Article
Justine Walter1, *, Ricardo Schnug2
1 Independent, Germany
2 Department of Educational and Futures Design, Germany
Abstract
This case study explores a futures workshop conducted at Tamkang University that aimed at enhancing students’ ability to envision desirable futures. The workshop combined utopian thinking and human-centered design methodology to enable students to overcome cognitive biases, such as the end-of-history illusion. Findings suggest that the integration of psychological insights and the use of interdisciplinary methods can improve engagement with alternative futures. The approach is adaptable for strategic foresight beyond education as it facilitates deep immersion and empathy building in visioning processes.
Keywords
Empathy, Human-centered Design, Visioning, Psychology, Scenario Workshop
Introduction
For decades, Tamkang University has made futures thinking a central part of its educational mission, recognizing its relevance for a society in which wicked problems are increasingly common. In the course “Futures Studies for Society”, students explore social change and begin the semester experiencing the Polak Game (Polak, 1973), which often reveals students’ pessimism about the future: over the past three years, approximately two-thirds of students from eight courses believed the world to be worsening, with only a few being neutral and even fewer on the optimistic end of the spectrum. In a world that is full of dystopian tropes and leaves its inhabitants little time to reflect on what a good life could be like outside of these projected negative futures, students find it increasingly hard to envision a desirable, yet plausible future for themselves. This aligns with large-scale global surveys like that of the Varkey Foundation (2017). However, when considering their own agency, students tend to be more hopeful, with nearly half of them feeling they could influence the future.
To further increase this perception of individual and collective agency and empower students to envision compelling images of personal as well as collective desirable futures, the authors designed a small workshop that combines utopian thinking and methodologies from human-centered design to facilitate the immersion in, and the prototyping of desirable futures.
Theoretical background
Both Organizational Foresight and Futures Studies have traditionally placed their primary focus on probable or projected futures as extrapolations of the present through observing trends and imagining the impact of their continuation (Smith & Ashby, 2020). This focus corresponds to the increasing short-term orientation among organizations, societies, and individuals resulting from the increased complexity, volatility, and uncertainty of today’s world (Gerlich, 2023). While scenarios of probable or projected futures are valuable for defining investment strategies, project plans or portfolio building and facilitate planning for what is likely to happen, they remain confined to current discourses and are often little concerned with the needs and feelings of the humans living within them.
As Tamkang University aspires to enable students to first recognize the future, adjust to the future, and then create their own future (Leong, 2024) as well as to inspire them to consider what kinds of people they want to become, it is necessary to supplement the teaching of trends-based foresight methodology with a discussion of more creative desirable futures that are still coherent and plausible, yet less constrained by what currently seems possible and likely. This appears particularly timely as the current generation of students struggles to remain optimistic about likely societal developments. For these young people, it is increasingly crucial not only to be able to think critically and analytically about different futures but to build the capacity to empathize with their future selves in order to envision positive personal futures.
This capacity is closely related to the emerging construct of future-self-continuity, or “the perceived connection between one’s present and future self” (Hong, Zhang & Sedikides, 2024, abstract) that plays a crucial role in long-term financial and ethical decision-making, academic motivation and performance, and general well-being. Initial research on the topic implies that the level of future-self-continuity in today’s societies is low (Hong, Zhang & Sedikides, 2024). This results in a pronounced tendency among people of any age to treat their future selves like strangers (Pronin, Olivola & Kennedy, 2008) as well as in widespread presentism and short-sighted decision-making. Psychological research on the matter has shown that this is partially due to an underlying cognitive bias: the end-of-history illusion or the belief that while we have changed significantly in the past, our current selves are largely stable and unlikely to evolve further (Quoidbach, Gilbert & Wilson, 2013). This illusion inhibits the future-self-continuity and fundamentally challenges futures thinking as well as creative visioning processes. As Daniel Gilbert summarizes in his 2014 Ted Talk: “We find it hard to imagine who we’re going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it’s hard to imagine, it’s not likely to happen. […] Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished” (Gilbert, 2014, 5:38, 6:23). This relatively new finding illustrates the importance of novel methodological approaches that are inspired by interdisciplinary research in facilitating effective visioning activities.
One promising methodology is utopian thinking, i.e. the exploration and discussion of a “non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in space and time” (Levitas, 2013, p. xiv). As this hypothetical (utopian) society can serve as a measure for evaluating what (future) social arrangements and lives are desirable, it facilitates reflecting on the present and sparks dialogue about desirable futures, while performing a kind of transformative capacity.
There exist several ways to express utopias, one of them being science fiction stories that provide “a fully realized, multidimensional vision, including not only the technological and scientific, but the psychological, cultural, moral, social, and environmental dimensions of future human existence.” (Lombardo, 2018, p. 3) As such, science-fiction literature and cinema provide an abundant, yet still hardly used pool of immersive future scenarios that often contain utopian elements. Moreover, it has been observed that science fiction may be a powerful instrument in informing the design of a better tomorrow (Zaidi, 2019) by “providing both a vision of civilization and the tools for realizing it” (Polak, 1973, p.13). Assuming that utopian sci-fi inspires individual imagination of, facilitates immersion into, and ultimately enables discussion about preferable futures, the authors of this paper chose this approach for their workshop.
A tool that helps to understand the implications of a future scenario – derived from science fiction or another source – for the people living in it and to evaluate its desirability while at the same time avoiding the end-of-history illusion is empathy, i.e. “the process through which we experience and understand the feelings of others, and that can move us to respond in considerate and concerned ways” (Segal, 2019, para. 1). Building empathy with one’s future self or other humans living in a given future scenario allows both deeper immersion in that scenario as it requires considering more aspects of the constructed world and the gathering of additional knowledge about how it might feel to live in it.
Much like futures thinking, empathy is an ability that is built into our brains by birth but needs to be refined and practiced in order to fulfill its potential. That practice involves imaginatively projecting oneself into another’s situation (Bateson, C.D., 2009) to understand how this person feels, thinks, and (re)acts in a given situation while remaining aware that these emotions and actions belong to the other person (Segal, 2019). This usually requires two steps or loops (Lambert, Selin & Chermack, 2024): an affective one in which one person relates to another one’s experience by imagining what it feels like to be in her or his place, and a cognitive one in which the unaffected person comes back to her or his own experience, tries to understand the shared feelings, and engages in perspective-taking. Methodology from human-centered design and User-Interface (UX) Design facilitates this process as it shifts attention from more traditional design work practices to potential users and thus allows for a structured collection of insights into other people’s emotions, thoughts, and actions while clearly distinguishing it from the collector (Morrison & Chisin, 2017).
Consequently, approaches like the creation of personas, i.e. profiles representing a particular group of people that share common behavioral characteristics, goals and motivations, are increasingly popular in foresight as they allow an enhanced engagement with scenarios by shifting the focus to the individual and building an emotional connection (Fergnani, 2019; Pace, Bruno & Schwarz, 2025). By placing themselves in a plausible future scenario and empathizing with it, participants in a scenario workshop become able to build more coherent futures and more easily overcome cognitive biases like the end-of-history illusion (Lambert, Selin & Chermack, 2024).
Building on these theoretical considerations, the authors based their workshop on the following assumptions:
- Students find it hard to imagine preferable futures that differ from the present and the past.
- Students have trouble empathizing with their future selves in order to analyze how they might feel in different futures and evaluate their desirability.
- Empathy-building methodology adapted from human-centered and UX design may be useful in building empathy with the future.
- Creative positive scenarios adapted from science fiction will spark students’ imagination.
- Drafting specific projects set in a hypothetical situation allows deeper immersion and further refinement of one’s personal vision.
Case Study: Vision With The Futures Studies For Society Course
Course details
This case study analyzes the process and results of two essentially identical 110-minute-long workshops held in week 15 (out of 18) of the fall semester 2024 at Tamkang University. The workshops were part of the course “Futures Studies for Society” and involved two student groups that were diverse in several regards: First, the students had diverse cultural backgrounds with approximately 50-55% of students across both courses of Taiwanese descent, while the rest originated from other countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Malaysia and the Caribbean (countries in order of representation size). Second, the students came from a wide range of academic disciplines. Many were enrolled in programs such as linguistics, diplomacy, tourism and computer science. In terms of participation, the total number of students attending the first run of the workshop was 25, while 36 students attended the second session. Project group sizes ranged from four to six students, adding up to a total of five groups in each workshop.
Leading up to the workshops
Prior to the workshops, the course followed the Six Pillars of Futures Studies framework and introduced theoretically and practically the various methods laid out in this framework (Inayatullah, 2008). During the first part of the semester, students had also been introduced to some of the most important futures concepts like the Futures Cone, trends, uncertainty, and the so-called “Zoo of Foresight” (Ylikoski, Rekola & Poussa, 2023) populated by black swans, elephants, and jellyfish. Emerging Issues Analysis, the Futures Wheel, the Futures Triangle, various scenario methods (e.g. 2×2 scenario method, archetypal scenario method) and Causal Layered Analysis were among the major methodological focal points.
In preparation for the workshop, lecturers had taken a small digression from the six pillars framework and included two additional lectures in this semester’s curriculum: one was titled “The Psychology of Futures Thinking” and highlighted the ways in which the human brain and mind influences decision-making, the other was called “Personal Futures” and focused on how the methods learned throughout the semester can be applied by individuals for their own personal decision-making.
The idea behind this digression in the curriculum was to remind students of their agency and illustrate how futures thinking on a personal/ individual level could potentially trickle across society – first affecting the individual, then its community and beyond – supporting the creation of positive futures.
Agenda of the workshops
The agenda of the workshop was as follows:
- The workshop began with a 10-minute review of the Futures Cone and various ways of approaching futures. Additionally, science fiction was presented as a valuable tool for envisioning potential future realities.
- After the introduction, students were handed out a Persona Canvas (Figure 1 & 2) in which they drafted their personal future persona’s details by stating name, age, occupation, hobbies and interests as well as the most valued achievement between the day of the workshop and the year 2045. For this, they were given 15 minutes.
- Once the Personas had been filled out, students were asked to take ten minutes and read the scenario, “A day in a regenerative life” (Heselmans, 2024), from the compilation “Clima Utopyas” that depicts a sci-fi utopia. They were then given another ten minutes to discuss impressions and feelings about this scenario at their respective tables or ask questions, if any existed.
- Before transitioning into group work, students were introduced to a version of the Empathy Map (Gray, 2017) adapted for this workshop (Figure 3 & 4). During this activity of 25 minutes, students were reminded to adopt the perspective of their 2045 persona when reflecting on the future reality depicted by the scenario they had just read. This canvas included deeper questions regarding what the students in the roles of their respective future personas hear, see, think and feel as well as what they do on a typical day in that future.
- For the next 40 minutes, students dispersed into groups of four to six people and introduced their drafted personas to each other. Afterwards, students were handed out an A3 canvas (Figure 5 & 6) and were asked to imagine and plan an event suiting their group’s respective life domain. These domains were taken from Verne Wheelwright’s (2010) book It’s your Future … Make it a Good One! and are: Social, activities, housing, health, finance and transportation. In the context of this workshop, the group working on the activities domain, for example, had to organize a sports event.
- In conclusion of the workshop, each group had three minutes to present their project.
After reflecting on the outcomes of the workshop, the authors of this case study decided to make slight adjustments to the order of the agenda for the second run to assess whether it would simplify the process of empathizing and visioning. Specifically, the changes involved handing out the scenario first, followed by a brief discussion, after which students received the Persona Canvas. The intention was to deepen the immersion into the scenario.
Results of the workshop
In accordance with the order of the final agenda, results are divided into: Discussion of and opinions on the sci-fi scenario, results of the Persona Canvases, results of the Empathy Canvases, and results of the project that students worked on as a group.
Scenario discussion
In a brief plenum and table discussion of the scenario within the groups it became obvious that opinions and feelings about the depicted sci-fi reality diverged: some students could identify well with living in this future and accept the utopian aspects of it, while others felt that the scenario did not depict a preferred future, pointing out various questionable elements of it (e.g. communication with animals, normalized vegetarianism).
Persona canvas
Figures 1 and 2 are two exemplary Persona Canvases from the workshop. They illustrate the authors’ observations that the particularly interesting or intriguing parts, such as hobbies and interests or job and achievements of the past, are in no way extraordinary or difficult to imagine from a present-day perspective.
Fig 1. Persona Canvas of a student from the workshop
Fig 2. Persona Canvas of a student from the workshop
Empathy canvas
Much like with the Persona Canvases, the Empathy Canvases were filled out by students quite enthusiastically. The exemplary canvases in Figure 3 and 4 display drafted projects with substantial parallels to present-day realities.
Fig 3. Empathy Canvas of a student from the workshop
Fig 4. Empathy Canvas of a student from the workshop
Group projects
With regards to the group projects, differences in quality or depth between the two courses were small, if not negligible, despite the slightly adapted approach mentioned earlier. However, differences in quality and depth of these organized projects did exist across workshop groups (domains). An important metric for assessing the quality of the projects was the extent to which the groups stuck to the future reality laid out in the sci-fi scenario. While students did draft projects that were positive and can be seen as an intrinsic part of a preferred future, the majority had difficulties relating the projects to the reality of the scenario. One domain in which a contrast between the groups’ outputs and the divergence on this metric is the clearest, is the health domain.
Fig 5. Group Project for the health domain in the Monday workshop
The health group in the first run of the workshop focused on health consciousness in the form of healthy nutrition, awareness, meditation, hydration and thus drafted a project very close to current discussions about health trends (cf. Zukunftsinstitut, 2025).
Fig 6. Group Project notes from the health domain in the second workshop
For the second workshop’s health group, in contrast, the essence of health consciousness seems to differ. It must be said here that their approach towards the project changed after a reminder to stay close to the scenario, as can be seen by the crossed-out parts on the canvas. As a result, the group did not only touch on sleep and dreams – as this was an important element of the scenario – but also identified changes in the central narrative surrounding health, namely supplements and genetic modifications as a way to improve health.
Regarding overall observations during the group projects, one particular point of friction that caused immersion problems was that students often imagined wildly different futures for their future personas. While this is generally positive, in combination with the diversity of students’ national background it led to them to question why (and where) this project group would come together when one of them serves as Prime Minister of Palau while another participant is an actor residing in Hollywood and a third a housewife in Indonesia.
While certainly a challenge, the variety of perspectives also led to particularly creative future imaginaries. A few highlights from other group projects across both workshops were events that included holograms or virtual reality in place of real objects and real meetings for the sake of sustainability, as well as a generally more environmentally aware society whose nutrition has shifted to a less meat-centric diet. Despite these forward-looking visions, the weights of history and old traditions were present in almost all results. These included, for instance, the enduring belief in traditional gender roles in Southeast Asia (e.g., by envisioning ‘trophy wife’ as a future occupation) and aspirations for wealth and fame (e.g., by becoming an artist or actor). As a result, the output reflected not only the scenario’s narrative but also the students’ present-day perspectives and cultural assumptions. This aligns with the authors’ assumptions and is an important result but will not be further discussed here.
Discussion Of Methodology & Limitations
Regarding the initial assumptions stated above, the workshop brought some valuable insights.
One of the authors’ assumptions was that students would find it hard to imagine preferable futures that differ from the present and the past. Throughout the discussions and from the results obtained, it became clear that imagination and acceptance of uncommon futures is indeed limited, respectively hard to establish, and requires a lot of effort in terms of facilitation and allocated time.
The authors also assumed that students would find it difficult to empathize with their future selves. The workshop validated this assumption as the great majority of students merely extrapolated the wishes of their current 2024-self to the future with little to no regard either for the depicted scenario reality nor to how their interests may change over time. While this seems to be in line with Gilbert’s end-of-history illusion, it remains unclear whether the difficulty lies (only) in empathizing with future selves or in the ability to see that future self in the imagined future scenario.
Futures studies methodologies like Causal Layered Analysis, role-playing scenarios, participatory futures and experiential futures can be used to tackle this bias (García & Gaziulusoy, 2021; Candy & Kornet, 2019). The authors of this paper assumed that empathy-building methodology as it is used in human-centered and UX Design may be a useful addition to the toolbox of any futurist who aims to facilitate the building of empathy with the future in a workshop setting. The canvases adapted for this purpose and the related group activities allowed students to think about the given scenario in a more personal and less abstract way. This proved to be fun for students and increased student engagement. However, it could be observed that students continued to have trouble fully understanding how it might feel to live in a given future. This might be largely due to time limitations that left students relatively little time to thoroughly reflect on the scenario and its implications for their future selves.
The immersion process may also have been affected by the chosen scenario. As the authors assumed that creative positive scenarios adapted from science fiction would spark students’ imagination, they selected a story from the compilation Clima Utopyas (2024) that depicts a futuristic and creative, yet credible scenario based on trends that are already visible today. It could be observed that instead of fully immersing themselves in the hypothetical reality, students tended to engage with it through evaluative thinking. It appears that simply accepting a scenario for the sake of the visioning activity feels difficult to do without judging aspects of the scenario that are incongruent with one’s own worldview and preferences. Nevertheless, lively group discussions about the scenario, its plausibility and desirability implied that it indeed sparked students’ imagination. A future run of the workshop, however, should make sure to address this issue, emphasize the ambiguity of any scenario, and allow students more time to imagine a positive vision of their future selves within it.
The choice of scenario may have affected the last workshop activity in which students took on the role of their future personas and drafted specific projects set in this scenario. The authors had assumed that this activity would allow students to immerse in this future more deeply and refine their personal future vision. As the scenario felt controversial to some groups and on-table discussions continued during this group activity, some potential insights were lost in these discussions. Moreover, several of the canvases were filled in in tongue-in-cheek fashion, largely ignoring the scenario as their background. At the same time, it could be observed that students mostly stayed in the roles of their future personas and created desirable projects. From this, it may be inferred that prototyping future projects is a methodology suitable for refining one’s own future vision in a workshop setting that provides an appropriate level of facilitation and enough time.
While the potential of this approach has become clear, the thorough immersion into a future scenario remains challenging. Immersion, however, is a crucial prerequisite for empathizing with future selves and may be just as important for such an activity to yield results that are independent from biases like the end-of-history illusion and make the educational experience a fun one too. Consequently, many of the limitations of this case study are related to this matter.
An additional limitation that sacrificed quality for the sake of immersion in the imagination process was the fact that students were often lost in discussions and for the most part, even after intervention by the authors, neither took notes nor jotted down novel ideas they came up with. An effective way to combat this limitation would be to assign a student the role of documentation lead whose responsibility would be to take down notes during the discussion and read them back occasionally to the group for finalizing thoughts and decisions. While this may be difficult for students without prior experience, it provides students with the opportunity to jointly reflect on the implications of the generated results for their individual visions. For educators, this intervention will be helpful for understanding the thought processes and narratives in order to identify relevant biases and improve future visioning activities.
Another limitation to this workshop was time. Just short of two hours does not leave much time for buffers which often led to taking students out of their immersive experience or enthusiastic discussions. With more available time and resources, the workshop could have also been conducted in a more immersive way like e.g. the one prototyped in Ellen J. Langer’s Counterclockwise Study (2009), in which she took participants of the experiment to a retreat where they were made to feel like it was 20 years ago. Similarly, immersive elements such as fake future newspaper articles, or asking students to dress in a futuristic way are promising props that may support a deeper immersion.
Conclusion & Outlook
In conclusion, the authors could validate many of their initial assumptions. Students indeed had trouble imagining a future that is ontologically different from the present and furthermore struggled to understand how it might feel to live in it. Students’ difficulty with immersing themselves in a future scenario and building empathy with their hypothetical future personas living in that scenario, suggests a limited ability to engage with futures outside of familiar narratives and as such aligns with the concept of disowned futures (Inayatullah, 2008) in which certain possible futures are excluded because they are outside of the dominant worldview. Similarly, a reliance on used futures (Inayatullah, 2008) during the workshops undermined the success in empathizing and engaging with alternative futures by defaulting students to pre-existing notions and ideas.
These discoveries indicate that findings from psychological research on concepts like the future-self-continuity and end-of-history illusion are worth considering in Futures Studies. In this regard, we expect added value from expanding the empathy canvas used in the workshops with state-of-the-art insights from psychology. In addition, the two runs of the workshop showed that methodology from disciplines like human-centered and UX Design have the potential to alleviate these biases and facilitate a deeper immersion in future scenarios as well as the building of empathy with one’s future self or other people inhabiting that future scenario. At the same time, authors discovered that apart from designing a coherent workshop concept and adapting methodology from other disciplines, a thorough immersion in a desirable future and the development of creative ideas of how to shape it requires precise facilitation and sufficient time.
For future application in educational settings, the authors recommend expanding the workshop design into a one-day block seminar in order to allow students enough time to fully engage in the experience. Diversity of the participating students – both in terms of their disciplinary and cultural backgrounds – should be addressed in facilitation and incorporated in the scenario work. To further bolster immersion in the scenario and enable empathy-building, it may prove beneficial to employ additional approaches like Causal Layered Analysis, for example in the discussion of the future scenario or in drafting the future personas.
In order to increase student engagement, ensure comprehension of the scenario despite possible language issues, and heighten motivation for immersing in the scenario, it may be beneficial to substitute the reading of a detailed written scenario by a short summary supplemented by a visualization and auditive elements for students to review. Generative AI can be of great use for creating such visualized scenarios.
Outside of academia and education, the approach is transferable to strategic and organizational foresight, e.g. by customizing the utopian scenario to the system an organization operates in. Instead of focusing on personal visions for individual futures, the main emphasis might be placed on a desirable future for the organizations in new markets or as a place of work. In such a context, we foresee that certain challenges identified in this case study are less likely to occur as participants in an organizational context share similar professional and/ or national backgrounds as well as ideas of their organization’s future as opposed to young students from various majors and cultural backgrounds that have difficulty defining a coherent vision for their personal futures.
The authors of this case study encourage foresight facilitators to adopt the approach introduced in this paper in contexts beyond education. Sharing the insights gained in further runs of the workshop with the futures community will increase learning and may be the starting point for setting new standards in enabling the participants in scenario workshops to empathize with their future selves. This may ultimately provide the foundation to empower individuals of all generations to imagine and then create desired futures for themselves and their community – just like Tamkang University aspires.
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