We are excited to announce our latest project, The Futures Bazaar: A Public Imagination Toolkit, written by design futurists Filippo Cuttica and Stuart Candy, and co-published by Situation Lab and the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Picture a wild and wonderful place where all alternative future possibilities co-exist at once, and can be physically encountered in real life; a kind of multi-dimensional exchange, in which tangible objects are put on offer from countless possible worlds. Welcome to The Futures Bazaar.

The Futures Bazaar is a design jam or creative gathering where people transform everyday objects into unique “artifacts from the future” to provoke, amuse, and inspire one another. Every participant helps imagine and produce these future artifacts, and every artifact tells a story.

The first Futures Bazaar event, also led by then BBC design lead Filippo Cuttica and Sitlab director Stuart Candy, was staged in 2019 for the away day of the BBC User Experience and Design (UX&D) unit, as a way to playfully lower the barriers, across the organisation, to thinking about change through alternative futures.

Soon after that, a second bazaar was held, this time in Stuart’s design futures course at Carnegie Mellon University. Both events went so well that the process seemed to be crying out to be shared with a wider audience. But then the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and things went on hold.

A couple of years on, however, and the widespread need that prompted this project in the first place –– the need to support shared spaces of imaginative engagement –– is more apparent than ever. Accordingly, Stuart and Filippo decided to create the Futures Bazaar Toolkit, in collaboration with the BBC GEL team.

The Futures Bazaar can now be adapted and run by anyone, anywhere. It is for players of all ages, in all fields. It is intended for use in public and private organisations, government bodies, schools, NGOs and charities alike.

It offers a chance to expand horizons, explore new ideas, and develop capacities for foresight, creativity, and storytelling, all in just a few hours. It may be set up as a stand-alone event, such as a company away day, or staged within a larger workshop, course, or event series.

Conceived in the traditions of experiential futures and participatory design, it might be part of a journey towards building foresight capability, engaging alternative futures in more open and creative ways, or it can be used more for fun –– teambuilding through worldbuilding.

Thinking concretely about times to come is harder and rarer than it should be. This open access public imagination toolkit aims to help make such thinking a bit easier and more common.

The toolkit is made up of three elements: Manual, Slides, and Printouts. The Manual helps you plan your own event, the Slides help you run it, and the Printouts are for distributing to participants on the day. All this has been packaged into a single ZIP folder containing the full set of PDFs for download from the BBC here.

It joins previous Sitlab outputs including our award-winning imagination game The Thing From The Future, and the Print-and-Play edition, as well as the card game Futureschool. The toolkit also builds on and learns from the years of experimental process design undertaken by Situation Lab in collaboration with Extrapolation Factory, through the series of design jams that we held in Toronto (Futurematic Vending Machine), New York (Futurematic Canal St) and Los Angeles (1-888-FUTURES).

The kit’s acknowledgements tip the hat to the many folks who made this publication possible, but above all, The Futures Bazaar toolkit is dedicated to the late Professor Jeff Watson of the University of California’s School of Cinematic Arts, co-founder of Situation Lab. The invention of openly available, playfully framed, creatively enabling frameworks and designs was among his many great gifts, and an inspiration throughout the project.

We are delighted to be sending it forth into the world, and eager to hear what people do with it. So please use the #FuturesBazaar hashtag to share outcomes, and get in touch with us with any comments, questions, or ideas for the community to build upon!