What Happens to Shared Visions?

New Research into Participatory Futuring

and Why It Matters

I’m excited to share a new paper I co-authored with Jessica Meharry for the Participatory Design Conference 2026:

“What Happens to Shared Visions? Surveying the Literature for Strategies to Preserve and Disseminate Participatory Futures.”  [Download PDF]

The paper explores a question that connects design + futures practices:

What happens after people collectively imagine a better future together?

In many participatory futures workshops, people gather to envision hopeful long-term futures, build relationships, and generate new ideas. The workshops themselves can be energizing and transformative. But afterward, the visions often disappear into reports, sticky notes, slide decks, or institutional memory.

We wanted to understand whether participatory futuring projects were finding ways to preserve and share these collective visions so they could continue influencing communities, institutions, and public conversations over time.

So we reviewed 222 papers across participatory futures, co-speculation, design futures, and related fields. Out of those, we found only 13 projects that clearly documented how collective visions were actively shared beyond the original workshop participants.

That finding disappointed us.

Why this matters

Participatory futuring is not only about facilitating workshops. It is also about creating durable artifacts that help ideas travel.

Many of the challenges we face today — climate change, housing, public health, democratic erosion, social fragmentation, emerging technologies — are fundamentally challenges of imagination [see Prentis Hemphill's work].

People often struggle to act collectively because they cannot clearly picture a future worth making disruptive change for.

Participatory futuring creates structured opportunities for people to:

• imagine preferable futures together,

• surface shared values,

• explore alternatives to dominant narratives,

• and build agency around long-term change.

But imagination alone is not enough.

If futures work is going to contribute to real systems change, the visions themselves need to persist beyond the room where they were created.

Our paper examines projects that turned collective visions into:

• magazines,

• exhibitions,

• paintings,

• radio shows,

• videos,

• scenarios,

• maps,

• public events,

• and storytelling artifacts.

These forms helped future visions travel into new conversations, institutions, and communities.

Three lessons for practitioners

One of the goals of this paper was to make participatory futuring more practical for researchers, designers, facilitators, civic leaders, and organizers who want to use these methods in their own work.

Here are three major lessons that emerged from the review.

1. Treat visions as important outputs — not temporary exercises

Many workshops focus heavily on facilitation but give less attention to what happens afterward.

We argue that collective visions should be treated as meaningful civic artifacts in their own right.

That means asking:

• How will this vision live on?

• Who needs to encounter it?

• What form will help it travel?

• How might it influence future action?

A good participatory futures process does not necessarily end when the workshop ends.

2. Form matters

The way a future vision is expressed shapes who can engage with it.

Some projects used illustrated scenarios. Others created immersive exhibitions or fictional radio broadcasts. One project commissioned paintings so that non-literate participants could fully participate in shaping and discussing future food systems.

This is especially important for equity and inclusion.

Participatory futuring should not assume that written reports are the best or most democratic way to share knowledge. Different communities connect through different modes of storytelling, image-making, performance, and dialogue.

3. Connect imagination to action

The strongest projects in the review linked visioning to broader strategies for change.

Some influenced municipal planning. Others shaped conversations within cultural institutions or sustainability initiatives. Several projects used future visions to help communities identify concrete actions in the present.

This does not mean every participatory futures project needs immediate policy outcomes.

But it does mean facilitators should think carefully about:

• who holds power,

• where visions need to travel,

• and what kinds of change the process is actually trying to support.

Participatory futuring as democratic infrastructure

One of the deeper ideas running through this paper is that participatory futuring can function as a form of democratic infrastructure.

Not infrastructure in the traditional sense of roads or utilities — but infrastructure for collective imagination.

At a time when public discourse is often dominated by crisis, extraction, polarization, and short-term thinking, participatory futures practices can help communities rehearse different possibilities together.

They can create space for reflection, hope, disagreement, experimentation, and long-term thinking.

But for that to happen, we need to move beyond one-off workshops and toward practices that preserve, circulate, and revisit shared visions over time.

Read the paper

If you work in:

• participatory design,

• civic innovation,

• community engagement,

• foresight,

• systems change,

• speculative design,

• urban futures,

• or social transformation,

I hope this paper offers both practical examples and useful questions for your own projects.

The full paper is:

Jessica Meharry & Hillary Carey (2026), “What Happens to Shared Visions? Surveying the Literature for Strategies to Preserve and Disseminate Participatory Futures,” Participatory Design Conference 2026. 

And perhaps the central question we leave readers with is this:

If communities are invited to imagine better futures together, what responsibilities do we have to help those visions endure?