Co-Imagining Futures: Engaging Experts Across Disciplines

The STS Futures Lab began working on the Co-Imagining Futures research project in the spring of 2019. Co-Imagining Futures was conceived as an experiment in critical participation aimed at developing methods for building cross-disciplinary communication and interactional expertise to support responsible innovation and anticipatory governance. We invite experts from various disciplines to join the Lab in collaborative scenario analysis and design fiction focused on a topic within the invited expert’s domain of expertise. Then, together and with our undergraduate student participants, we critically engage plausible future scenarios related to the expert’s selected topic.

This essay documents this research-in-progress, including our process, methods, and artifacts stemming from our initial expert engagements. Artifacts include photos, videos of interviews and excerpts from our workshops, publications, and commentary.