Why do we need Futures & Visual Literacy?

The rapid changes at all levels of life call for new frameworks of thought and action. These frameworks need to be original and creative to effectively tackle the new challenges and successfully overcome current deadlocks.

In our daily life, we activate – automatically and without explicit awareness – our perceptions and anticipations to face challenges. We are used to the conventional ways of thinking and acting that contemporary lifestyle supports. As a result, we weaken our imagination and we become less active co-creators of our future.

Understanding how our thinking mechanisms limit our potential in the present and the future, as well as acknowledging how and why we established them, will make us effective agents at a personal and at a collective level.

Futures Literacy, an official UNESCO program since 2012, provides the tools that foster innovative and creative thought and serves towards individual and collective empowerment.
Visual Literacy, within the established UNESCO Chair “Visual Anticipation and Futures Literacy towards Visual Literacy” provides the skills to unpack our personal and cultural lenses through which we sense and make sense of the world and reconsider our place and role in it.

Useful links:
Futures literacy: anticipation in the 21st Century
Decolonizing your Imagination – Futures Literacy for Change
Futures Literacy - Embracing Complexity and Using the Future?
Evaluating and Improving the Use of the Future for Identifying and Choosing Dynamic Opportunities
How do we identify great opportunities
Interview about Futures Literacy with Riel Miller, Head of Foresight at UNESCO
To Think About the Future in a Changing World