The Futures Bazaar Toolkit is a way for communities to turn household junk into "artefacts from the future"
We are always on the lookout for methods that can help communities be “cosmo-locally” ambitious about their own future. Here’s one from noted futurist Stuart Candy, called the Futures Bazaar (developed in association with the BBC). There’s a full toolkit here to download, and they explain below:
A Futures Bazaar is a Star Wars-esque collection of fictional artefacts coming from multiple futures, each specifically designed to ask a question, or provoke debate.
A bazaar is like a hive brain (an idea well expressed by Eric S. Raymonds’ seminal essay about open source coding ‘The Cathedral And The Bazaar’): each stall is totally independent from each other, and yet together they form an organism where mundane meets the weird and wonderful.
It was the perfect metaphor to simultaneously explore the idea of future plurality (there are many paths forward available) while doing so through artefacts that had the metaphorical freedom to be playful and a bit ‘out there’ (a bazaar, after all, is a place where you find the wacky phone cover alongside the fancy knock-off, as opposed to the shiny products found in a supermarket or department store).
The idea behind such activity was to ‘lower the bar’ to future thinking, and to introduce communities to a seemingly obvious, and yet hard to grapple with idea: that the future hasn’t happened yet, that we can play an active role in shaping, but that before we can collectively choose what should happen, we ought to explore what could happen.
…Imagine a wild and wonderful place where all alternative future possibilities co-exist at once –– and can be physically encountered in real life. A kind of multi-dimensional exchange, in which tangible objects are on offer from countless possible worlds. This is the Futures Bazaar.
In more practical terms, a Futures Bazaar is a design jam or creative gathering, where people bring in “junk” items from home, and transform them into unique “artefacts from the future”, to provoke, amuse, and inspire one another. Every participant helps imagine and produce these future artefacts, and every artefact tells a story.
More here. We’re posting some of the materials from the toolkit below:
