Another great podcast by Futurepod; Maya Van Leemput works in Applied Futures Research at her university, as well as holding the position of chair for UNESCO’s Images of the Future team. The conversation was a fascinating wander through Maya’s work in co-creating images of the future as she explored how an early interest in exploring the way in which futures are created and shared through the medium of broadcast television, led her to a deep fascination with polylogue futures - how “media, art and design can contribute to nurture and improve, scaled and intertwined polylogues” for the co-creation of new and more inclusive images of the future.

One of the key highlights for me centered around the plurality of futures. Moving from an often commonly accepted worldview that a ‘preferred future’ is one where we’re able to achieve a unified vision of the future, to a frame where we can utilize our differences to create a multitude of future images that are both inclusive and diverse across content, format and possibility. An interesting contextual note was Peter’s reference to Robert Yonk’s work in exploring the differences between experts and non-experts in their predictions of the future. Yonk found that experts were more likely to predict the future as more positive, bigger, faster, shinier and the non-experts were more likely to consider that current future trajectories of powerlessness, isolation and inequality were more likely to continue. 

Maya’s work at UNESCO, seeks to find those networks and communities, where the ‘not yet’ future is already being discussed or envisioned (often outside of professional futures work) and connect them to each other, to support further co-creation and enable deeper richer participatory futures discussions. Her work presents as a kind of antidote to Yonk’s observed dynamic, in its inclusion of a wide range of non-expert people and processes within the media and arts domain; where people are already doing the generative work to cultivate new images of the future at varying levels of scale.

Another highlight that resonated deeply with me was her building on this supposition that we’re not moving towards consensus (we’re moving away from established ideas as we navigate these post-normal times). The idea that we need to unlearn the things that are holding us back. This shift away from the goal of a unified perspective renders each individual voice as valid, surfacing a unique perspective with equal narrative weight (compared to dominant voices often prioritized within any given discourse).

This post-normal polylogue approach Maya presents, rejects the prevailing idea that including so many diverse voices necessarily results in a diluted perspective -  and that strength, and by extension usefulness and strategic weight, must be garnered through unifying vision.

In thinking about how I might use images of the future in my own work; it strikes me that images of the future can make ideas feel closer to where we are, and potentially provide the opportunity for more immersive experiencing and synthesizing of a potential future, even within the context of our own worldviews. Maya contends that visuals help us render proximity, not only bringing us closer to ideas about the future, but also bringing images of the future closer to us. This reminds me of Leah Zaid and also Sabine Winters another philosopher engaged in speculative design interviewed on Futurepod. Whilst the approaches of these practitioners are all markedly different, they all utilize immersive visuals and/ or storytelling as an entrypoint to a more meaningful, inclusive and immersive experience of possible futures.