Gallery
Experiment overview
Futuro Cards is a strategic educational tool and methodology designed to democratize access to future scenario creation and foresight practices across disciplines and levels of expertise.
The project translated complex foresight methodologies into an accessible card-based system that enabled diverse participants, from students and activists to designers and policymakers, to construct alternative futures while critically engaging with the interdependence of global trends, emerging technologies, and socio-environmental challenges.
By merging Sustainable Development Goals, mego-trends, speculative thinking, and systemic analysis, Futuro Cards functioned both as a practical framework for scenario-building and as a reflective platform questioning how futures are designed, by whom, and within which power structures.
Strategic objectives
Futuro Cards was strategically developed to:
☀︎ Democratize access to futures thinking beyond expert and institutional circles
☀︎ Turn abstract foresight methodologies into an intuitive, playful tool
☀︎ Enable users to connect global challenges with technological, environmental, and social dynamics
☀︎ Support critical reflection across three interconnected scales: individual, organizational, and planetary
☀︎ Create a participatory framework for imagining futures that question dominant narratives of progress
☀︎ Offer an educational ecosystem supported by a dedicated platform with case studies and learning resources
Rather than positioning futures as a domain of elite strategists, the project reframed it as a collective competency, a shared cultural practice essential for navigating uncertainty.
Achieved results
Futuro Cards gained international recognition as an innovative educational and strategic tool, leading to workshop invitations from institutions and organizations across different countries and sectors.
The accompanying canvases enabled structured analysis of future scenarios, allowing participants to explore not only technological feasibility but also ethical, social, and ecological implications moving beyond superficial techno-optimism toward more holistic evaluation models.
The tool proved effective in stimulating imagination, discussion, and strategic thinking among participants who would otherwise have limited access to foresight methodologies.
Main reflection
The evolution of Futuro Cards revealed a profound paradox: a tool designed to democratize futures thinking was built upon foundations rooted in frameworks increasingly revealed as colonial and extractive.
While witnessing the enthusiasm and creativity of diverse participants, I became critically aware that the Sustainable Development Goals themselves often function as instruments of Western-centric development ideology, reinforcing Global North dominance while marginalizing indigenous epistemologies, relational worldviews, and local systems of knowledge.
I observed how corporations adopted these frameworks as a veneer of responsibility, using them for greenwashing while continuing practices that deepen ecological devastation and socio-economic exploitation, particularly affecting Global Majority communities. The rhetoric of “sustainability” revealed itself as performative, a narrative of progress that maintains the same power hierarchies it claims to dissolve.
This realization forced a pivotal choice between scale and integrity.
I chose integrity.
The decision to withdraw the project, placing remaining decks in storage and ritually burning others as an act of symbolic refusal, marked a conscious departure from complicity in frameworks that reproduce colonial violence under the guise of universal progress. The gesture was not an act of destruction, but of realignment: a commitment to decolonial practices and to futures rooted in plurality, regeneration and justice.
Futuro Cards ultimately became more than a tool for imagining futures, it became a lived lesson about who has the authority to define what a “better future” is, and at what cost.