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!
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.
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
Pinja Päivinen has been part of this work since before CTL existed. She came in as a focus group participant in Copenhagen and, over the years, became a co-author of the methodology, a presence at Terres du Son, and — soon — a colleague based in Lyon. We asked her five questions.
You’ve been connected to this work since 2017 — longer than CTL itself has existed. How has your relationship to the questions it asks changed over that time?
I think encountering and starting to think about futurization during the course on the psychology of time, my interest started with just curiosity about how big of a role time plays in our lives and what actually happens when we imagine the future. Working with it during the earlier years made me do a lot of self-reflecting as well. Untangling the relationship to the past, present and future and how that also personally affects my thinking was a big personal question I saw, that arose from the work.
Similarly, as I’ve always been interested in the connection between how we feel and act, and spend time trying to understand my own relationship with the uncertainty of the future and the complexities surrounding global issues like climate change, I had to first realize just how uncertain and anxious I generally am about the future and learn to sit with it.
So I would say the journey through the questions has shifted from more academic curiosity towards the concept of the future and a learning opportunity, to something more constantly adapting and evolving — questions on what we can do to support the process of future thinking and thus support behaviours affected by it. Adding also the layer of creative thinking into how do we make this engaging and interesting rather than just an academic inquiry — how is it applicable to our everyday lives and different cultures?
You’ve watched the Space of Futurization go from a research idea to something people experience at festivals. Is there a moment from that journey that stays with you?
I would have to say the first deployment at Terres du Son in 2024. I unfortunately missed the prototype in Copenhagen so this was the first time I got to closely be part of the process of bringing our research and ideas into life in a physical space. It’s kind of amazing to think back now to the whole process with many unknowns — I didn’t even have an idea on how to imagine the tent we would be inside!
And overall just getting to work with the team to take our research and creative ideas and build a space where they get to speak and shine and be witnessed by people. I think getting the first people into the tent and space itself also brought this moment to light. It made me realize how we finally did it and gave me encouragement in seeing how the many, many ideas that we have can take shape and not only contribute to research and methodology, but to create experiences for people and open up conversations.
You went from focus group participant to co-author of the methodology. Was there a moment where you realized this had become your work, not just work you were helping with?
I think there were a few along the years but the biggest “realization” only happened recently.
The first one was when we finished and submitted the book chapter on futurization. I had just finished my bachelor’s and was also in a very transitional moment trying to figure out the future (as we do all the time). Even as I hadn’t been working on it so closely with the project while I was finishing my thesis, having that opportunity to contribute to an academic publication was a big moment for me that also gave me confidence.
Then there was the first Terres du Son deployment that had a big impact on me, but I would honestly say that it was the second deployment last year along with taking on a more active role in the whole preparation process, ideation and working in a different role with the team that gave me the feeling that this work is part of me in a way and it’s there to stay. Not to say I didn’t connect to it or feel like this before, but that was the moment that made me experience my own role differently and also gave me the opportunity to explain the work more closely to our interns helping out — that was a moment of reflection on how much the work actually means to me.
This made me see how I had grown from learning to be comfortable in the discovery process not as an observer but as someone who can use personal insight to let the data and research speak and do this through creativity more naturally. And also that my role had truly shifted already from being “an observer and thinker” to the asked questions to being one to ask “what is the next question to explore?” and “how can we take what we see and create something new from it?”
Your background combines psychology, nutrition, and behavioural sciences. How does that combination show up in how you think about futures work?
I always like to say I’m kind of a chaotic curious mind — instead of one clear question I often have at least ten in my mind at once. I just find humans and life in general fascinating in so many levels. I think I’ve always been that way from the time I tried at least ten different hobbies or sports when I was young until I landed on one that I loved.
Along with psychology I minored in philosophy during my bachelor’s and have done a range of environmental and sustainability courses throughout both my degrees, as I’ve always been drawn to interdisciplinary thinking about the questions of why we act, feel or eat the way we do. I think as humans we share so much at our core but are also shaped by so many factors including culture, environment, and our lived experiences — and in understanding the questions we ask, we need to combine different lenses to make sense of the sometimes chaotic picture in front of us.
I also worked in hospitality for almost a decade in one role or another, which has taught me almost equally about people as my studies have. We can’t wish to shape our eating or food systems without understanding the people and pressures involved in it, like we can’t shape behaviour without understanding many other factors such as emotions, motivations, culture and barriers.
So to summarize this answer before it becomes a book: I think my background shapes how I think about futures work through aiming to not only focus on how we imagine the future but trying to understand the process and behaviour around it by creating a kind of mosaic out of all the little pieces that go together even if not so obviously. What I love about working with this team is that it’s a community of people from various backgrounds and experiences and it’s always great to see different perspectives contributing to shaping the ideas we have.
I’ve also learned that even as the aspiring philosopher in me would like to answer the biggest questions in life by combining all the worldly knowledge, I have a unique experience through my background that gives me also a specific lens through which I can contribute to the questions we ask about the future.
Eating and food is something we all share as humans — we need to in order to survive and it will continue (in one form or another) in the future. How we eat is also shaped by habits, emotions, culture and tradition and is connected to our well-being and health on multiple levels. There is no future without food (for living beings at least) and while it’s not the whole picture by any means, I think it is an essential (and curious) lens embedded in futures work that I aim to incorporate into my work at CTL.
What does moving to Lyon mean to you — practically and otherwise?
Currently it has been lots of packing and lots of endless lists of things to do (but thankfully only for a little while). Practically it means changing my life, environment, and not being so physically close to many loved ones, which is a little scary even though I’ve done it before. It’s a little funny how I think you get a little more nervous about this getting older. I don’t think I spent this much time planning when I left to study in the U.S. (for seven years) without ever having been on a plane.
It’s also the first time moving to a country where I don’t speak the language almost at all (but it’s a work in progress). But it also means practically being closer and more hands on to our work and our team which I am very excited about. And I’m also excited to see how I can professionally grow and where my ideas can take me. It also means a new chapter and an adventure for me personally.
The last years have been a little tough on many levels and ever since I moved back to Finland (now already almost seven years ago) I’ve had the thought to experience another place, environment and culture again and I’m excited to have this opportunity to make it happen. This always comes with some uncertainty about the future but as we have learned it’s natural and something to accept and get comfortable with.
Sometimes we need to embrace the unknown and I truly believe these types of changes are always good. No matter what happens, it makes you grow and gain new experiences — so I’m excited to see how that happens for me in the near future.
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 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..
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.
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.
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!
Most public spaces don’t make room for questions about the future. Perhaps it’s something to reconsider?
Last summer for the second time, we brought the Space of Futurization to life at Terres du Son music festival in France. As part of The Laboratorium — together with NFÉtudes, the Nap Project led by Arman Ameri Mahani and Barakat Alsaleh, and Syméon Fieulaine — we created a collective space for discovery blending science with creativity, made possible with the support of Fondation APRIL.
Around 350 festival-goers stepped into the Futurinarium. They engaged with questions about what the future looks like, feels like, sounds like. They mapped their personal futures and global ones — and discovered just how differently those two things live inside us.
As we shared recently, the strongest effect wasn’t on specific climate attitudes or dismantling fears in a single visit. It was on increased social connection, thoughtfulness and reflection — people’s sense that imagining the future together with others was meaningful and worth doing.
That’s what the Space of Futurization is designed to create.
The Space of Futurization is an immersive, research-based installation designed for real-world cultural contexts that helps people move from anxiety about the future to creative reflection and genuine connection — while collecting rich data on how people relate to time, uncertainty, and the future. Grounded in over a decade of cross-cultural research on how humans relate to time, it can be adapted for festivals, university campuses, science events, or cultural venues — and it’s built to be experienced together.
We’re now looking for the next places to bring it. 🌱
If you work in cultural programming, science communication, climate research, education, the arts, or public engagement — and you’re looking for something both scientifically grounded and genuinely moving — we’d love to hear from you!
What kinds of spaces do you think need this kind of conversation most? 👇
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.
