Join us at Edge Esmeralda for the Future Cities Worldbuilding Lab. In this 90-minute workshop, we’ll fuse today’s frontier technologies, new/old practices, and moonshots with narrative design to imagine worlds where they’ve become everyday infrastructure.
This workshop is an extension of research published under the 2023 Summer of Protocols program and the 2024 Datus & Nusas Workshop, both of which explored storytelling as a tool to drive new forms of regional coordination and institutional innovation. By using fiction to expand the Overton window and chart new dependency paths to alternative futures, this lab will contribute to a growing body of “speculative non-fiction”: grounded stories based on early-stage ideas not yet in the mainstream.
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Using a simple 8-part scaffold, participants will choose a real-world city and pair it with an old/new innovation (think zero-knowledge proofs, blue-green infrastructure, dynamic zoning codes, etc), then imagine what that city might look like once the innovation has scaled and become part of daily life.
The goal is to connect in-progress innovations, and their associated challenges and opportunities, to a future where they have matured. You will leave with a polished piece of speculative fiction and the opportunity to have your story included in a comprehensive digital library of actionable future-oriented solutions.
The workshop is everyone but you might be particularly interested if you’re a:
Startup founder at any stage wanting to tell a more compelling story about their vision and how it impacts the world to a more general audience
Policymaker seeking new ways to communicate bold policy shifts and explore long-term impact
Researcher and practitioner interested in the narrative framing of systems change and translational futures work
Community organizer imagining just, local futures rooted in emerging tools
Storytellers, designers, and civic technologists who want to translate today’s edge into tomorrow’s institutions
