Author: Galina Zhukova

The people behind Creative Time Lab: meet Jérémy LeBot 

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Jérémy LeBot found us through Nicolas Fieulaine‘s post about Terres du Son, then sat down and read our papers before reaching out. We asked him what was on his mind at that point.

“I was looking for a way to connect art with the behavioral sciences. CTL showed me that theoretical frameworks could be translated into immersive experiences. Proof that I could bring my two academic backgrounds together without compromising scientific rigor or artistic creativity.”

His path runs through decorative painting, social psychology, over a year of emergency housing coordination at RESSIF, and ecological transition. At the time, he says, each transition felt like letting go of a possible future. Looking back, he sees the thread. Skills from each experience still feed how he works now. The paths are converging into a future he hadn’t anticipated, one he finds “far more stimulating and meaningful.”

The RESSIF year shapes how he thinks about public engagement. He puts it directly: many programs fall short because they are designed without consulting the people they are meant to serve. Communication is not tailored to the audience. Eligibility conditions create friction. People disengage.

After his first week, he is wondering about: how does our perception of time as a finite resource influence the choices we make?

He is looking into the CFC and ZTPI scales. He says this perspective is new for him, neither inherently positive nor negative. Depending on the context, it can push him to act with greater intention, or become a source of hesitation and paralysis. Time perception as a lens on choice.

Time is such a fascinating concept! There are so many questions around it! That’s why we never get bored at CTL – many things to explore!

What he is most looking forward to in our work is the moment a project comes to life. Designing projects is largely about imagining the future. Analyzing data is largely about making sense of the past. The encounter itself, watching participants, listening to their experiences, collecting data in real time, those are “rare moments when I am fully immersed in the present.”

And what CTL might help him build: “intervention prototypes in which art is not a layer of aesthetic for an awareness-raising tool, but a central mechanism for change and action.”

Welcome, Jeremy! We are happy to have you with us!

What’s on your imagined menu for 2056?

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Café Futuresque grew out of real research. The menus are built from what people across different contexts have imagined we might eat in 30 or 100 years. What started as a research output became an experiential format: a pop-up café where the menu itself is the centre, inviting visitors to sit with the questions that future of food research keeps raising. Where are we now, where are we heading, and how do we actually feel about it?

The menu includes “Not Your Grandma’s Salad”: lab-grown vegan chicken, kale, algae crisps, and carbon-negative dressing. The “Soil-to-Sip Smoothie” blends regenerative greens, adaptogenic fungi, and nano-hydrated chia. And for the nostalgic among us, the “Plastic-Wrapped Candy Bar,” listed as a Forbidden Relic.

A little weird for some? Absolutely. That’s rather the point.

It wasn’t surprising that many came into the pilot workshop at BIOTOPE FESTIVAL worried about the future of food. But it was interesting what happened next.

73% of participants thought we would see menus like this in restaurants or cafés within 20 years, and almost 50% within the next 10, well within most of our lifetimes.

The highest-rated emotion during the experience was “uncomfortable.” The second was “empowered.” Just under half said they wouldn’t be comfortable eating from the menu. The reasons: it’s “too artificial,” it “has no gustatory pleasure,” or it “will kill a lot of work.” The participants who said they would be comfortable? “We will have to adapt,” or simply curious to try.

And yet, afterwards 80% felt their own choices help shape food futures. Many who came in worried stayed worried (concern about prices, taste, and what we might lose didn’t go away), but discomfort and agency turned out not to be in conflict. If anything, sitting with an uncomfortable future seemed to activate people rather than shut them down.


That showed up in the written responses too. Inspired actions ranged from “going to buy vegetables from the next Sunday market” to “growing my own garden” and “making more thoughtful choices.” Specific, grounded, personal.

Finally, more than half said the brief experience shifted how they feel about the future of food, at least to some extent. The most chosen reason? It made the future feel closer and more real. We often relate to the further-away futures outside our personal horizons as something distant, to be decided later, by systems larger than us. What we need are ways to bring these futures into the present imagination, creating spaces that encourage sitting with the uncertainty, until Sunday’s grocery run can start to feel like part of the answer.

We’re continuing to develop the format and would love to hear what these findings bring up for you. What’s on your imagined menu for 2056?

Café Futuresque is part of our work supported by the Fondation APRIL.

Café Futuresque at Biotope: two days of food futures in Saint-Émilion

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Last week we were invited by Madina Querre and Nicolas Fieulaine to bring our Café Futuresque, along with three other stations from our immersive installation, to the 10th edition of BIOTOPE FESTIVAL in Saint-Émilion. The festival’s theme this year, Vivants?!, asked what it means to stay committed to territorial transformation.

It was our first full pilot of the Café Futuresque in this format, ran across two very different days.

On Friday, we joined a day of round tables with professionals from the agricultural and wine industries: ecologists, viticulturalists, and thinkers on the future of living territories. We asked them about their images of the future and showed them our future menus, asking what food they weren’t ready to give up in 30 years. The global futures were tense: nature reclaiming power, radical bifurcation, local spaces of resistance. The personal futures were something else entirely: symbiosis, living in coherence with the nature, “zen sous un grand chêne multicentenaire devant un jardin bio”. And the food they couldn’t give up? Cherries. Apricots. Potatoes. Wine, naturally.

On Saturday, families and festival visitors joined us for a workshop around the three menus: 2054, 2124, and Vintage 2024. We asked people to look through them, imagine ordering, and tell us how they felt about the future of food.

Before the workshop, “worried” was a dominant gut feeling, focusing on prices and quality of food, followed by “curious” about future developments and “sad” about the possibility of losing foods that have personal value. After the workshop, about 71% of participants felt that their everyday food choices can contribute to shaping what food looks like in the future. When asked which dish they’d order, 3D-printed pizza and insect power tacos came out on top. The foods people weren’t ready to give up: chocolate, candy, sushi, and lasagna.

What the numbers don’t fully capture are the conversations around the table. Many were passionate and wanted to keep talking: about wanting to eat more consciously but feeling the weight of food prices, the difficulty of navigating an increasingly complex foodscape, what their children eat and what kind of food world they’re inheriting. The future of food, it turns out, is not an abstract question for most people. It’s already here, in the weekly shop and the school lunchbox.

Two days, two very different rooms, but the same underlying questions surfacing: what will we eat, who decides, and what do we lose in getting there?

We’re continuing to develop the Café Futuresque around the themes and questions surrounding food and the future. We’re looking for new contexts to bring it into. If this resonates with your work or your organisation, we’d love to hear from you.

Café Futuresque is part of the Space of Futurization, produced with the support of Fondation APRIL

Workshop at Institut Transitions  

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What does the future look like when you’re in the middle of changing yours?

We were recently invited by Nicolas Fieulaine to run Images of the Future workshop with 36 participants of the Nouvelles Voies program at Institut Transitions. A year-long program reorienting careers toward ecological & social transition. People in the room were already doing something quite difficult: letting go of one way of working and building toward another.

We started where we always start, with two questions. What does your personal future look like? What does the global future look like?

The gap between the two answers was striking.

Personal future:

optimism 20 · enthusiasm 20 · calm 12 · uncertain 30 · anxious 10 · helpless 7 · indifferent 3

Global future:

uncertain 36 · anxious 31 · helpless 20 · calm 6 · optimism 5 · indifferent 1 · enthusiasm 0

The personal futures were full of texture. People drew trees, cabins in the mountains, birds. They wrote: nature, liberté, introspection, bonheur, paix intérieure. Family, children, time for activities they love, a work that inspires and motivates. Someone imagined white hair. Someone wrote “flou, mais c’est ok” (blurry, but that’s okay). Someone else: “incertitude mais stabilisant, un arbre qui prend ses racines” (uncertainty, but stabilizing, a tree taking root). The futures were modest in scale, sensory, relational. Uncertain, yes. But in a way that still left room for agency.

The global board was something else entirely. Crises, effondrement, guerres, sécheresse, conflits, en feu. Extermination du vivant. Someone wrote “ça sent le sapin” (it smells like a coffin). “Aïe aïe aïe.” One note said “nuancé, plus éclairé, mais pas suffisamment” (more nuanced, more aware, but not enough). Résilience appeared once. Enthusiasm: zero.

One participant put it directly: I have a hold on my personal future, but not on the global one. Which is a shared experience, not a failure of imagination. It’s a real psychological distinction. The personal future is where agency lives. The global future is where it goes quiet.

What held across both boards: nature as anchor. Trees, birds, forests, mountains appeared everywhere, on the personal side as where people locate safety and meaning, on the global side as what’s threatened. And connection as resource: family, children, intergenerational links, geographic and affective bonds. These are what make futures livable. Relational grounding, something shared.

What made this group particular was the context. These people were already choosing to act, already retraining, already building something new in the direction of transition. And still the gap held.

We see this tension across very different rooms, across countries. In Denmark and the United States, around 75% of participants describe the global future in predominantly negative terms. In China and India, roughly 65% describe it positively, shaped by different information flows, different meaning-making structures, and a more circular relationship with time..

We also talked about how time horizons have been shrinking since the pandemic. Before 2020, participants typically imagined personal futures 15 to 30 years out. Now it’s five years at most. Large collective events don’t just change how we feel about the future. They also change how far into it we can look.

Something new came up in this workshop. One participant said he couldn’t distinguish between his personal and global future, he experiences them as one and the same. We heard this for the first time a few months ago at Sciences Po. It’s making us think again about the concept of Balanced Time Perspective and deepens the direction of our research..

The workshop was facilitated by Anna Sircova, with Mariam and Galina Zhukova assisting. Thank you to Nicolas Fieulaine and Institut Transitions for the invitation, and to everyone in the room for bringing such openness to the questions.

If you’d like to bring Images of the Future workshop to your organisation, training program, or team, don’t hesitate to reach out!

A Space to Name the Future — Toward a Collaboration with the CLSM

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Last week we sat down with Hélène Salsi the coordinator of the Local Mental Health Council (CLSM) of Caluire-et-Cuire, Rillieux and Neuville, and Florence Wagner,  representative from the city of Caluire. Nicolas Fieulaine joined us. We talked about what Creative Time Lab does and walked them through the Space of Futurization.

Every October, France runs the Semaines d’Information sur la Santé Mentale (SISM). This year’s theme: the arts. And the CLSM’s current priority is reaching young people, creating spaces where they actually want to show up and participate.

We showed the stations. The glass jars where you vote with beans on how you feel about your personal future vs. the global one. The window where you write what you hope to see 100 years from now. The postcards people send to their future selves.

Since the lockdowns, the numbers on youth mental health in France have gotten significantly worse, and the professionals on the ground don’t always know how to open that conversation. We shared that parents who came through the installation at Terres du Son told us they didn’t know how to talk about the future with their children. But visiting the installation helped them, they found a way.

We’re now looking at what could work for October in the Caluire territory. Maybe the full installation, maybe a few stations, maybe workshops. The format is flexible (it’s been in a festival field, a university classroom, behind room dividers covered in black fabric). What matters is the space it opens.

In our data across countries, we see that when people are given a safe space to name what they feel about the future, the freezing stops. They move from “I can’t think about this” to “maybe there’s one small thing I can do.” And when quite a few people say that, in the same room, a sense of community forms. That’s what we’re trying to bring to Caluire.

The installation will be at Terres du Son in July and in Villeurbanne from September, if you want to come see it with your own eyes. We’ll share more as the October collaboration takes shape.

If you work in mental health prevention, local public health, youth services, or you’re curious about how art and psychology can work together on these questions, reach out.

The people behind Creative Time Lab: next up, Mariam El Jebbari 👋 

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We’re continuing our series introducing the team. This time: Mariam, who’s joining us as an intern working on event coordination and impact research support, and will be closely involved in the upcoming Café Futuresque pilot.

Mariam is studying international business and management at Esdes, recently spent a semester in South Korea, and has a background in foreign policy. As she puts it: understanding how different politics and cultures work around the world helps address, more precisely, the diverse concerns people have about the future. What caught her attention about CTL is that it creates spaces where those differences can be shared, felt, and imagined together.

Of the three registers we work across (art, research, public engagement), research is her familiar ground, art is a curiosity, and public engagement is the one that makes her slightly uncomfortable. You can’t control it. You can’t perfect it in advance. She wants to learn how to design for people, not just think about them.

She put it well when describing what she hopes to find out about herself here: “Can I listen to a work of art the way I know how to listen to an academic paper? Can I help create an experience, not just interpret it afterwards?”

Café Futuresque is a good place to start. Her instinct about why food and the future belong together: three meals a day, the time you take for each, the habits that surround them. All deeply structured, all slowly shifting. The future of food could go toward something more thoughtful and nourishing, or toward whatever’s cheapest and fastest. Because food is so universal and so daily, it might be the most concrete way to ask: which future are we actually heading toward?

When we asked what question she keeps coming back to, she said: “How do I stay lucid about crises without losing my capacity to act joyfully?” For someone who’s 20, that’s a question worth carrying.

What she hopes to take away from the internship: a stronger sense of translation (between registers of experience, not languages). How do you turn a researcher’s intuition into an artistic gesture? And that gesture into a public conversation that actually lands? She says she’s good at analysis. She wants to get better at building bridges people want to cross, without oversimplifying what’s on the other side.

Bienvenue, Mariam!

The people behind Creative Time Lab: meet Galina Zhukova 👋

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Over the next few weeks, we’re doing a series of posts to introduce the team. We’re starting with Galina, who joined CTL recently to assist us with research and operations (though some of you may have already crossed paths with her at Terres du Son last summer).

Galina studied urban planning in Grenoble, a city she credits with giving shape to something she’d already been feeling. She’d always wanted to improve city life. Grenoble gave her the practical tools to actually do it. (Apparently that’s the difference a good master’s programme makes.)

Ask her about cities and she’ll tell you every building is someone’s bet on the future. Every transformation of a space, an expression of someone’s image of what comes next. The overlap with CTL’s work was easy to spot: how do we build a collective future? And sometimes, how do we come together to protect it?

Before joining us, Galina spent years trying to bring city residents into urban planning processes. She kept running into the same wall: people who’d simply stopped showing up. Disillusioned by promises that didn’t land, convinced their input would change nothing. She thinks CTL’s futurization tools could help with exactly that, restoring a real sense of agency to citizens and city professionals who’ve lost faith in the process.

Two moments from Terres du Son stayed with her.

First: a workshop where she realized, with some surprise, that she was more pessimistic about the future than everyone else in the room. (A useful data point about oneself, if slightly uncomfortable.)

Second: watching children visit the Futurinarium with their parents or grandparents. A dial phone that kids had never seen before sparked questions going both directions. Two generations discovering what the older one had once imagined the future would look like, and how it shaped the present the younger one is living in.

What brought her to CTL? A stroke of luck, she says. Finding something at the intersection of research and creativity at exactly the right moment.

We’re glad the timing worked out. Bienvenue, Galina!

Futurization Framework at the Behavioural Insights for Policy Conference 2026 in Athens

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Last month, our founder Anna Sircova presented the Futurization Framework at the Behavioural Insights for Policy Conference (BiP) 2026 in Athens, Greece — an interdisciplinary workshop organised by King’s College London, Ethos Lab, and Eteron Institute, bringing together behavioural scientists, economists, policymakers, and practitioners from across Europe.

The conference brought into focus themes that sit at the heart of our work: trust, education, public engagement, and how we can support and empower people to act even in the face of uncertainty.

A range of important research was shared, including keynote speaker Ralph Hertwig making the case for boosting — building real cognitive and emotional capacities in people, not just steering their choices — and Nicolas Fieulaine exploring how psychological and cultural perspectives shed insight on why people might not access their social rights. The shared thread: education and culture aren’t soft additions to policy — they’re essential.

BiP gave us the room to go deeper into our research results — and what came up in those conversations made us want to share three things from our own data we haven’t spoken about yet.

Culture shapes how the future is imagined and felt. Across our scenario workshops with student focus groups from the US, China, India, Turkey, and France, we found strikingly different responses to the same question: what would it mean if the future didn’t exist? In the US, no future meant collapse — no motivation, no meaning. In China the response was calm and adaptive — no future, no problem. Habits, beliefs, and cultural context are part of the architecture of how people relate to what comes next.

Climate anxiety colors an experience — but selectively. In our installation study at Terres du Son, baseline climate anxiety was associated with lower excitement and sense of personal control, and more fear about the future — but didn’t touch deeper traits like calm acceptance or sense of purpose. Future-focused experiences need to hold space for emotional complexity and help people access the existing foundations for resilience, not just inspire.

The strongest effect we observed was social. More than any shift in individual climate attitudes, what the installation changed was how connected people felt to each other through the act of imagining the future together. That, to us, is what futurization looks like in practice. It is a psychological skill: the ability to sit with dark or uncertain futures without paralysis. Building that capacity — through education, thoughtful design, and honest public communication — is at the centre of building hope, resilience and action.

We thank Fondation APRIL for their support of the research.

And thank you to Sanchayan Banerjee, Pinelopi Skotida, Vasilis Panagou, George Melios, and the whole organising team for creating this space of opportunity in Athens.

Exploring future scenarios at Sciences Po Lyon

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In February, Creative Time Lab was invited by Nicolas Fieulaine to facilitate two workshops for students at Sciences Po Lyon. Together we explored the images of the personal and global futures and five future scenarios. It was a day of mind-bending creative work for everyone involved!

Through creative exercises and research tools, students reflected on both their personal future and the global future, revealing a striking contrast that we have repeatedly seen in our research.

When imagining the personal future students felt a blend of:
enthusiasm (25%) and optimism (16.5%),
balanced by some anxiety (20%) and uncertainty (21.5%).

Importantly, they framed it as something they have power and agency over.
The visuals were relatable: a creative career with challenges, but also the freedom to travel and take a nap on a beach.

The global future, however, looked very different. It was described as:
🔥 anxious (36%)
🌫 uncertain (25%)
⚠️ powerless (33%)
with barely any optimism (3%)
and definitely not calm.

The images were often stark: a planet on fire, environmental disaster, explosions, and deep social division.


None of this was surprising. But what did resonate—and what we must pay attention to—is that no one feels indifferent.

Amidst the imagined chaos, urgent questions emerged:
Why do we separate our personal future from the global future when they are, in fact, one and the same?

And while there is fear and deep sadness in imagining what we stand to lose, a stronger emotion began to surface: Anger.

We have been running these workshops since 2019. It is for the first time that we witness anger being so present in the room.

What do you think has changed in the emotional landscape?
Do you also notice anger appearing more often in conversations about the future?
What emotions come up for you when you imagine the global future today?

👇 Share your thoughts below.