In a world that seems caught in a crisis-ridden present, there is a need to reawaken our capacity to collectively imagine, make, organise, and educate towards more hopeful futures. The centre offers a transdisciplinary space for collaborative research and education for just, sustainable and inclusive futures that invites diverse knowledges and perspectives.

The world faces a deficit of social imagination. We find it easy to imagine apocalypse and disaster; or to imagine new generations of technology. But we find it much harder than in the past to imagine a better society a generation or more into the future.

Geoff Mulgan, The Imaginary Crisis (2020)

Malmö Research Centre for Imagining and Co-Creating Futures brings together researchers and teachers from across the university to bring the transformative and critical potential of design, art, culture, humanities and the social sciences to bear on key areas of critical societal transformation. The scope of these areas spans critical issues such as collective responses to climate change, environmental degradation and sustainability to the rise of political polarization and extremism or the profound impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and the rapid development of digital technology on relationships, social interactions and public discourse, and ultimately, the sustainability of society and democracy.

Our shared agenda in these areas is organised around four interconnected orientations to future-making, each providing a set of questions, concerns and methods: Imagining Futures, Making Futures, Organizing Futures, and Educating for Futures.

News and events

Lecture, 3 September

FUTURES Thoughts: Cruel Futures, Dubaian Dreams and Permanent Arrival

News

Thinking outside the box to contribute to sustainable societies

FUTURES Thoughts

A warm welcome to our public talk series, FUTURES Thoughts. The public talk series is held on Thursdays 13.15–15.00 at K3 Studio in Niagara, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1, unless otherwise stated.

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Previous FUTURES Thoughts

Spring 2026

  • #7: What Grows in a Silicon Forest? (9 April)
    Melissa Gregg, Professor of Digital Futures, University of Bristol, UK
  • #8: Pluralising and Politicizing Service Design: Critical Agendas and a Worker-Centered Approach (23 April)
    Lara Penin, Professor in Transdisciplinary Design, The New School, US
  • #9: Engaged Scholarship for Possible Futures: Let’s Burst the Foresight Bubble Together (23 April)
    Sarah Pink, Laureate Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Lab and FUTURES Hub, Monash University, Australia
  • #10: Decolonisation by (and with) Old White Men in Flow Feelers. Is That Even Possible, Relevant, or Feasible? (7 May)
    Martin Hultman, Professor of Sociology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • #11: Imaginative Futures: Imagination, Art, and Media in a Strange World (28 May)
    Bo Reimer, Professor Emeritus of Media and Communication Studies, Malmö University, Sweden
  • #12: A Conversation on Art, Radical Imagination and Hope (16 June)
    Geoff Mulgan, Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation, University College London, UK. Organised in collaboration with Malmö Möts (12–18 June).

Autumn 2025

  • #1: A Manifesto for Making Critical, Crip & Cyborg Futures
    Laura Forlano, Northeastern University, US
  • #2: Where on Earth Are We? The Role of Academic Scholars in Times of Threatened Democracy
    Birgit Schaffar, University of Helsinki, Finland
  • #3: Learning from “Aesthetics of Access”: Engaging in Participatory Design as a Relaxed Performance
    Laura Popplow, Köln International School of Design, Germany
  • #4: Creative and Community-Centred Approaches to Sociodigital Futures
    Laurène Cheilan, Centre for Sociodigital Futures, University of Bristol, UK
  • #5: Futures
    With the editorial team of Fronesis (special issue on futures): Charlotte Fridolfsson, Ylva Gislén, Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren, Carolina Pettersson, Lina Rahm and Åsa Ståhl
  • #6: Danish Colonial Reproductive in Kalaallit Nunaat
    Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Research projects

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Researchers

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Publications

Collaboration

Collaboration is an integral dimension of our work, and is built into all processes and activities of the centre. We draw on existing collaboration infrastructures at Malmö University, for example the Forum for Social Innovation Sweden, UNIC Centre for City Futures, alongside a number of partnerships with external stakeholders, in order to increase our societal reach and impact.

Contact

Email us

futures@mau.se