I am a writer, speaker, and teacher who works for our social and ecological commons. I practice participatory and narrative futures as a way to amplify social change. I bring unique perspectives to some of our most pressing challenges, unlocking insights and imagination.

My Story

Born in California of Mexican ancestry, I grew up in the very multicultural suburb of Whittier in the 1970s and 80s. At an early age I took an interest in world philosophies and did a B.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine. In the 1990s I lived in Japan, Spain and Taiwan, which opened my awareness to our planetary existence. I also grew an interest in Futures Studies in the 1990s which led me to do an M.S. in Strategic Foresight at Swinburne University of Technology. I saw the strategic synergy between futures thinking and action research, and developed a number of approaches for linking foresight to action.

My PhD used critical globalisation studies to explore the long term futures of the world system, in particular futures of social and ecological justice. After my PhD I taught at a number of universities, Victoria University and Swinburne University in Melbourne and National University of Singapore (NUS), where I developed approaches to anticipatory governance and cosmolocalism. From 2016 to the present I have developed approaches to futures that connect inner and outer dimensions, which I call Mutant Futures. In 2018 I was privileged to work with the Global Swarm and Nesta to develop a keystone document for Participatory Futures practice. That same year my family moved from Melbourne to country Victoria (Malmsbury), where we live, practicing Permaculture and supporting community resilience.

Why I Started Futures Lab

I started Futures Lab in late 2015 because I needed a space where things were allowed to be half-baked. My work through Action Foresight sat at the professional end of service delivery, where there’s an expectation to arrive with mature thinking, polished frameworks, and processes that simply work. That’s valuable work, but it leaves little room for genuine experimentation — and my experience helping build the Footscray Maker Lab had taught me how essential tinkering and play are to real creativity. Futures Lab became my sanctuary for experimentation: a place to test, refine, and sometimes abandon ideas, where there is neither success nor failure, only learning that leads to the next possible experiment. Because the future cannot only be envisioned — it has to be enacted. Futures Lab is where small pieces of transformational visions get brought into the present, the bridge between imagining other worlds and actually beginning to build them.

From the start, I committed to a different way of working with ideas: putting them out into the world as if they belonged to no one and everyone. Open source, documented, released to the network. What I discovered changed how I understand innovation itself — the pieces of the puzzle are not within us but between us, in the field of collective intelligence that connects colleagues, friends, and strangers who care about the same questions. Projects emerged not because I pushed them, but because the network chose them. Again and again, problems I couldn’t solve alone were solved by the field — when I was willing to let go of ownership, let go of my own preferences, and let the larger ecosystem decide where the energy should flow. That remains the founding spirit of Futures Lab: experiment openly, share everything, and trust that we are part of something larger that is also working on the future, through us and between us.

José M. Ramos