A Participatory and Personal Futures Design Course
Something is wrong with how we engage with AI and climate.
We read the commentary. We have the conversations. We read the reports. They tell us what’s coming.
And yet most of us leave those conversations feeling smaller, not larger. More anxious, not more empowered. Like spectators looking at a slow moving train wreck rather than people who will save the train by switching tracks.
This course starts from a different premise: that the most powerful response to uncertainty isn’t passively learning what’s coming — it’s understanding the leverage points that will shift the system in the long term, and deciding together how we want to target these.
Navigating AI and Climate Futures is a three-Saturday action-learning experience for people working at the intersection of governance, community, and change — policy officers, local government practitioners, NGO workers, designers, and civic innovators who are done with passive expertise and ready to actually do something with what they know.
Over three Saturdays you’ll build two distinct skill sets. First, a futures toolkit: deep time exploration, horizon scanning, scenario thinking, visioning and action learning — grounded in Joanna Macy’s work on active hope — so we can navigate this landscape without burning out. Second, a participatory futures toolkit: how to bring communities into the conversation, using methods that range from experiential to creative to playful.
But this isn’t a workshop where you learn and go home. Between Sessions 2 and 3, with a small group you will design and run a real participatory futures intervention — with colleagues, community members, or the public — and bring back what actually happened. What surprised people. What shifted.
Because the future doesn’t need more analytic clutter and noise. It needs more imagination, more voices, and more people willing to put something into the world and see what comes back.
Location and Group Size
The venue is central Melbourne (CBD), 888 Co-working Space, near Little Collins St.
Group size is limited to 12 people.
Three Saturdays. Real action. Your next step.
Melbourne CBD, July 2026. Places strictly limited.
| Dates | Details |
|---|---|
| Sat 18th July 2026 | Futures of climate and AI |
| Sat 25th July 2026 | Participatory Futures on climate and AI |
| Sat 15th Aug 2026 (half day) | Report back and celebration |
The course runs as an action-learning process across three Saturdays. The first 2 Saturdays run from 10:00 AM to 4:30 PM. The final Saturday goes from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM followed by a group lunch for those who want to stay.
Saturday 1 introduces the AI–climate landscape and core futures tool-kit, including weak signals horizon scanning, scenarios, and visioning, alongside work on “active hope” (Macy), sensing and strengthening our sense of purpose. As a whole group we will develop and make public a summary of the thinking from the day.
Saturday 2 is focused on the Participatory Futures (PF) tool-kit, how to engage the public in the climate-AI futures. We’ll learn core frameworks for PF, play the Our Futures game, and small groups will form and design a participatory futures intervention — a workshop, conversation, or activity that can be run with a real audience (colleagues, community, friends or public) before the next session.
Between Saturdays 2 and 3, groups will run their interventions and gather stories, reactions, and insights. Options for the PF intervention are varied but can include:
- Guerilla theatre
- Public art piece
- Interactive game (online or live)
- Installation or VR simulation
- Geo-spatial crowd mapping
- Public conversations / educational engagements
- Artificing futures (artefacts from the futures)
Saturday 3 is a half day report-back and celebration: groups share what happened, what surprised them, and how their thinking has shifted. We’ll do a cross-group synthesis, and a closing ceremony connecting collective insights back to each participant’s own sense of purpose and next steps — personal and professional, civic and creative.
| Price | Pay Links | |
|---|---|---|
| Standard Price | $295 | Link |
| Early Bird discount | $210 (ends 5 July) | Link |
| Concession discount | $240 | Link |
| Low income / student | $150 | email me |
About the course instructor
Dr. Jose Ramos is an action researcher, futurist and political activist focused on the planetary commons. He is founder and director of Futures Lab, co-editor of the Journal of Futures Studies, co-founder of the Participatory Futures Global Swarm, and founder of Action Foresight. He has published 4 books and over 70 articles, chapters and papers on futures studies, action research, social innovation, public policy, governance and the commons. He holds a PhD in critical globalization studies and has taught futures studies at universities worldwide. He lives in Malmsbury, Victoria, Australia, with his wife De Chantal and his two children Ethan and Rafaela.
Futures Lab 
You must be logged in to post a comment.