Future of Creativity + Compassion
APF x OCAD U
August 15, 16, and 17, 2025
OCAD University – Waterfront Campus
Floor 4R at 130 Queens Quay E, Toronto, ON M5A 0P6
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Designing Beyond Decline: Compassionate Futures for Aging
Workshop
Sean Park, Zayna Khayat, Nicole Knibb, + Victoria Bui
This design fiction workshop invites you to explore aging futures that go beyond crisis response. Together, we’ll engage with provocations drawn from foresight research on aging in Canada, shifting identity, new intergenerational housing models, and emerging gerontechnologies before co-creating speculative care futures using a design fiction AI tool.
Room 435
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Improvisation for Creative Connection: Building Collaboration, Spontaneity, and Empathy
Workshop
Chris Leveille
This introductory, on-your-feet workshop will introduce you to the principles of improvisational theatre, cultivating the core skills that underpin compassionate and collaborative futures work: active listening, spontaneous thinking, creative risk-taking, and mutual support. Participants will practice working as a team, embracing failure, and silencing the inner critic that often stifles bold ideas through a series of improv exercises. This session offers a dynamic and playful space to build your creative confidence and deepen your capacity for connection.
Room 401
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As Tulips They May: A Compassionate Arc for Wayward Times
Workshop
Rodney Frederickson
In this workshop, participants will work with familiar and speculative gestures & movements of compassion – disrupting, transforming, and uncovering the deeper layers of embodiment and meaning. From these small ruptures, participants will conjure speculative bodies and worlds where such gestures are the language of compassion. Through movement, writing, and visual making, we will explore what these bodies teach us, not just about the futures we imagine, but about how we hold (or withhold) compassion in our own.
Room 434
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Activating Prosocial Futures: Integrating Connection, Creativity, and Authenticity into Futures Practice
Workshop
Nicci Obert + Karessa Torgerson This participatory workshop introduces practical tools for integrating authenticity, connection, and moral imagination into established foresight frameworks, including:
– An exploration of why authentic connection and examined personal values are essential for future workers.
– Immersive exercises that help participants experience themselves as agents of prosocial change.
– Practical overlays for existing foresight processes that activate hope without naiveté.
Rather than treating prosocial outcomes as afterthoughts or constraints, we’ll demonstrate how centering human goodness and mutual aid opens new solution spaces. Participants will leave equipped with tools to help organizations and communities remember their capacity for integrity and connection and channel that recognition into concrete strategies for navigating uncertainty.
Room 433
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Futuring with Nature
Workshop
Alexis Tennent, Joanne Renaux + Shaun Alfonso
“Futuring with Nature,” an intergenerational series of fully outdoor workshops designed to help communities envision future stories by exploring signals of change and our relationship with nature through artmaking. This session will include a brief demonstration of how we collect and interpret these artful signals to deepen connections with nature and the future.
Will be outside
Sensecraft 2050: Prototyping the future of creativity
Workshop
Anna Barkhudarova
Sensecraft 2050 explores how emerging tech and sensory intelligence are transforming creativity—yet many organizations still innovate with outdated mindsets. In this workshop, creative teams use multisensory labs and foresight tools to reimagine the future of creativity and prototype inclusive, emotionally resonant innovations.
Room 434
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Navigating Grief in the Contextual Environment: Space for Grief
Workshop
The Method Collective: Fran Quintero Rawlings, Ziyan Hossain + Calla Lee
This session, held within the Space for Grief exhibit, will engage participants in Method Collective’s Grief-Informed Futures Framework, designed to help individuals and organizations navigate grief in the contextual environment. The workshop explores grief’s impact on the decisions we make, the grief that concerns present issues, as well as anticipatory grief around potential loss and/or transition in the future.
To embrace new possibilities across an ecosystem, we must reconcile with the past and present. Our framework is currently impacting national healthcare, global climate action, and civic engagement, and we aim to drive broader organisational and social change. The idea that grief and emotions are integral to future work has been attracting major institutional support for our projects across fields of urban planning, policy design, cultural engagement, health care design, as well as the supply chain of multiple industries.
Room 424
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Signs of Change
Installation + Workshop
Angelika Seeschaaf Veres, Koby Barhad, Daniel Daam-Rossi + Bettina Schwalm
This installation and workshop uses signage systems to explore how extreme climate informs the way A.I. technology is adopted and re-shapes culture. Informed by a series of global installations of imagined public policies through signage, ‘Signs of Change’ research cultivates hyper-local knowledge and perspectives on extreme climate disruptions. A.I. technology has emerged as a significant re-shaper of daily rituals, routines, behaviours, and interactions, posing both threats and opportunities for how society might deal with our uncertain climate-disrupted futures. This work has received the APF 2023 award winner in the imaginative category.
Room 401
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The Feelings We Can’t Yet Imagine: An introduction to Affective Foresight
Workshop
Seth Harrell
This session explores the intersection of emotions and futures thinking, introducing the concept of “Affective Foresight.” In the first hour, participants will engage in hands-on activities to develop emotional scenario planning tools and vocabulary for emerging feelings shaped by technological and environmental change. The second hour will explore how humor enhances future thinking by activating cognitive flexibility and emotional resilience. Participants will learn theoretical psychological underpinnings of humor and techniques to explore future trends and contradictions, using comedy as a tool for insight and adaptation.
Room 401
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Bodies in Motion: The Next Decade / Media & Entertainment
Workshop
Kelly Kornet + Desmond Dickerson
In this ‘bodies in motion’ workshop, participants will be invited to share their strongest held beliefs about the future and gain enlightenment from the perspectives of others. The facilitators will invite participants to consider a range of provocations for how (and what) media will be imagined, created and consumed in 2030. In response to each provocation, participants will position themselves along a spectrum from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree, then take part in a facilitated discussion. Please note participation is confidential, but this session will be audio recorded for synthesis of learnings and insights.
Room: 433
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Imagining Beyond Urgency: A Collective Practice in Constructive Daydreaming
Workshop
Betty Xie + Kyra Tudlong
This immersive workshop introduces constructive daydreaming as a foresight practice that activates the brain’s default mode network for deeper meaning-making. Through somatic grounding, creative stations, and reflective writing, participants reconnect with their inner imaginative core to envision futures from a place of alignment and care.
Room 435
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Higher Ed. – An Act of Public Imagination
Workshop
Jennifer Murphy
This interactive foresight experience immerses participants in divergent futures of post-secondary education in 2035. Through storytelling and scenario-based stations, the session explores collapse, care, and transformation in higher education as a living system.
Room 435
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Pathwaves: Futures World Building Workshop
Workshop
Patti Schmidt + Rebecca Black
This workshop invites participants to explore world-building through collaborative storytelling and speculative design. It draws from over two decades of experience in the creative industries to foster imaginative and inclusive futures.
Room 433
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Time in the Body: Embodied Futuring
Workshop
Julienne DeVita
This movement-based workshop introduces embodied futuring as a method for processing change through the body. Participants engage in guided exercises to explore how futures emerge within us, using awareness, stillness, and shared reflection to deepen their capacity for navigating uncertainty.
Room 434
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Performing Compassionate Futures
Workshop
Kathy Porter + Iowyth Hezel Ulthiin
This workshop blends participatory theatre and psychogeography to explore futures thinking through embodied knowledge. Participants engage in movement-based activities and non-verbal dialogue to co-create compassionate scenarios and expand their imaginative capacity.
Room: 433
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Nurturing Anticipation & Imagination
Workshop
Allison Campbell-Rogers + Doug Reid
This participatory learning lab invites futurists to engage with K–12 educators in exploring imagination as a civic skill essential to futures literacy. Through interactive installations, the session fosters dialogue on how foresight practices can support young people in navigating uncertainty with creativity and care.
Room 435
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Rituals of Composting: Presence and Purpose in Endings
Workshop
Jillian Harris + Morgan Bath
This participatory workshop reframes endings as fertile ground for transformation through ritual, storytelling, and somatic practice. Participants will explore personal and collective transitions, culminating in a symbolic composting ritual that honors closure and renewal.
Room 434
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Writing Foresight Fiction
Workshop
Karl Schroeder
This interactive session guides participants through the creation of a foresight fiction outline, using storytelling to explore critical uncertainties. It emphasizes narrative as a tool for conveying complex futures in an engaging and accessible way.
Room 401
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Installations
Where We Stand to Imagine: A Positional Practice in Futures Work
Installation
Danny Ghantous + Morgan Bath
This participatory installation invites attendees to explore their social identities using the Power Flower, a reflective tool for surfacing positionality in foresight and design. Through visual mapping and collective synthesis, the installation fosters dialogue on inclusion, ethics, and the role of identity in shaping future imaginaries.
Room 401
Space for Grief
The Method Collective: Fran Quintero Rawlings, Ziyan Hossain + Calla Lee
Space for Grief is an internationally recognized public art installation created by The Method Collective, comprising OCAD University graduates from the MDes in Strategic Foresight & Innovation: Calla Lee, Fran Quintero Rawlings, and Ziyan Hossain. This installation provides a reflective space for processing emotions and fostering collective healing.
In addition to the physical installation, Space for Grief offers a soundscape on Bandcamp, “A Soundtrack for Your Memories”, which enhances the immersive experience and supports emotional exploration.
Room 424
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Futures of Toys 2040
Installation
Sara Blanke, Roxana Cociorba, Danielle Pierre + Paola Pieschacon
This project explores how toys—key facilitators of creativity, learning, and social connection—may evolve by 2040, under shifting technological, environmental, and cultural forces. Using strategic foresight tools like horizon scanning and scenario planning, the team envisions four distinct futures of play, from AI companions to regenerative, low-tech toys.
Room 439
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Futures Drinks
Installation
Mushfiqa Monica Jamaluddin
Futures Drinks is an immersive, reflective experience where participants engage with their past, present, and future selves through symbolic beverages and guided prompts. The installation fosters introspection and emotional connection, offering a rare moment of temporal self-dialogue.
Room 417
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Futures Room: A Self-Guided Journey from Personal Futures to Collective Flourishing
Installation
Futures Hub
The Futures Room is an immersive installation styled like a cozy living room, designed to spark introspection and imagination through participatory foresight. Visitors engage with tactile tools and a collective Futures Wall to reflect on personal and collective futures, fostering a silent, evolving dialogue rooted in compassion and creativity.
Room 436
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Invitations to Better Worlds
Installation
Department of Imaginary Affairs
This installation invites participants to reflect on the labor of building just and liberated futures while confronting the grief and contradictions of systemic transformation. Through imagination and collective reckoning, it offers a space for unlearning, resistance, and radical possibility.
QR codes can be found throughout the floor.
Room: 440
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Thank you.
Installation
Orus Mateo Castaño-Suárez
This participatory installation invites attendees to write a note of gratitude to someone compassionate in their life, to be opened in 2035. The act of writing and sharing these notes becomes a time capsule of appreciation and a collective exercise in compassion-building.
Room 401
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Packing for a Future Journey
Installation
Kelly Okamura
For this proposed dialogic installation, containers transition possessions from past life to new beginnings. From steamer trunks to carry-on luggage, we move our possessions from one place to another. What we pack to take and what is left behind reflects the context of the situation. Regrets for items left, yet we often make superficial judgements of others based on material possessions.
This interactive installation’s purpose is to spark new considerations on material objects, future design, and purchasing.
Room 433
Reimagined Birth Spaces – Virtual Hydrotherapy
Installation
Sasha Kamkin, Kory McGrath + Zachary Scholtz
This immersive installation transforms institutional birth environments into sensory sanctuaries using projection mapping and soundscapes. It reimagines hydrotherapy as a tool for emotional regulation and reconnection, especially for birthing individuals excluded from such experiences due to systemic barriers.
Room 428
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From Me to You
Installation
Susan LK Gorbet, Matt Gorbet + Rob Gorbet
This retro-styled interactive artwork invites participants to explore the emotional nuances of language through a vintage display that transforms the phrase “I ____ YOU” into a poetic sequence of evolving meanings. The piece uses algorithmic storytelling and tactile interaction to provoke reflection on relationships, empathy, and the power of small changes.
Room 413
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Echoes of the Unseen
Installation
Golnoush Mirsalari + Amin Forootan
Echoes of the Unseen is an interactive audio-visual installation that explores the connection between sensory interaction and emotional memory.
By turning a rotary encoder, participants activate a multi-layered experience where soundscapes and shifting visual landscapes unfold in response to their movement.
The device functions as a portal into the unseen, inviting audiences to engage with the intangible: memory, emotion, and the subconscious. Created using TouchDesigner, Arduino, and custom sound design, the piece blurs the boundary between body and machine, presence and perception.
Room 402
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Mapping out the Foresight Community
Installation
The Canadian Foresight Network
Canadian foresight network aims to connect Canadian professionals across academia, government, private sector, and not-for-profit to understand work being done in foresight, find ways for cross-collaboration, and map out connections across people. It also aims to democratize access to futures thinking across the nation.
We are currently mapping out the peer-to-peer connection in a visual map and we invite people to join the network and add their names.
Room 431
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Human Creativity Posters
Family of Rebel Members: Janine Pierre (wife), Joe Riccio (husband) & Maya Riccio (child)
These four activism posters are a series of nine created for The Futures of Creative Services project dossier in for OCAD’s Foresight Studio course. This work documents the possible impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Creative Services and these posters were created as part of a Time-Machine interactive performance activating one scenario. The full report was created by the fictitious group: Spark Foresight Studio and made up of our real-world colleagues: Luke Correira-Damude, Brandon Meawasige, Aisling Nolan, Janine Pierre & Zachary Scholtz.