Future everyday life is certain to be different from today. But how is it shaped in the present? How can such processes and their implications be captured and analysed? Why might we want to intervene in and shape futures differently? and what new theories, methods and kinds of data would we need to achieve it?

Photo: participants in the making everyday futures workshop are getting ready to be photographed with their research artfact ‘Zero G° Choreographies’ (read more about the workshop and this artefact)

Everyday futures is the theme around which a network of people – from academia, corporate R&D, government and non-profit organisations – comes together to consider these and related questions.

The network was initiated by Nicola Spurling and Lenneke Kuijer (organisers) with the aim to explore Everyday Futures as a valuable new area of research. Futures of work, future homes, city futures and energy futures all make assumptions about, and have far reaching implications for everyday lives that are seldom explored. Studying such assumptions can provide insight on how ideas of ‘a normal life’ and ‘the good life’ are made, materialized and performed. It can reveal the connections and contradictions between futures of multiple types and scales.

Moreover, a focus on the everyday has the potential to reveal some realities overlooked in broad future visions, including the inequalities which such visions, strategies and plans tend to (re)produce. Everyday lives vary across generations and across the life-course, across time and space, across the seasons, and across cultures and countries of the world. We think that finding methods and processes of future-making that are capable of capturing these differences, and forms of analysis that explore how they are made in the first place, is an area ripe for development.

On this website you can find more information about the network, its activities and how to join it, explore the workshops and events that have been organised so far, and browse the resources that have been generated in the process.