Things from the Future Studio – Toronto Climate Week 2026
An immersive and interactive Speculative Design Studio on Climate Futures
Things from the Future is a hands-on speculative design studio that combines futures thinking, speculative design, and AI-assisted empathy tools to explore five climate futures between 2055 and 2080. Over three to four hours, student teams investigate signals of change shaping each future, examine how people might live and experience these worlds, and design artifacts that embody their underlying logic.
Designed and facilitated by the Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (COIE) at Centennial College as part of Toronto Climate Week 2026, the studio brought together students from diverse disciplines to engage with climate futures as tangible, lived, and designable realities.
Presentations from teams at the Toronto Climate Week 2026 Studio
Beyond the Data: Experiencing Climate Futures from the Inside
Climate education often focuses on data, projections, and scenarios, but understanding climate futures requires more than interpreting charts and statistics. It requires imagining how people might live, adapt, and experience these futures and what those worlds might actually feel like.
Things from the Future was created to bridge that gap. Using AI-powered visual immersion, conversational AI personas, and speculative design tools, participants step inside possible climate futures, exploring them through the perspectives of the people who inhabit them and creating artifacts that emerge from those worlds.
Participants leave with something data alone cannot provide: a lived understanding of a possible future. By transforming abstract projections into tangible experiences, the studio fosters the empathy, imagination, and agency needed to act in the present.
How we set the stage
The studio begins with a provocation: a visual of an artefact from a future world. Working together, participants interpret the artefact and infer the kind of future it emerged from. This exercise serves as an entry point to key futures-thinking frameworks, including Dator’s Four Futures, Signals of Change, Future-Back Thinking, and the Cone of Plausibility, supported by real-world examples. These concepts provide a foundation for the hands-on exploration and world-building activities that follow.
The core of the studio is structured around participants uncovering insights about a future world and building layered, evidence-informed speculations. Activities are organized across three levels of inquiry — World, People, and Artefact, in that sequence.
This progression helps participants systematically develop deeper insights, lead with inquiry, and construct coherent, well-supported narratives about their imagined futures.
Five worlds. Five teams.
At the heart of the studio is the Futures Kit, distributed to each team. Every kit represents a distinct future world and contains the materials that guide participants through the studio’s three core activities.
- The Scenario Cards introduces the future world through a brief narrative and rich visual imagery, helping participants immerse themselves in its logic, systems, built environment, and emotional atmosphere.
- The Signals of Change Card includes two to three real-world news articles, research findings, or documented phenomena that ground each speculative future in present-day conditions.
- Activity 1 Worksheet: PESTLE Framework and Tipping Point – This worksheet supports participants in mapping systemic drivers of change using the PESTLE framework and identifying key tipping points that shape their assigned future world.
- Activity 2 Worksheet: “Miss Morrow” AI Persona Conversation
This worksheet guides participants through an interaction with a conversational AI persona (“Miss Morrow”), including key questions, note-taking prompts, a QR code linking to the AI agent, and a final reflection section. - Activity 3 Worksheet: Speculative Artefact Design
This worksheet supports the design of an artefact from the future world, offering guiding questions and structured space for sketching and ideation.
Activity 1 – Immerse & Decode the World
Teams begin by immersing themselves in their assigned future world, closely reading the scenario card and signals of change. Together, they observe, discuss, and interpret what they see, guided by a central question: What happened between now and this future?
Future-back thinking inverts traditional strategy. Instead of starting with present-day constraints, it begins with a vision of a possible future and works backward to understand what had to occur for it to exist.
Using the PESTLE framework—Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental—teams move beyond categorization to treat it as an analytical lens for “excavating” change. They identify what shifted, collapsed, or emerged to make this world possible, and pinpoint the critical Tipping point after which this future became likely or irreversible.
The activity concludes with teams submitting their insights through a shared form. Participants practice thinking in critically in systems and through collective sense making.
Activity 2 – Life of Miss Morrow – Persona
Using empathy and lived experience, participants explore the gap between systems-level change and human experience.
Each team is introduced to Miss Morrow, a woman living in their assigned future world. Every version of Miss Morrow is distinct—her age, profession, routines, personal history, and the everyday costs of inhabiting her world.
Teams begin by reading her biography and formulating questions they want to ask her. These questions are designed to surface lived experience, ranging from the ordinary to the intimate: What does she eat? What does she argue about? What does she carry that she doesn’t name as a burden?
Teams then scan a QR code to connect with Miss Morrow through a real-time AI voice interaction. Each version of Miss Morrow is a custom AI agent shaped by her world, biography, and carefully designed guardrails that keep her grounded in lived experience. One participant leads the conversation while others observe and take notes.
The activity closes with a single reflection: What did you think about this world before the call? What did the call reveal that the brief could not?
Activity 3 – The Thing from the Future – Speculative Design of an Artefact
The final activity invites teams to design a single artefact that could only exist within their future world, an object that expresses its logic, values, and consequences more clearly than text alone.
Synthesizing a material artefact from all their knowledge pushes participants to go from gathering pieces of the world to crafting a piece of their own that belongs to the world.
Teams answer four questions: What is it called? What does it do, and who is it for? What does it tell someone about this world that a paragraph cannot? What does it look like — form, materials, colour, condition? They write a visual description precise enough to generate an AI image. They accompany it with a hand-drawn sketch.
Both are submitted. The organizing team uses the descriptions to generate AI visuals of each artefact in real time.
Sharing Futures
Throughout the workshop, the organizing team collects outputs from all three activities and compiles them into a presentation for each group.
The studio concludes with each team presenting their assigned future world to the room. Until this point, teams have worked in parallel, fully immersed in their own futures, engaging only with their version of Miss Morrow and designing within their own world.
The presentations become the first collective moment where all five futures are experienced side by side, allowing participants to compare, contrast, and reflect across worlds.