During this project we experimented with ways to bring futures literacy to young people. One of the approaches was to collectively create pieces of futures fiction. Creative images of alternative futures open up new possibilities, bring people together around new perspectives, and challenge dominant narratives about the future – especially when created by voices that we usually don’t hear. They are useful tools for transformation, they trigger imagination and conversation, and they’re also fun – which we believe is an important part of learning many things. These activities, involving close to 200 teenagers and young adults from Slovakia and Belgium, also opened a window into how this generation thinks about its, and our future.

Here, we share some of the outcomes of the Futures Is Now project: what the young participants created and what that leads us to understand about their hopes, aspirations and worries; and also what we, the project organisers, learned from the whole process.