On Monday 16th December, Dr Sarah Dillon and postdoctoral researcher Dr Olivia Belton will participate in UNESCO’s first Global Literacy Design Forum at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. The Forum will bring the general public together with leading Futures Literacy practitioners, designers, facilitators, teachers and researchers. The Forum has two primary objectives. One is to prepare the ground for a UNESCO Ministerial Summit on Futures Literacy in late 2020 by showcasing and refining a range of already proven techniques for integrating Futures Literacy into government activities. Two is to build awareness and networking related to the development and diffusion of Futures Literacy. Participants in the Forum will be invited to engage in active learning-by-doing. The laboratories that will be designed and curated by senior experts from the Global Futures Literacy Network will use collective-intelligence methods to explore the nature and practice of Futures Literacy as a capability.

Dr Belton will lead one lab, based on her research at Cambridge on designing creative ways to determine the public’s perceptions of autonomous flight. Dr Belton will lead participants through a collaborative storytelling game designed to enable people to creatively imagine future technology, with a particular focus around imagining near-future implementations of artificial intelligence.

Dr Sarah Dillon will lead another lab, based on her research with Dr Claire Craig for their forthcoming book, Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning (London: Routledge, 2020). Dr Dillon will lead participants in a collective activity of storylistening. Futures literacy activities often generate futures, and thereby reveal anticipatory assumptions, through collective storytelling (or other forms of collective imagining). This session will demonstrate the value to be gained from collective storylistening – that is the activity of listening to and analysing a pre-existing story. The session will be structured around engagement with Ursula Le Guin’s short story, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’.

Further information about the Forum, which is open for the public to attend, can be found here.