… and then? Visions of the future
“Think about and write by yourself the future that concerns you”: the largest crowd foresight & crowd writing experience
Italy | 12 March 2020 – 12 December 2022
There is a lot of talk about climate change and what we need to do, but the application of correct behaviour is scarcely implemented by individuals in the everyday life. This scientific communication project assumes that if someone individually and actively seeks the solution to a collective problem, he/she feels more involved in applying it. The project is based on an innovative, participatory and bottom-up research methodology, which will make it possible to get out of the model where experts who drop models from above that are not applied by people. The project was disseminated through the website (https://www.epoi.eu), social media and in on-line events (wide public) and webinars (high schools and universities): we proposed people to participate in a crowd foresight, which is neologism that defines a participatory approach in which a large number of people (crowd) try to imagine what will happen in the future in order to plan present and future actions based on this knowledge (foresight). To do this, participants imagined and described in a form on-line what they will eat, how food will be produced, how they will move, spend the free time, where will they live, how will be their clothes, what will be their job. Participants could then download an e-book, which is scientific-literary novel (genre: speculative nonfiction) set in the mountains on a glacier which melts, where three characters discuss on the great themes of the climate change and the future. The novel has no end and readers are asked to write it. In this way the readers become writers; they change from passive to active. The best endings of the novel will then compile the final book (expected to be printed in September 2021) as an exercise of crowd writing. All the endings are planned be published on the project website. One of the endings is written based on the crowd-foresight results. The project has a version (educational kit) to help in making students aware of the issues of climate change.
More info & Social Media
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Editor’s Note: All information published as submitted by the author(s). Minor edits may have been made to increase readability and understanding.
