In 2023—building on our founder’s long-running track record of research and reporting on innovations in media, tech, and democracy—Dot Connector launched our Fun with Futures practice.
Rather than a traditional consultant-client service, Fun with Futures is an organizing principle— designed to support our own continual learning and experiments. It helps us to collectively generate insights and feed them back into Dot Connector’s DNA.
Unbound by contracts or KPIs, we take classes and create them, explore novel methods for democratizing futures, and nurture our own capacity to wildly speculate.
We do this because futures thinking allows us to:
From autumn 2022 through spring 2023 we held a monthly Fun with Futures workshop to share best practices and tools with peers—drop us a line to be added to the list for updates about how this might evolve.
OK, fine, but why “fun”?
The name “Fun with Futures” reflects our desire to detach ourselves from the gloom-and-doom narratives that saturate our media landscape and social movements. We address serious issues, but with a sense of play and curiosity that allows us to move beyond reactivity and into creativity.
We first learned the power of play when we designed Dot Connector Studio’s Impact Pack, which has made its way around the globe. Since then we’ve explored many different games and tools for futuring and open-ended inquiry, and the power of collaborative storytelling to immerse people in possibilities they could not dream up alone.
We seek fun as an antidote to despair and hubris. None of us really know for sure what will happen next—but we might as well have a good time trying to figure it out.
