Futures intelligence research.
Exploring the conditions under which new futures can emerge.

What Do You See? NYC is an interactive, web-based photo archive created by Molly Baker Ragan that invites users to explore and tag hundreds of everyday photos taken around Queens, New York City. The platform encourages people to notice and interpret overlooked urban details—like tangled cables or sidewalk markings—by allowing anyone to add their own descriptive tags to each image. This participatory approach transforms mundane city scenes into a collaborative, living archive, revealing patterns and diverse perspectives on daily life. The innovation lies in its open tagging system and focus on subjective interpretation, making urban observation a shared, creative act and challenging how we perceive the capitalist everyday.

Commons economies differ fundamentally from collective and cooperative economies. While collective ownership centers on a defined group’s shared control—often creating boundaries that exclude others—commons economies are open, inclusive, and designed for unbounded participation across space and time. Collective ownership is a limited, 19th-century approach that cannot address today’s planetary-scale challenges or externalities. In contrast, commons economies innovate by enabling shared stewardship and access, prioritizing the public and common good over group self-interest. This shift signals a move toward more adaptive, inclusive, and sustainable economic models that better address global needs.

The team at Canopy is addressing the environmental impact of wood pulp demand by promoting low-impact, circular alternatives like straw waste and recycled textiles. These "Next Gen pulps" are not only competitive in price and performance but also significantly reduce environmental harm. They have 88-100% less land-use impact, at least five times lower impact on biodiversity, and prevent four metric tons of carbon emissions per ton substituted for wood pulp. Canopy aims to catalyze a shift in the global pulp sector, displacing wood pulp from climate-critical forests by 2029 and eliminating it by 2033. This initiative seeks to make Next Gen pulps the industry standard, thereby protecting ancient forests and addressing climate and biodiversity crises.