Join writer and producer Maria Leonard for an interactive workshop using co-creation, creative writing and shared discussion on the plural trajectories for care, work and technology. By centering the potential of imagination and the notion of ‘plural futures’, you will go away with new tools and tactics needed to think about the way you want to live together with others in the future.

Touching on the writing of diverse thinkers such as Arturo Escobar, Ursula Le Guin, to ideas and images of future forms of work, community, care and the technologies used to create them, Invented Futures will take participants through a series of creative methods, or “tools”, for charting alternative trajectories, ways of being together and the kinds of possible futures this can create in the face of uncertainty through four strands:

★ Utopia as method: Governance Futures
★ I do not dream of labour: Work Futures
★ Robot Intimacy: Care Futures
★ Entangled systems: Tech Futures

Building on the research produced by the Invented Futures collective, the session will introduce to the concepts of worlding and the commons, organising practices, emerging debates around living with technology and the urgent questions around living together.

We will challenge, question and develop participants’ notion of what makes a future, the kinds of people-led organising it takes to meet the demands of current future trajectories, and the imaginative responses that we need going forward.

Bring along a pen, your ideas and your imagination: imaginations are capacious and shifting, big and restless: we can have everything we ask for, everything we need.

About Invented Futures

Maria Leonard is a writer, researcher and producer who has worked on the cultural aspects of, separately, the future and death. She is currently producer of Invented Futures, facilitator at Theatre Deli, and an associate artist at Spike Island, as well as a poet.

Invented Futures is a research collective which brings together artists, writers, researchers and technologists around the principles of speculative thinking to reframe dominant ideas about the future and its alternatives. We ask the following questions:
What kind of knowledge, systems and capabilities are required to imagine and build alternative futures?
How might speculation, from thought experiments to fiction, to performance and prototypes, provoke dialogue and change?

Based at Spike Island and with living labs throughout Europe, the collective spans fiction writers, researchers and organisations such as the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge, the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies, UCL Science and Technology, Bristol Digital Futures Institute, the Imagine Festival of Ideas and Politics, and more.

Pay-what-you-can – there is a recommended price of £4 on the door at this event, but no-one will be turned away through lack of funds. Book in advance or pay on the door.