Event programme

At the EU Policy Lab, we developed a tool to build scenarios that stimulate thinking on how values and attitudes shape our futures. Traditional foresight scenarios usually depict what different futures could look like, often based on drivers of change and critical uncertainties. The development of the tool was driven by our need to understand how different futures emerge from the values and attitudes that govern our actions. ​

Based on 'archetypal societies', each with their own dominant values and attitudes concerning several domains, the tool helps to build, compare, and contrast the present with different value-based scenarios, to eventually develop an aspirational vision of 'how' we should engage with a certain policy domain or issue. ​

During this workshop, we will showcase this value-archetypes based scenario-building tool.​

Facilitators: Yannick Dujardin & Laurent Bontoux / EU Policy Lab

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A few years after Jubilee; a mass erasure of debt, a new calendar system, and a restructuring of societal and economic priorities. ​

After Jubilee is a radio show set in a future Europe. By tuning into the show, listeners get a glimpse of the day-to-day stories, opportunities, and challenges brought about by this time of transition. ​

Through a series of segments — a conversation between a grandma and her granddaughter or a report from a local community center — listeners are invited to imagine a world where we have more space, to rest, to experiment, and to connect with one another. ​
After Jubilee re-imagines futurism, questioning our relationship to the past, the linearity of time, and the inevitability of the future.

Facilitators: David Martens / EU Policy Lab

Resources: 

Futures Garden - EU Policy Lab - European Commission

Governments spend billions on social benefits but do limited research with the public, leading to ineffective services. Meanwhile, public-sector innovation and policy organizations conduct valuable research that no one sees.​

To address this problem, the organizers of this session developed The People Say: a first-of-its-kind multimedia research platform that helps decision-makers engage with voices of the public when designing new public policy and strategy solutions. Our goal is to make it easy and ethical to engage with the public; to make it simple to generate cross-searchable, publicly available data; and to deliver meaningful insights about the public’s experience that lead to real policy innovation.​

This screening session will share selected clips from over 200 hours of civic video research, highlighting ten areas for future policy action derived from our participants. The session will include a Q&A with the audience to discuss the genesis of the project, the methodology employed, the outcomes to date, and our future plans for this groundbreaking civic-data resource.​

Facilitators: Jessica François​ & Chelsea Mauldin / Public Policy Lab

As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in public decision-making, questions of trust, responsibility, and long-term impact often surface only after systems are deployed. This session explores how trust can be designed upstream, before policy commitments, technical choices, or governance structures become difficult to reverse.​

Through a facilitated, participatory format, participants will examine how assumptions about risk, accountability, and legitimacy shape AI-related policymaking. The session will invite reflection on where responsibility truly resides when AI systems influence public outcomes, and how policymakers can anticipate second-order effects that are not immediately visible.​

Drawing on real-world policy and governance contexts, the session will offer tools for identifying blind spots, surfacing implicit trade-offs, and reframing AI decisions around long-term societal trust. The aim is not to provide technical solutions, but to strengthen policymakers’ capacity to navigate uncertainty and design resilient, trust-based approaches to AI governance.

Facilitators:  Suvianna Grecu /  AI for Change Foundation​

Air is one of the most shared yet least perceived infrastructures of collective life. It carries emissions, particles, moisture, and microbial traces, binding bodies, environments, and institutions into forms of interdependence that remain difficult to sense and govern. This workshop invites participants to explore how atmospheric awareness can inform future policymaking. Through embodied and design-led exercises with mist, movement, sensing, and role-based enactments, participants engage air not as empty space but as a living commons shaped by shared exposure and responsibility. ​

Drawing on situated observations, site-specific samples, and speculative policy prompts, the group will co-create provisional “Atmospheric Commons Protocols” that translate vulnerability, care, and ecological entanglement into tangible governance imaginaries. The session contributes a practice-based perspective to policy futures by showing how collective sensing and embodied rehearsal can support more responsive, climate-aware, and relational forms of public decision-making.​

Facilitators: Clemens Winkler / Humboldt University, Myriel Milicevic / University of Applied Sciences Potsdam

Artificial intelligence is transforming professional practice across sectors, including policymaking. This workshop explores how AI can collaborate with human expertise in policy development.​

Participants will engage with FAST, one of the world's most comprehensive knowledge graphs of technical, social, and political innovation. They will explore data and ideation tools, some of which are AI-based to envision consequences and identify potential policies. Participants will have the opportunity to rank policies developed by groups as well as by AI, as a sort of “Turing Test”.​

Using AI-assisted and traditional ideation tools, participants will develop novel policy proposals for 2030-2035, mapping consequences and refining ideas through discussion. An AI system trained on European policy frameworks will contribute proposals alongside human participants, with origins (human vs AI) remaining undisclosed until final rankings.​

This blind evaluation creates a unique experiment: Can participants distinguish AI-generated policies from human ones? How does AI performance compare across dimensions of policy quality?​

Facilitators: Aya Elzoheery ​ & Daniel Pesach Cohen ​ / Futurity Systems

Get to know the tool

This interactive session presents one tool from the Intergenerational Dialogue framework: AI‑powered conversations with future individuals.​

You find a lost backpack. As you figure out who it belongs to, you discover the lives of four young Europeans living in 2040.​

This collective experience is set in a future Europe. Together, participants unpack artifacts of tomorrow – everyday objects such as printed magazines, photographs, travel journals, and energy bars. Among the mis an AI-powered device with its owner's voice, which can talk about their experiences and answer your questions about future realities.​

This activity opens a dialogue on how we think about policies and their impact on young people, taking into account changing social norms, challenging assumptions about growth, identity, and adaptation.​

Facilitators: Marta Malesinska & Erica Bol / EU Policy Lab

Resources:

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Futures Garden - EU Policy Lab - European Commission

We live in a time of unyielding, accelerating change. From climate crises to social anxiety and AI fatigue, our bodies often register these shifts long before our minds can make sense of them. What begins internally as a sense, emotion, or thought, echoes outward into collective patterns and actions.​

This workshop invites participants to recognize the body as an active site of foresight. The session introduces Embodied Futuring, a practice grounded in transtemporality: the understanding that past, present, and future are deeply interconnected. ​

Participants engage in accessible, movement-based exercises informed by Social Presencing Theater, contact improvisation, and Theory U. The workshop unfolds in three stages: Presencing, Sensing Futures, and Embodying Action. Through individual reflection, small-group exploration, and collective sensemaking, embodied insights are translated into shared language, visual mapping, and near-term practices that strengthen futures and policy work.​

Facilitators:  Julienne DeVita ​/  Liminal

A presentation of recent experiences in creative uses of sound within foresight projects, including:​

The content of the screening and physical artefacts aim to highlight the potential impact of sound within foresight and generate discussion around creative and experiential elements of foresight work more generally.  ​

Facilitaors: Peter Humphrey​ & James Steven / Hyphae

For anyone working with policy decisions, designs or foresight topics, the Love Consultancy is here to support you! At the EU Polyfutures event, we will unlock the potential of love, to inform good policymaking in the present and future. ​

First, we will familiarise ourselves with love ethics, both in policy and individual perspectives. A brief impulse will broaden your perspective on love, care, and relational policy, including theoretical frameworks and practical examples. During peer-to-peer consultancy sessions, we will look at your personal and specific challenges. These sessions will help us reflect on our personal perspectives on love ethics and teach us how to apply loving principles in a professional context. At the end, we will have a group Love Consultancy in which we will hold space for questions, difficulties and discussion.​

The Love Consultancy welcomes anyone interested in love ethics in policy, including policymakers, designers or foresight professionals. No matter what policies you deal with, join us to learn how more love in policy will create a good future for all. We are all stakeholders in policymaking and we believe that all of us can advocate for love ethics. It’s time to love more!​
Alessa and Jasmin established the ‘Love Consultancy’ to support policymakers and related professionals in integrating love ethics into the policymaking process - with the aim of making informed, long-term decisions for caring futures. Our format is inspired by the renowned feminist scholar bell hooks, who advocated for love ethics in public policy.

Facilitators: Alessa Fetzer / Private consultant & Jasmin Jossin ​/ University of Applied Sciences Potsdam​

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This interactive workshop brings together African agriculturalstakeholders to explore the future of climate-smart crops—such asquinoa, millets, and panicum—as a solution to climate variability, soildegradation, and food insecurity. Using futures thinking tools like theFutures Wheel, combined with storytelling and gaming, participants willco-create scenarios for 2063 where these crops are mainstreamed. ​

The session aims to identify policy trade-offs, benefits, and systemicimpacts across markets, governance, and civil society. Drawing on UNDPEgypt’s foresight-driven success in agrifood transformation, the workshopwill inspire participants to envision resilient food systems and designtailored policies that incentivize adoption. By reframing perspectives andcrowdsourcing aspirations, this hands-on experience empowersstakeholders to influence decision-making and unlock opportunities forsustainable agriculture and livelihoods in Africa.

Facilitators: Engy Abdelwahab ​/ Unica Research​

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How can policymaking become more rooted in how people really think and decide? How can we bring evidence into the art of thinking about tomorrow? Behavioural Insights (BI) - an applied field drawing on psychology, economics, and cognitive sciences - offers tools to understand real decision-making and how context and design shape behaviours. A core strength of BI lies in experimental methods: by randomly allocating participants to different treatments, controlled experiments allow us to isolate the effect of an intervention from all other factors. This ability to establish causal relationships makes experiments the gold standard of evidence in behavioural science and a powerful resource for policy design. ​

This workshop invites participants to explore BI at the intersection of design and foresight. Through a live behavioural experiment, expert presentations, and interactive exercises, participants will uncover key behavioural mechanisms and examine how experimental evidence can enrich their policy work.​

Facilitators: Emanuele Ciriolo​, Francesca Papa & Michal Krawczyk / EU Policy Lab

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Policy Lab will run this as a live field lab that treats the city as an instrument for analysis. Participants use their own senses and disciplinary lenses to test whether the felt experience of place can become usable policy intelligence. The emphasis is on joint experimentation, not teaching a method.​

Part 1 will involve a guided walk across contrasting urban conditions (plaza, corridor, park edge, thresholds, infrastructure seams). Participants will record sensory cues(sound, smell, texture, temperature, light) and emotional tone (comfort, alertness, safety, estrangement), alongside observing physical form (enclosure, height/density, materials, traffic, sightlines, seating, greenery/water).​

Part 2 will involve overlaying those records onto a collective map with environmental and spatial indicators (air quality, heat, noise, shade, land use, flows, accessibility, transport, green/blue infrastructure). The group will then identify patterns, mismatches, and opportunities to inform place-based decisions.​

Facilitators: Lara Kinneir & Neha Sharma​ / Policy Lab

This session would allow us to share three key cases where design​ support and shape policy making process with great advantages...and​ great frustrations. All of them are at the meeting point of democracy &​ ecology, providint concrete tools to authorities to deal with major​ challenges (water, biodiversity, social housing). Getting feedback from​ professionals & academics from other European countries would​ definitely help us imagine next steps in a context of participatory,​ ecological and public innovation backlash.​

The three considered projects are all imagined and conducted in​ partnership with public authorities in France :​

1) Creating a tool to help local elected officials to better deal with water​

management issues.​

2) Designing administrative artefacts to integrate biodiversity to​

local policy making processes​

3) Involving inhabitants in a vast social housing renovation program​

We would like to use these three cases to illustrate the current tipping​ point for design in policy making in France, between creativity and​ administrative normalization.​

Facilitators:  Grégoire Alix-Tabeling​ / Vraiment Vraiment​

What happens when security logic colonises every domain of public life? As algorithmic borders, ambient sensing, and defence-tech platforms reshape European governance, we face the progressive securitisation of everyday existence - where health becomes biosecurity, communication becomes information warfare, public space becomes a sensor field.​

Fear-driven security politics trades civil liberties for protective technologies - systems that erode privacy while becoming instruments of profiling and manipulation. The deepest cost is invisible: this logic forecloses our political imagination, making it impossible to envision governance beyond the cycle of threat and control.​

This workshop tries to break that impasse. Through speculation blending the MANOA scenario-building method with design fiction, you'll explore plausible futures to 2040 for European security governance. The materialisation phase transforms scenarios into tangible policy artefacts -prototype regulations, speculative blueprints for privacy-preserving infrastructures, or models for transnational citizen assemblies, to name a few. Participants will leave with tools for reimagining security as collective care - and inputs for rights-centred European policymaking.​

Facilitators: Bartosz Frąckowiak/ ​Strategic Dreamer(s)​ & Ewa Kozik​ / BW_Lab

How can governments respond to immediate political pressures while stilldesigning for meaningful system change? This workshop will introduceparticipants to the dual-timeframe model, a framework the Public PolicyLab has developed over 15 years of collaboration with governmentpartners to support policy and service-delivery innovation. ​

The workshop focuses on designing for the “next administration’sfuture”—a five-to-twelve-year horizon that begins after current politicalleadership has typically changed. This timeframe creates space todevelop policy systems that are more ambitious than incrementalrenovations, while remaining feasible within democratic governance.​

In this highly interactive session, participants will explore the drivers ofpresent-innovation bias in their own policy contexts; identify participatorydesign methods that can usefully deepen the time-horizon of civic design;and develop familiarity with approaches to foster ‘next administration’government innovation for more sustainable and just futures.​

Facilitators: Isabelle Bradberry​ & Chelsea Mauldin​ / Public Policy Lab​

Technology foresight isn't passive prediction — it's foresight in action.This practice explores the long-term futures of science, technology, andinnovation. But foresight without action is just speculation. Trueanticipatory governance demands that we not only imaginepossible futures, but have the courage to act on what we discover —shaping policy before crises force our hand.  ​

This interactive session gives insights to the role of  foresight  in policy-making through the FUTURINNOV project . Through hands-on exercisesusing Technology Foresight cards, participants will identify weak signals,prioritise emerging technologies using impact matrices, and apply theFutures Triangle to evaluate drivers, enablers, and barriers. The sessionexplores how anticipatory governance transforms foresight insights intoactionable strategies.  ​

The question isn't whether the future will be disruptive — it's whether we're daring enough to shape it. 

Facilitators: Orsi Nagy, Anthonia Mochan, João Farinha & Gwendoline Bailey / EU Policy Lab

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This event is designed to engage practitioners, policymakers andresearchers in a reflective and forward-looking dialogue about thetransformation of Europe’s institutional buildings in light of urgent climateand societal challenges. ​

Through a curated walk in and around the European Quarter, participantswill explore: ​

The workshop will weave together stories of 21 European Commissionbuildings currently undergoing radical change, offering both inspirationand provocation: How can this moment of transition become anopportunity to build a better relationship between the EuropeanInstitutions, the city, and its citizens? How can we conceive our buildingsas more than energy performance sheets — as tools for representation,communication, and experimentation, embodying and expressing EUvalues?​

Facilitators: Alexander Throm​ & Josiane Schmidt  / 21 buildings​

From the race to return humans to the Moon to satellite mega-constellations and the militarisation of Earth orbits, outer space is a domain of increasing human activity and interest. However, outer space also remains troublingly constrained by shared images of the future that are familiar, problematic and powerful in shaping the practices and perspectives of influential space industry actors today. How can we envision outer space differently? How can we imagine futures beyond Earth otherwise?​

This screening and discussion is dedicated to imagining outer space futures. Thinking with a programme of short films by Joseph Popper and others, the session explores different ways in which artistic and design practices can inform European policy making. Together, the films demonstrate the potential of these practices to trace and question the intricacies of predominant future imaginaries and to employ critical and speculative approaches for imagining alternative space scenarios.​

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) investigates globalrisks from digital, biological, political and physical systems. Complexityand interdependence can make the greatest risks hard to comprehendbefore they occur. CSER is developing Worst Case Scenario, a podcastand series of longform articles that brings together scientists,policymakers and creative practitioners to ask how we make the invisiblevisible: exposing the vulnerabilities within our systems and rehearsingmore resilient responses. ​

This (audio) recorded session will showcase perspectives of small groupof invited panellists and a wider audience. Themes include: games andspeculative scenarios in policy experimentation; tension betweencredibility and creativity; the ethics and psychology of representation inroleplay; the impact of creative methods in resilient and anticipatorygovernance systems.​

Facilitators: Jessica Bland​ / Centre for the Study of Existential Risk

What if a nation’s cultural survival depended on tiny artefacts held by its citizens – and what happens if one goes missing?​

In 2087, you carry a fragment of your digital nation with you, safely stored in the “Tiniest Soul” ring worn on your finger.​ As societies evolved, countries and cultural identities could no longer rely solely on physical land or borders. Citizens became the living carriers of their cultures, histories, and collective memories—tiny treasures that hold the essence of a nation.​

Tiniest Soul—an experiential futures prototype—emerged from a foresight process exploring humanitarian aid in relation to digital risks and autonomous weapons. Created in 2024 for the 34th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, it invites visitors to immerse themselves, reflect, and engage in visceral debate. A soft ritual and guiding questions accompany the experience, deepening the connection and exploration.

Organisers: Lena Tünkers​ / independent

Trust is key to cooperation, legitimacy and shared decision-making in public life, yet it is often approached as an abstract concept, rather than a lived practice. This makes trust difficult to cultivate across siloed departments and complex policy networks. 

The Bottle of Trust embodies trust through an experiential ritual, that creates a tangible encounter with trust’s relational nature, emphasising that it grows only when mutually shared through active participation: To receive trust, you need to give it away.​

Materialised as a hand-blown Murano glass vessel, the artifact is offered as a gesture of trust. The original recipient writes a desire on paper, places it inside the bottle and passes it on to someone they trust. With each exchange, trust is enacted and multiplied through a chain of intentional gestures that spark shared moments and create the space for deeper human engagement.​
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The bottle’s fragility demands care, serving as a physical metaphor for the vulnerability and reciprocity inherent in trust. The Bottle of Trust complements analytical policymaking methods with embodied and design-driven approaches, enabling participants to move from knowing about trust to practicing it, experiencing how relational qualities such as trust can be cultivated at both interpersonal and institutional levels.

Organisers: Jeroen Peeters​ / Future of now ​& Maria Claudia Coppola​ and Ambra Trotto​ / EIT Culture & Creativity​

Organiser: Nicola Spano / EU Policy Lab

Some of the games: