In 2024, the university has been working on investigating how an approach with more methodology could be implemented and the reform is expected to be announced by the government at the end of 2025. The students came up with several creative ideas for a future vision of the teacher education programs, including more practical on-campus exercises, holograms, and interdisciplinary learning. The results will be presented to the Faculty of Education as proposals for the development of the new teacher education program at Linköping University.

The Democracy Research Network is a multidisciplinary, informal network of researchers at Tampere University. The network brings together approximately 100 researchers from all faculties of the university. The purpose of the network is to learn and share the different ways in which scholars across Tampere University are engaging with democracy in their research and strengthen the collaboration between researchers working in this field. The network also actively collaborates with stakeholders outside the university.

In the futures workshop, the network’s executive committee mapped out the future of the network. The workshop focused on both near-term activities and long-term goals and plans. This was done, among other things, by shaping utopias with playdough. The workshop helped to create inspiring visions for the future of the network.

The project focuses on embedding the equal opportunity policies in municipal services in the fields of education, healthcare, social security, culture and law enforcement for socially vulnerable groups such as LGBTQI+ people, single mothers raising a child with disability, immigrants from culturally different societies, formerly incarcerated persons. The Futures Workshops were run in four municipalities in Lithuania and gathered from 8 to 25 participants in each from December 2024 to April 2025. Some groups built futures narratives that broke silence on inconvenient topics such as LGBTQI+ needs, identified gaps in municipalities‘ approaches to studying local residents‘ needs through data collection and analysis and overall, as one of the participants noted, gave time „to reflect on culture in culture“.

On June 2, 2025, the ENHANCE project researcher Joakim Söderström hosted a dynamic and imaginative workshop at Linköping University that brought together six participants, ranging from university students in sustainability, urban and regional planning, and geography education to researchers in science and sustainability teaching. Despite not knowing each other beforehand, the group quickly formed a collaborative spirit as they explored how to transform a university campus into a greener, more inclusive, and biodiverse space.

With inspiring music from Joakim’s kitchen playlist setting the tone, the ENHANCE workshop proved that even a small group can generate big ideas for a more sustainable and student-centred campus future.

Many research centers face the challenge of planning for the future in a way that is both strategic and inclusive. This Futures Workshop will bring together CIDTFF members to co-create a shared vision for the center and define concrete steps to achieve it. Using a participatory methodology, we will explore alternative futures, discuss the role of the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) in our practices, and identify key actions that align with our collective aspirations. The goal is to develop a collaborative action plan that reflects diverse perspectives and strengthens CIDTFF’s long-term impact.

This workshop is part of a larger project that is examining climate, biodiversity and water across the islands of Ireland and Great Britain. Previous research has shown that businesses currently aren’t adequately considering climate change and biodiversity loss in their assessment of value chain risks. During the workshop, we will be asking businesses to think about the futures of their businesses, how their value chains could change, and what type of future they would like to create. The research goals will be two-fold: first, we want to get business leaders thinking about the connections between their business models and climate and biodiversity; second, we as researchers want to gain an overview of climate and biodiversity risks across a variety of sectors and get a sense of industry partners who we might want to work with during future phases of the larger project.

The ULALABS project aims to define a theoretical and practical framework for the implementation and operation of a European distributed Living Lab focused on urban challenges and climate change; a “Lab of Labs” perceived as a shared and interconnected R+D+I infrastructure among HEI partners to promote transformative innovation policies within and among European regions through the articulation of open and collaborative Learning Communities and shared Agendas.

This research is about an innovation network and aims to investigate how value creation and collaboration might be improved from a member perspective. We have so far been collecting primary data through interviews and meeting observations and have also started analysing secondary data such as network reports in order to better understand the perceived member value of individuals and member organisations. A futures workshop is planned for spring 2025 to co-design the future of the network. The research project is currently confidential.

Mushrooming is a 15-year-old large network of self-organizing coworking spaces in Finland. It functions in the biggest cities, offering connections for people to find a membership in a coworking space, new spaces for their coworking communities, or new members to share the costs of running such a space. Mushrooming holds a lot of potentials that are not yet developed, and it could highly profit of new ideas and new contributors brought in by FW process.

Read more here pages 229 – 249.

Photo by Sebastian Jäntti, at coworking space 33 in Turku.