Since 2020 Roisin Markham has been living with the question – How do we create futures living into? During 2025 the question shifted to a statement which now forms thrutopian pathway to reclaim the future.
In 2026 I aim to partner with young people to create something that can be used in groups outside of formal educational environments and within that has playfulness, imagination, and reclaiming the future at the core. Placing agency back into the hands of students.
Think origami fortune tellers, doodling, imagineering, mythic and epic futures, briding dystopian and utopian narratives to create pathways students want to bridge in trotpian practices. There may even be an option to discuss and explore ethical uses of AI or stay with pure imagination.
BDT Futures Lab combines 6 years of research, 15 years of working as an artist, community educator and 10 years of working as a futurist, innovation experience designer, facilitator and mentor.
It explores the stories we are living in and challenges them through facilitated creative and movement based events. Some of these are unbridled fun and making, others movement with content, they are a way to live into an other world being possible.
With current overloading of crisis: ‘eat or heat’ – standard of living, housing, fuel and heat, health, inequality, telivised genocide, war, distrust in institutions, biodiversity loss and manmade climate change along with intergenerational trauma, challenges of functioning in ourlives let alone creating our own futures worth living into seem like a pipe dream.
What if we had more pencils and everyone at least had an oppourtunity to redraw what their future loked like?
What would we need?
- pencils and paper
- a way to think about the systems we live in
- stories that hold the complexity of where we are
- an open way to play with what our futures might hold – dreaming on purpose think forune teller x being a good ancestor
- a more than human experience – kin with the natural world
- fast tech slow harm – exploration of AI, ethics, whats acceptable and safe for us
- an open and safe space to explore, make and collective create a new social imaginary
- the idea that another world is possible
- a way to plot that journey
We can do this work alone, online and in isolation but that misses this point. We need to come together to make meaning, to connect, to be in community and making and sharing new stories.
Themes include:
- Reclaim the economy – introducing doughnut economics and
the idea our economy lives within our society not the other way around
typically done through Step Into the Doughnut workshop a somatic ideally explore outside this video will give you an idea of it
The Doughnut Economics Action Lab has plenty of material to introduce young people to economics in a relational way making it accessible.
- Time traveling, literally exploring the idea of traveling 5-10 years into the future ‘where humans have done everything they possibly could’
I have a time travel device that I bring into rooms with children, young people, educators, policy makers and communties. This is combined with approaches to open up to what is possible to have the courage to dream that a new world is possble and collectively share and shape what our ideas maybe.
Typically done with a deep relaxation, creative visualisation and group humming.
Afterwards sharing, talking and drawing are important
There are several ways to explore and play with this idea and what gets ‘put in the room’ depends on the group and context. - What do our roles look like in the future – making and playing with new roles. Inventing new jobs and playing with them through origami fortune tellers and creating a tarrot like deck.
Alivlihoods vs. deadlihoods across the polycrisis.
AI can be used here as part educator part creative producer depending on AI usage and acknowledgement of climate and social harm it causes.
Other themes include
- Being a good Ancestor
- Decolinisation
- Power dynamics and systems inequalities
- Storytelling and improvisation
- Attending to endings and grief work
- Active Hope
- Climate and social justice
The BDT Futures Lab approach is also informed by the BDT Community Engagement Lab.
Futures Roles ~ playfully reclaiming futures for children and young adults.
Through my work with students and young adults, universities and communities of place I have been hearing despair of stolen futures.
Perhaps those futures were not very equitable in the first place?
The impact of COVID, war, the telivised genocide, the breakdown of unilateral rules of peace and law. The slow erosion of human rights, harms of fast tech. The polycrisis and collapse narrative has robbed our youth of agency and hopefulness. It’s this, the offset that needs a presencing, the space of where the future you once thought was yours is no longer. In part we need to grieve it. but more then anything we need active hope and agency.
The world won’t end, just our percieved privileged consumer growth perspectives ends. Even when we’ve grown up or are in diffcult circumstances in Ireland and the Northren hemisphere we are still privileged by the chance of where we are born.
How it is now and how it will be in the future is different to the stories we know.
The films, narratives, memes and culture we’ve grown up and around the space between the American dream and the UK colinisation needs to claim its own story.
We need to attend to creating new social imaginaries of futures we want to live into.
PLAY
I’d like to partner with young people to explore playful approaches to Futures roles.
In the past I have worked with children transitioning from primary school to secondary school using portraits and the history of portraiture from painting to photoraphy and selfies. It explored idenity and memory making as a threshold and ritual in the transition form primary school to secondary school. There was an element of playful learning, communication, connection, seeing each other, perception of self and someone in your class making a portait of you, digitally altering the image to produce a final picture of you. It was a full day event. As part of this project I created a poster, which was presented to each 6th class student along with their graduation certificate ant a school event. A picture of you a memory of me.
More recently through the framework of new economic thinking across Alivelihoods and Deadlihoods with 60 PhD researchers in Advanced CRT, I introduced doughnut economics and mapped where their research and personal interests were on the doughnut and then across the spheres of regenerative economics and work.
In 2026 I aim to partner with young people to create something that can be used in groups outside of formal educational environments and within that has playfulness, imagination, and reclaiming the future at the core. Placing agency back into the hands of students.
Think origami fortune tellers, doodling, imagineering, mythic and epic futures, briding dystopian and utopian narratives to create pathways students want to bridge in trotpian practices. There may even be an option to discuss and explore ethical uses of AI or stay with pure imagination.
in the same way I collect well designed and easy to use Wellbeing indicators I also have a collection on Roles in the Future. But I want to really create spaces for young people and children to have fun with the idea of what they could be in a world thats full of uncertainity.
Another world is possible.
Roisin Markham 