Envisioning as an Enabling Tool for Social Empowerment and Sustainable Democracy

The future is commonly acknowledged as important to investigate and discuss for the sake of society whereas we can, at the same time, acknowledge how public discourse in our contemporary societies is only offering poor, stereotyped and often negative visions of future. This paper reframes the evolution of attitudes towards the future in our recent history through technological positivism, acknowledgment of a complex and unknowable future, emphasis on marketing reactivity in place of anticipation, and increased development of dystopic visions of threatening unsustainable future. It will review the current situation where the future is omnipresent in media stressing its poor, uniformed, technology-driven form lacking creative imagining, accessible and attractive envisioning and rich public deliberation. The authors then build on a series of recent sustainable visioning activities (i.e. public cultural exhibition, digital interactive media, foresight visualisations for public authorities, projection exercises involving youths in schools and universities, etc.) to show how emerging practices involving designers skills to generate participative visioning processes resulting in concrete forms of anticipation accessible to all and likely to enable both formal deliberative processes and informal social conversations on the future, as well as empowerment of citizens in education for responsible living and democracy.