Workshop with Riel Miller, pioneer of UNESCO Futures Literacy

Riel Miller has developed Futures Literacy – using the future to change what people see and do - as a nascent scientific discipline for both the OECD and then for UNESCO. In this 1-day seminar, Miller introduced Future Studies explaining where the field currently stands, how Futures Literacy should be conceived, and how we can deal with actual and potential futures in more fruitful, practical and participatory ways. This included the question of how Futures Studies can proceed to become a Futures Science. In the second part of the seminar, Riel showed examples of Futures Literacy Laboratories – real world futures laboratories or “Reallabore” – and how they should be set up. Futures Literacy Labs are - according to the expert - collective intelligence knowledge creation processes that invite participants to take a structured learning voyage through why and how they imagine the future.

“Futures capability it's not a methodology”, Riel Miller explained. “It is the capacity to understand that there are different kinds of futures, different methods for imagining the future, different uses and different impacts of using the future.” The seminar showed how transformation, Futures Science and Futures Literacy are increasingly interconnected and how one should not be practiced without the other. In South Tyrol, too, the implementation of future laboratories is planned.