The Collaborative Future-Making research platform explores how we can envision inclusive and sustainable ways of living and thriving together. We do this through prototypes and discussions where people from all sectors of society are involved. Our multidisciplinary group of researchers have respective backgrounds in humanities, design, and social sciences.

Future-making Academy – to read futures for societal change

FMA Spring 2023 is fully booked. If you want to be contacted and possibly join the next FMA you can send an email to Charlotte Orban.

14 February - 13 April

Do you work with social transformation and change? Perhaps you are a civil servant within a municipality or region, a teacher, an activist, work at an NGO, or an artist. Do you want to deepen your knowledge and reflect together with others? 

The Future-making Academy at Malmö University is a new initiative where we invite you to a reading circle focusing on complexity, future-making, and collaboration. The purpose is to make research available, deepen and provide space to examine and discuss how thoughts and ideas from the texts we read can resonate with our own practices. 

The reading circle will be conducted in both Swedish and English. No specific skills are required or needed to participate besides an interest in reading and reflecting. However, it is important to be able to participate in all meetings because the group is carefully put together to be a good interdisciplinary reflection environment.

Learn more about Future-making Academy

Seminars 2022

5 April

Future imaginaries of artificial intelligence for human life – a Nordic perspective.

With: Jason Tucker and Michael Strange, GPS Malmö University

6 April

Agonistic Navigating: Exploring and (Re)configuring Youth Participation in Design.

With: Kate Ferguson, participatory designer and PhD candidate, RMIT University, Melbourne. Co-hosted with the K3 Seminar Series.

Kate Ferguson

Kate Ferguson has recently completed a PhD at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. With a professional background in architecture, placemaking, public engagement, and community projects, she has a longstanding interest in the way people participate in shaping the built environment.

28 April

Flow Feelers – a study circle on applied ecofeminism for men.

With: Thomas Laurien, senior lecturer in design at HDK-Valand, and co-founder of the Design and Posthumanism Network

9 May

The Issue of Agency in Public Sector Infrastructuring Final PhD seminar.

With: PhD student in Interaction Design Alicia Smedberg K3 MAU and discussant Carl DiSalvo, School of Literature, Media, & Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology. This will be co-hosted with the K3 seminar series.19 May, 14.00-16.00

Stories and Design Recipes to Wonder, Care and Prioritize Relational Homemaking

50% PhD seminar with PhD student in Interaction Design Juliana Restrepo Giraldo K3 MAU/Linneus University and discussant Martín Ávila Professor of Design at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. This will be co-hosted with the K3 seminar series.

23-25 May

1st Symposium on Storytelling and Collaborative Future Making

Seminars 2021

4 March

Transmissions: Critical tactics for making and communicating research (video)

17 March

In Swedish: Att föreställa sig framtider (del 1) – livesänd samtalserie i samarbete med Malmö konstmuseum

25 March

How can we imagine a future for integration? (video)

31 March

A part of K3's seminar series and part four of the Co-becoming in the Pluriverse series.

We know so much, but we have not learned to use knowledge wisely (video)

6 April – 28 May

River – A process for decolonizing together

12 April

Automation of imagination (video)

15 April

From Dark Mountain to Östervåla: Gatherings around Climate Predicaments (video)

28 April

Att föreställa sig framtider (del 2) – livesänd samtalserie i samarbete med Malmö konstmuseum (video)

29 April

Storytelling for sustainability(video)

4 May

Speculative fiction and the bureaucracy of the future(video)

5 May

In Swedish: Att föreställa sig framtider (del 3) – livesänd samtalserie i samarbete med Malmö konstmuseum (video)

11 May

Decertifying legal sex/gender status (video)

28 September

Watch 'Utopia's in the making' at Mau Play

4 October

Watch Respectively Yours: Yoko and Ann on Pluralist Accounting at Mau Play

12 November

Watch Public sector innovation: panacea or pandora´s box? at Mau Play

13 December

Watch Transition Landscapes at Mau Play

Invitation to the 2nd symposium on Storytelling and Collaborative Future Making

The Leadership and Organization Group and the platform of Collaborative Future-Making hereby invite you to the 2nd symposium at Malmö University on the theme of storytelling and collaborative future-making. The symposium will take place 2-4 May 2023.

We invite a varied group of scholars from disciplines like design studies, leadership and organization studies, work science, communication, art, architecture, education and urban planning. The symposium is organized by Associate Professor Hope Witmer, Professor Per-Anders Hillgren and Professor Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen. The theme Storytelling and Collaborative Future Making addresses collaborative responses to making a sustainable and common future within the diverse areas mentioned above.

The symposium explores new ideas and approaches that mix storytelling and collaboration with questions concerning human rights and our relations to nature. 

A common thread in the symposium is to explore the role that storytelling can have in crafting ethical foundations for work, organization, design, architecture, education and urban development. Storytelling and collaboration for earthly survival mix with questions concerning how to collaborate and organize for human rights. While the 17 SDGs have been successful in mobilizing attention to questions concerning sustainability and inclusion, the embedded idea of balancing profit, people, and the planet in actual strategies and practices seems to be off-track in practising sustainable and inclusive development. Sustainability and inclusion are more and more at risk of becoming empty signifiers. Therefore, this symposium presents new ideas, concepts and approaches that allow for new understandings of how to work with all aspects of sustainability, and which aim for organizational and societal impact.

The symposium explores new ideas and approaches that mix storytelling and collaboration with questions concerning human rights and our relations to nature. These approaches might range from new embodied, relational, and material understandings of storytelling, the problematic and complex relations between small stories and grand narratives, the relations between places, spaces, and stories, post-human, transhuman and storytelling and -making for Gaia, feminist or queer storytelling. We also invite contributions on how to research and write differently in ways where we take upon us our earthly responsibility. Such contributions may be inspired by engaged scholarship, reflexive inquiry, post-qualitative inquiry, or speculative fabulation. Finally, we also invite new approaches to understand the details of how we work and collaborate and how they mix with issues concerning human rights and nature. These might comprise ideas from performative approaches to accounting, logistics, learning, collaboration, and planning.

Join us

If you want to join us, please submit an abstract of app. 500 words by 5 April 2023. This year we will also collect contributions for an edited book on storytelling and collaborative future-making. It is possible to only attend parts of the events. If this is the case, we would like you to provide information about when you are attending. The event is free of charge. We will not be offering accommodations for lunch or dinner. We will make space for social gatherings in Malmö and organize a joint meeting place for dinner in Malmö for those who are interested.

Contact

Please send any queries to the organizing committee, Kenneth, Hope or Per-Anders

Our research

Our work draws upon multidisciplinary, critical perspectives from the humanities and social sciences. We combine these perspectives with design research methods that are collaborative and constructive, such as making and prototyping.

One of our guiding concepts is critical imagination, which is about challenging basic assumptions, norms and structures for what constitutes socially, culturally, ecologically and economically sustainable futures.

Our research is carried out in collaboration with professionals and policy makers, as well as individuals and non-governmental organisations. Together, we prototype and discuss alternative and collaborative futures.

To summarise, the platform aims to:

  • envision and prototype inclusive and sustainable futures
  • develop ways for how these futures can be debated
  • work closely with actors from all sectors of society

Research methodologies and focus areas

Research methodologies and approaches include art, action research, co-design, discourse theory and analysis, feminism, hermeneutics, historicisation, performativity, phenomenology, postcolonial studies, posthumanism, science and technology studies, and social network analysis.

Focus areas include critical imagination, anthropocene storytelling, heterodox economies, collaborative resilience, and societal engagement.

Forskningsplattformen Collaborative Future-Making tar sin utgångspunkt i mänsklighetens bristande förmåga att föreställa sig hur världen skulle kunna vara annorlunda.

Ett centralt begrepp är "critical imagination" (kritisk föreställningsförmåga). Detta handlar om att ifrågasätta grundläggande antaganden, normer och strukturer. Syftet med detta är att vidga människors perspektiv på vad som skulle kunna utgöra socialt, kulturellt, ekologiskt och ekonomiskt hållbara framtider.

Plattformen utforskar hur vi kan föreställa oss dessa alternativa framtider samt formerna för hur vi gemensamt kan utforma, testa och debattera dem. Den tvärvetenskapliga forskargruppen är verksam inom humaniora, design och samhällsvetenskap.

Researchers, publications and projects

Total hits: 32
  • Andrea Botero, Aalto University, Finland
  • Davina Cooper, King's College London, UK
  • Max Koch, Lund University, Sweden
  • Andrew Morrison, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway
  • Emily Spiers, Lancaster University, UK
  • Danielle Wilde, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark