Background

Current sociodigital imaginaries largely express the visions of large technology companies, political actors or other powerful lobbies. The question of who gets to imagine sociodigital futures, and the methods that might support pluralising future imaginaries, are key concerns in building fairer and more sustainable sociodigital futures.  Working alongside our partner, Locality, we have recruited a range of community and voluntary sector organisations to support us in generating spaces for co-designing sociodigital futures with community members.

Our approach

We will be working in depth with three community anchor organisations and with community members over a year in order to understand what matters to them in relation to sociodigital futures. We will be experimenting with sociodigital futures methods in order to co-create future imaginaries alongside these community members. The communities include those who have been neglected and minoritised in sociodigital futures research, for instance: racially minoritised communities, working class communities and those who often experience digital exclusion related to age or income.

We will start by working with creative and arts based methods to understand what matters to the communities involved and the everyday futuring they already engage in. We will then draw on a variety of participatory futuring methods to work alongside communities to imagine the sociodigital futures that they might prefer for their communities. We have already used the Futures Places Toolkit in various community venues to co-create future imaginaries and intend to build on this work.

Opportunities and outcomes

This co-produced research will enable us to explore methods for imagining  and co-creating sociodigital futures alongside communities whose voices have been neglected in future imaginaries. This will be important foundational research in understanding how we might pluralise futures visions and build capacities and capabilities for participatory futuring.

The approach will involve working with the organisations and community members to embed futures thinking, and the futures imagined, into their organisations and communities. We also envisage advocacy and policy work around building fairer and more sustainable sociodigital futures through exhibiting the futures visions and working alongside other partner organisations (e.g. NCSC, DEFRA) to disseminate these visions widely.

CenSoF investigators: Laurene Cheilen, Paul Clarke, Marisela Gutierrez-Lopez, Helen Manchester, Jessica Pykett, 

Partners and collaborators: Locality, Zion Centre, Bristol Creative Sustainability CIC, Birmingham Settlement