In January, we conducted three Confront Workshops (WP4) in collaboration with our subcontractor ÆRA. Each workshop focused on a specific theme—eating, dressing, and moving—and involved 45 participants representing consumers, policymakers, and businesses.
Nenad Pavel presenting IMAGINE at the workshop.
Prior to the workshops, participants recorded short videos expressing their hopes, dreams, and concerns for the future. The three-hour workshops started with a plenary, which included a storytelling session. Participants were then divided into smaller groups of 3-4, sharing their thoughts about the future in general.
Mini exhibition at the Confront Workshops. Photo by Nenad Pavel
After the first group session, the participants attended a mini exhibition based on of some of the projects made by design students at OsloMet (WP3). In the second group session, the participants discussed their hopes, fears and dreams for the future of food, clothing and mobility. A final plenary summarized the discussions.
Participant work station at the Confront Workshops. Photo by Nenad Pavel
Participants used survey cards to capture their thoughts and insights throughout the workshops. The cards were filled in during the introductory session, after the first and second group discussions, and in the final session (example below).
Input from the workshops will be used in the forthcoming project exhibition.
The European Institute for Food History and Cultures (the IEHCA, Institut Européen d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation) organised the ninth edition of its annual international convention and the IMAGINE project was there!
When: 5th – 7th June 2024 Where: Tours, France
Virginie Amilien chairing the food futures session at IEHCA. Photo by Atle Wehn Hegnes
During the conference Atle Wehn Hegnes and Virginie Amilien organised the session “The History of Food Futures: Imaginaries of Global Food Futures”.
The session aimed to
provide an international platform for scholarly discourse on the diverse and evolving perceptions of the future of food across various cultures and contexts. It invites a deep exploration into the ways societies globally have envisioned and continue to envision the future of food. We draw upon thoughts, such as the avant-garde ideas presented in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “The Futurist Cookbook,” a remarkable early 20th-century work that not only challenged traditional Italian cuisine but also proposed a radical rethinking of food in relation to art, technology, and society. Marinetti’s vision was more than a culinary innovation; it was a manifesto that reflected a broader futurist philosophy, emphasizing speed, technology, and industrial prowess, themes that are still relevant in today’s discussions about the future of food. Moreover, seminal works like Warren Belasco’s “Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food,” also inform our goal to broaden the perspective, inviting global viewpoints to understand how different cultures imagine their food futures. The session aims to explore how historical and contemporary imaginaries of food futures have shaped and are shaping global food cultures, policies, and practices. We seek to understand the interplay between societal aspirations, anxieties, and expectations concerning food, and how these are influenced by factors like technological advancements, sustainability concerns, and cultural shifts.
Virginie Amilien also presented the paper “Imaginaries of Norwegian Food Futures in a European context”, co-authored with Justyna Jakubiec, Atle Wehn Hegnes and Lisbeth Løvbak Berg.
Slide from the paper presentation.
The paper reviews the European literature on food futures, creating an overview of important European imaginaries of food. It further analyses and draws out connections to imaginaries of food futures in Norway, based on empirical data colleced in the IMAGINE project. The empirical material from the Norwegian case consists of public policy document and businessstrategies, advertisements, and consumer stories.
IMAGINE respresented at the quadrennial joint international conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)!
When: 16th – 19th of July 2024 Where: Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Justyna Jacubiek presenting. Photo by Tamalone van den Eijden.
Justyna represented IMAGINE by contributing to the panel ‘Creative transformations through performance and the written word’ through the presentation she has worked on together with our former WP1 member Tamalone van den Eijnden. She focused on the bond between urban gardening and imagination, thus reflecting on the research and fieldwork she did last year during her research stay in Oslo. Through the prism of her observations and encounters based in Oslo’s Losæter garden as well as close reading of some quotes from the novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, Justyna explored the potential of imagination for transformative processes. The conference offered a space for sharing a real diversity of views, a great deal of which, as Justyna spotted, searched for unofficial ways of knowing. The focus of the contributions, ranging from thinking with the more-than-human, food-making and performance, the relation between policymaking and academia, rethinking the notion of temporality or imaginaries of hope has offered a rich environment for transdisciplinary discussions, observations and questions – all of which will feed into Justyna’s and Tamalone’s further work on the presentation paper which they aim to turn into an article.
Submitted abstract
This contribution explores the bond between urban gardening and utopian imagination to advocate them as modes for creative transformation. Rooting our focus in fieldwork we performed in urban gardening initiatives in Oslo, we look into how they can be seen as turning the landscape into an expressive and nourishing medium that probes how the world could be. To broaden our focus, we introduce utopian imagination as a specific mode for transformation whose relevance goes beyond verbal communication and concerns imagination as a productive process that creatively prefigures and engenders new ways of social and ecological being. By taking Starhawk’s solar punk novel The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) as our inspiration, we will solidify the proposed bond between urban gardening and utopian imagination. To this end, we will engage with Paul Ricoeur’s approach to imagination to understand it as a form of negotiation with the environment beyond concepts and perception and, as such, an ecological endeavor. Engaging with a close reading of the repeated expressions of visions of a utopian future as found in the novel, we will explore how these become the means by which this very future is materialized within the storyworld. We will approach close reading of the novel as a nutritious, creative and reflective tool for imagining existing and future urban gardening. Thus, we aim to contribute to the larger field of STS by proposing utopian imagination as a medium for doing and making transformations within our foodscapes.
Welcome to the opening of a pop-up exhibition of IMAGINE, and confront your assumptions about sustainable futures!
When: Thursday 14 December 2023, 3–5 pm Where: Nitja Centre for Contemporary Art, Lillestrøm
IMAGINE presents projects by the students Stine Asbjørnsen, Eren Bal, Christodolous Christodolou, Preeti Kumari Jha, Silius Martinussen Lasskogen, Kumar Sourav Moharana, Haizea Perez, Julianne Pheng, Hamza Simsek, Alex Taylor and Natalia Wanguestel de Luna.
When you think about the future, what do you imagine? Flying cars, tubed food, or high-tech clothing might be among the images that come to mind. IMAGINE sets out to study these images of the future as imaginaries. Imaginaries are the many ways in which we humans think about the future and ways in which they can become possible.
This exhibition presents projects by second-year master students of product design, OsloMet, where they employ principles of speculative, critical design and design fiction to provoke questions and discussions about the imaginaries of a sustainable future.
The Lecturers in charge of the course are Nenad Pavel and James Duncan Lowley. Marie Hebrik from SIFO is the head of the related work package, WP3 Design.
The exhibition is on view from Thursday 14th December to Sunday 17th December 2023 and is realised in collaboration with OsloMet.
On the 26th of September, Work Package 5, EXCHANGE, arranged the next edition of their workshop series, further developing the theoretical framework for the project and connecting the work packages. The workshop’s theme was ‘Imaginaries, Power and Culture’.
The workshop started with an introduction by Dan Welch and Nina Heidenstrøm and went on to updates from all the work packages on their progress before moving on to the theoretical discussions.
Justyna Jakubiec recapitulated the work on novels and movies done by Tamalone van den Eijnden, presented in a previous workshop ‘Negotiating Themes in the Fiction of Futures and the Imaginaries of Consumption’, reminding us of the themes found in them: Techno-Futures, Future according to Social Transformations, Future According to Marginalized Positions and Futures according to Climate Change/Transformation.
Future imaginaries in public policy documents
She went on to resent the work on the policy documents. In her analysis, she has brought in the concept of discourse from Foucault:
Discourses are practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.
Michel Foucault
In many of the policy documents the focus has shifted over the years included in the study, from primarily having a focus on human health, to wider environmental concerns becoming a more significant part of them in later years. The connection between the environment and human health is often being made more explicitly in the newer document, as in the theme ” imagining through a food for the body”, in the image below.
During her stay in Oslo for the month of September, Justyna Jakubiec spent time doing field work and interviews in Oslo, visiting sites where futures for the three themes, eating, dressing and moving manifest through alternative practices or even through conflicts between ideals of sutainable life, habits and previous ideals. The latter is particularly evident in city planning, where the concerns of public transport and in particular tramways collide with the needs of cyclists, creating roads where cycling is dangerous.
Future imaginaries in business strategy documents
Lisbeth Løvbak Berg then presented the ongoing work on business documents and advertisements under the headline “Themes?”, as these are still being negotiated and will change throughout the analysis. However, some elements could already be drawn out, for example, the focus on local production when it comes to food, but also that different actors have strikingly different approaches to what local production is.
Future imaginaries in advertisements
At this point, advertisements from the same businesses whose documents have been chosen, have been examined. This allows for a comparison with their documents, in some cases underlining their content, and in others providing a contradicting image of the business strategies. Advertisements do not very often explicitly talk about the future; however, they present ideals and aesthetics that may gesture towards it. For food, the aesthetics more often romanticise the past or community, while for transport, the visualisations are more often futuristic. However, technology plays a part in many. The phrase “the future is now” comes to mind.
Work Package 2 – Explore
Audun Kjus presented the findings from the consumer stories on minner.no, referring to the different types of narratives found in them: The Crisis Ladder, Ideals and Utopias of Frugality, Green Abundance, etc. They represent different ways that the consumers see the future developing. The Crisis Ladder would for instance mean that one unfortunate situation leads to another worse, and so on, until a full-fledged crisis unfolds.
He noted that Green Abundance was only set in urban environments, and the gap between the rich and the poor was never addressed in these stories.
Audun Kjus talking about the discussion of the gap between the rich and the poor in the stories.
A question was asked about how the respondents saw their responsibility regarding a sustainable future. Kjus responded that most of the responses belonged to two categories; one where people had given up; the other where people described the changes they have made themselves and how these were ideals for other people to follow.
Work Package 3 and 4 – Design and Confront
Dan Lockton presented the work that he has done with his students at TU Eindhoven. It ranges from courses to exhibitions and can be found here, on the TU/e Researching the Future Everyday website. In this work, an important question is “How do design students explore other people’s imaginaries?”, or even their own imaginaries. One way that this is examined is by confronting the students with a job ad from the future: Dear Design Graduates of 2023, WE NEED YOU. Here they are presented with future design jobs such as Human-Machine Collaboration Designer, and what this job entails.
Dan Lockton presenting student work on urban foraging for fashion.
James Lowley and Nenad Pavel presented student work done so far. One example was particularly pertinent in showing the relevance of critical design when imagining the future of shared, driverless cars as Ruter#, the Greater Oslo public transport company, is currently planning the introduction of such cars. The student project very efficiently asks the question: “What can possibly go wrong with self-driving cars?”
Nenad Pavel showing Ruter#’s self-driving cars.
Theorising Imaginaries, Power and Culture
Dan Welch led the next sessions, where Justyna Jakubiec first presented a glossary that is being developed for the project. The aim of the glossary is for the project consortium to negotiate common definitions for the concepts used in the project. This is particularly useful as the consortium combines a range of different disciplines. In the following group work, concepts to add to it were discussed and the glossary is in constant development.
Following this, Atle Wehn Hegnes introduced the different texts in the proposed readings for the day (you can find them listed below). We then discussed them and their relevance for IMAGINE in groups, focusing on the following topics:
Where does IMAGINE position itself related to these three research agendas?
What are we doing differently?
What is our unique contribution?
There was agreement that the material aspects of futuring practices, e.g., through design, was something that IMAGINE brings that is often omitted.
Another question asked was “Does the distinction made between narratives and imaginaries made in the texts have relevance to IMAGINE, is it helpful?”. Some thought this was helpful; that the two concepts define two different layers, where imaginaries represent the overarching ideas of the world, that are often not expressed directly, and narratives are the stories we tell about the world, where the imaginaries shine through. This is a discussion we will continue going forward.
Discussion on Collaborative Publications
Dan Welch presented a range of publication possibilities and a quick round table brought forward several publications that are already on their way. We then divided into groups according to our research interests, ranging from social transformation to ethics. The following discussions uncovered many more exciting synergies and publication prospects!
Program
10 am – 12 pm: Sharing Progress and Plans
The first session will be an opportunity to hear from each of the Work Packages about work in progress, preliminary results and plans for the rest of the project.
12 – 12.45 pm Lunch
12.45 – 2.15 pm: Theorising Imaginaries, Power and Culture
In this session we would like to engage with thinking around the power and performativity of imaginaries – drawing both on the IMAGINE project’s empirical research and theoretical orientations and other work. To facilitate these discussions, we invite you to read two or more of the attached recent papers, listed below, as well as something from the wider reading list attached.
2.15 – 2.45 pm: Coffee
2.45 – 4 pm: Discussion on Collaborative Publications
In this session, we would like to consider how we can collaborate across the IMAGINE project, both in terms of a major project publication, such as a Special Issue, and in terms of collaborative publications across WPs.
Suggested reading for Theorising Imaginaries, Power and Culture
Core texts
Bazzani (2023) “Futures in Action: Expectations, Imaginaries and Narratives of the Future” Sociology Vol. 57(2) 382–397
Oomen, Hofman and Hajer (2021) “Techniques of futuring: On how imagined futures become socially performative” European Journal of Social Theory [2022 Vol 25(2)]
Adloff and Nickell (2019) “Futures of sustainability as modernization, transformation, and control: a conceptual framework” Sustainability Science 14 (4):1015–1025 – NB: this paper sets out a research agenda for the University of Hamburg Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Futures of Sustainability’ programme. It is usefully read with along with commentary piece:
Delanty (2021) “Futures of sustainability: Perspectives on social imaginaries and social transformation. A comment on Frank Adloff and Sighard Neckel’s research program” Social Science Information DOI: 10.1177/0539018421999562
Further readings
Jasanoff S (2015) Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity’ In: Jasanoff S and Kim S-H (eds) Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1-33
Ricoeur P (1976) Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination. Philosophic Exchange 7(1): 17-28.
Watson M (2017) Placing power in practice theory. In: Hui, A., Schatzki, T. and Shove, E., (eds.) The Nexus of Practices: Connections, constellations, practitioners. Routledge: London, pp. 169-182.
Lythgoe, E. (2014) Social imagination, abused memory, and the political place of history in Memory, History, Forgetting. Études Ricoeuriennes, 5(2), 35–47.
The magazine A Magasinet from the newspaper Aftenposten (The Evening Post) is asking: – Millions of jobs will soon disappear. What are we going to be doing in the future?
The article references the World Economic Forum’s prediction from this summer that 81 million jobs probably will disappear within the next few years and the list of 100 jobs of the future developed by researchers at Deakin and Griffith University in Australia. The list includes (drone) swarm artist, ethical hacker and genetics coach.
The journalists interviewed several people on the subject, including Imagine project leader Nina Heidenstrøm. For the interview, she delved into the stories collected on minner.no to say something about the future of work:
“The cliché has taught us: nobody can predict the future. But it is nevertheless possible to fantasise and imagine. Humans always have.
What do you see then? Food on tubes? Robot take-overs? Flying cars? That we will live on a strange planet? Then you’re not alone.
– These classic future images are strikingly constant. They are reproduced over and over again, says Nina Heidenstrøm, senior researcher at Consumption Research Norway SIFO, OsloMet.
She leads the research project Imagine, where the goal is to engage people in active reflection about how they imagine the future. The project will result in an exhibition next year. According to Heidenstrøm, many people speak of hope and dreams of a slow life. The ambition is not to be part of the rat race. Many people like the thought of both 6-hour work days and four-day work weeks.
– The decidedly most dominating fear is that life will be tougher economically and that one will have to work more.”
What do Norwegian consumers think about the future of eating, dressing and moving?
This summer, the project note “Images of the future. Reporting on the minner.no data collection”, was published. Written by Audun Kjus, Harald Throne-Holst and Atle Wehn Hegnes, it is based on a collection of stories about the future from Norwegian consumers.
This is a deliverable from Work Package 2 – “Explore” in the research project IMAGINE: Contested Futures of Sustainability. The aim of the WP is to collect narratives about the future from the Norwegian population through a questionnaire distributed in collaboration with the Norwegian Ethnological Research (NEG). The note examines 123 stories, collected from May 2022 to June 2023.
We asked one of the authors, Atle Wehn Hegnes, to tell us about the report.
The report is in Norwegian, citing the Norwegian consumer stories, can you give an overview of what it contains for English-speaking readers? What can they expect to find in it when they use Google Translate?
The project note is divided into three main parts. The first part concerns background, objectives, methods, and sources. The second part, titled “Narratives,” looks into overarching themes and ways that people talk about the future, which include “the crisis ladder,” “modernity and morality,” and “frugality.” In the third part, “Dimensions,” we have identified some recurring themes in the material that appear across multiple narratives. The appendix presents the results in a matrix, showcasing the breadth of narratives about the consumption areas of food, clothing, and transportation. In sum, English-speaking readers, if they use Google Translate, will hopefully find a general presentation of future scenarios based on responses from 123 contributors. We hope that the narratives and themes can be understood as relevant to the ongoing discussions about the future of sustainability in Norway and insights into how the Norwegian population perceives and imagines different aspects of their future, especially related to consumption and sustainability.
What kind of stories did you find?
The stories we collected ranged from optimistic to pessimistic, shaped by contributors’ attitudes towards for example modernity, technology, and humanity’s potential.
Some optimistic stories embrace modernity and technology, seeing them as tools for positive change. Contributors expressed faith in technological advancements, such as implants for health monitoring or sustainable textile production, as a way to support freedom, reason, and global development. Some believed that people inherently desire cooperation, safety, and harmony, and that with time, they would overcome restrictive traditions and ideologies to create a better future.
Pessimistic stories, on the other hand, focused on the challenges posed by cultural, historical, as well as the influence of capital forces. They saw these obstacles as formidable counterforces against progress. While some acknowledged that renewal through research and idealism could lead to a better society, they expressed doubts that humanity would overcome ingrained greed and ignorance. They identified humanity’s inherent negative qualities as the fundamental problem, highlighting issues such as overconsumption, population growth, and the abuse of power by certain groups.
In the report, you describe how the topics of the stories shifted over time. What were these shifts?
The report reflects work that was carried out in the spring of 2023, using material that was collected from the spring of 2022 to the spring of 2023. A lot has happened during this period. The world was emerging from a pandemic but was at the same time entering into a war when the collection began. Around halfway through the period, ChatGPT was launched, electricity prices in Norway increased drastically, and the interest rate was on the rise. Our material shows that our imaginings of the future are shaped by these events and by the state of society today.
Were there findings that surprised you in particular?
In this early stage of analysis, the optimism about the past, and how it impacts our understandings and hope for the future, is something I find interesting. Although it may not be particularly surprising.
So then, what are the visions of the future of eating, dressing and moving among the respondents?
They are numerous and complex, and that is what makes IMAGINE, this material, and this project note exciting to work with further. We already now see that there are more people with visions for travel and food in the future than about clothing. This is interesting in the sense that it can tell us something about which areas of consumption are getting attention, and that this might change. However, it’s difficult to give a good answer to this question now, but I will hopefully give a more nuanced answer if you ask me the same question again in a few months.
From 22nd – 24th of May, Marie Hebrok and James Lowley went to Eindhoven University of Technology to visit Dan Lockton. The purpose of the visit was both to share experiences and to work with the students at TU Eindhoven.
The three researchers discussed their experiences with and the outcomes of the design courses that they have been running at OsloMet and Eindhoven as part of the IMAGINE project. They also made plans for the development of the planned IMAGINE exhibition toward the end of 2024.
James and Marie hosted a lecture and workshop on food future imaginaries with MA design students attending the course Researching the Future Everyday.
Together with the students they reflected on and visualized how futures of food and eating are imagined – how imaginaries manifest in the present – and what the role of design is.
They also got the chance to visit the RetroFuture exhibition at The Evoluon – that “explores how we envisioned the future in the past, while reflecting on our understanding of the future today”.
DREAMING OF THE FUTURE We all dream about the future. Do we dream about the Earth, the Moon, or the universe? About how we can all live together peacefully, or how we might end up living in a nightmare? Or about all of the things that will be made possible thanks to technology and science? And how do past dreams and the here and now affect the way we think about the future?
We would like to welcome Justyna Jakubiec to SIFO!
She joined the project recently and this is her first visit of two during the IMAGINE project. She is visiting from our partner Utrecht University, where she is currently a Research Assistant, after having finished her RMA thesis on “Science Fiction Film and Becoming Otherwise: Woundedness, Posthuman Performativity, and Reinventing Subjectivity”.
Her visit kicked off with a workshop between WP1 and WP2 on the 29th March and she is working closely with Virginie Amlien and the other SIFO researchers in the project during her stay.
Working on the IMAGINE project since February, together with Rick Dolphijn I am part of WP1, focusing on identifying dominant imaginaries of sustainable futures. This is my first visit and research stay at SIFO: until April 30th I will continue our research on policy documents and business strategy documents, with a special focus on Oslo municipality. I will continue WP1’s role to negotiate how Humanities-based perspectives (esp. Media Studies and Philosophy) are important for IMAGINE.
Building on the workshops/kick-off this autumn, the MA Fashion and Society students ventured on a dedicated project to explore fashion’s role in imagining sustainable futures.
How can we use design to imagine sustainable futures?
What is the role of fashion within that?
Because if we can’t imagine sustainable futures, then how can then begin to build them?
The dominant imaginaries become so infused into our societies and become invisible, we take them for granted. Who gains and who does not from these dominant futures?
Then followed presentations and group tasks by IMAGINE researchers Marie Hebrok and James Lowley.
Exam – oral presentation
On the morning of the 23rd of March, the 5 MA students presented their projects to external sensors and some of the IMAGINE team.
Kinga Zablocka & Eva Celine Lynau: Hyper-productive sharing
The projects grappled with materiality as well as cultural meaning in the future, examining the current issues that the fashion industry is facing.
Maria Kupen With: Precious Plastic
You can read more about the student work in our upcoming project gallery.
