Finn is a designer and foresight practitioner with a drive to enable people to shape their collective futures. He creates tangible tools, experiences and participatory foresight processes that help people to imagine and implement their visions of a better future.

Finn is the creative lead on SOIF’s National Strategy for the Next Generation programme, is an NGFP fellow, and the inaugural winner of the NGFP Walkabout Prize where he is using social media to engage young people to think about the future.

Finn is also a visiting lecturer in Global Innovation Design at Imperial College London and is founder of Futurall, a design studio specialising in producing design led participatory futures engagements. He is also a regular public speaker at foresight conferences such as Primer, Futures Festival, and the Global Foresight Summit.

<aside> ❓ Can you describe your project, “Tomorrowland”?

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A Tomorrowland is an open, inspirational, safe space for praxis – physical or virtual – where youths co-imagine radical, preferred futures, produce cultural artefacts of their envisioned futures, and sustainably act on identified projects of interest. Tomorrowland is funded by the NGFP (Next Generation Foresight Practitioners) to pilot projects in Bangladesh, Brazil, UK, Australia and the Netherlands. The Tomorrowland project is led by NGFP Fellows Shakil Ahmed, Erica Bol, Rodrigo Mendes Leal, Finn Strivens and Ana Tiquia.

Tomorrowland Community Meet is an open invitation to foresight and futures practitioners working, or interested in working with young people to articulate, explore, and generate pathways towards desired futures. This quarterly series of talks, workshops, and participatory sessions aims to build a community of practice through sharing of outcomes and learnings from youth-centred projects globally.

<aside> ❓ How did your project start and evolve?

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Lots of the Tomorrowland work goes back to what Shakil Ahmed wrote in his story as part of a future manifesto with SOIF's (School of International Futures) NGFP (Next Generation Foresight Practitioners) network, where he talked about someone in Bangladesh walking through their 2050 city and visiting a Tomorrowland, which was a future space for democratic participation. So it's all framed through a lens about the future of democracy and building new spaces for democracy. Shakil reached out to a number of people in the NGFP network doing work with young people, mostly around creating communities and community spaces to have discussions about alternative futures and, I guess, questioning the dominant narratives that run through our societies and in our media. This is what Tomorrowland project is about: bring a bunch of people together who want to make sustainable formats for new communities and who use futures methods to try to create these spaces, co-op and adapt different methods for their own uses.

<aside> ❓ Do you always start from the same story ?

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We don't always start from the story, but I think it would be a nice way to start. It's a really powerful piece of writing. And it actually communicates the vision for tomorrowland much better than when we explain it out loud. Maybe as a result of this conversation, this is something I might feedback to the community: "Could we start every community meet with reading this story and cement ourselves in this sort of future narrative of where we're all headed together." Shakil’s story presents Tomorrowland as a physical space, but we understand Tomorrowland as a space we collectively want to make. So it could be a virtual space. It could be a wall that has a sort of regularly evolving set of murals that people come to make about the future. It could be any sort of space that we feel is appropriate. Tomorrowland is modular and adaptable.

<aside> ❓ Who is generally involved in putting the project together?

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The five of us together (Shakil Ahmed, Erica Bol, Rodrigo Mendes Leal, Finn Strivens and Ana Tiquia) are putting in place Tomorrowlands in different countries and exploring the impacts of the space we are creating. We come together to share some learnings about the similar questions, for example, how to evidence what we've done? How to follow up? How to sort of understand the impact on the people who are involved in the processes? And also how to make some kind of simple shareable set of tools so that anyone else can start thinking about how to make Tomorrowlands in their community.

<aside> ❓ How is it funded?

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SOIF has an impact award, which is a 5,000 usdpound grant. The purpose of the grant is to get members of the NGFP network to collaborate with one another. Inspired by Shakil’s initiative, we applied to this grant. We split the grant mostly to cover the costs related to running workshops and supporting the communities that we're working with.

<aside> ❓ What publics do you work with, why, and what do they do together?

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