“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!
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 chĂŞne 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?
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.
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? 👇
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?
Are you fascinated by the big questions? What is time? Does the future exist? Do we exist? And most importantly, can we build something funky to explore it all?
We are a quirky, passionate group of psychologists, researchers, nutritionists, artists, and makers based in Lyon. We tackle deep subjects with both rigorous curiosity and a healthy dose of creative irony. We love going on tangents, collaging ideas, and building weird and wonderful things.
Our work is a vibrant collision of disciplines. We collaborate with artists, musicians, researchers in psychology, behaviour sciences, sustainability professionals, festivals, and universities to create installations, immersive experiences, and thought-provoking projects.
What we’re working on now (and where you come in):
This spring and summer, we have a thrilling and eclectic mix of projects on the horizon. Our work ranges from the wonderfully specific to the wildly ambitious:
“Dears, we have one week to develop a 15-minute immersive experience for professionals in cultural sector, grounded in our latest research.”
“Great news – we’re invited to present our installation at a festival! Now, we just need to fill a hole in the budget over the next few months…”
“Hmm, these pre- and post-experience comparisons are off. Looks like we need to check for baseline climate anxiety and build some non-linear models…”
Sound like a “go somewhere you don’t know, and bring back something you don’t know what”? We promise it’s not quite like that! It’s more like… organized chaos with a purpose.
This is where you come in. We are looking for a self-motivated and curious intern who:
Is excited to dive into the unknown and share their own ideas.
Wants to learn in an environment that will challenge and support their growth.
Isn’t afraid of a little ambiguity and enjoys figuring things out as a team.
Yes, our work can be unexpected, and we take things day by day. But we are the good kind of crazy. We build on each other’s strengths, and we offer guidance and structure to help you navigate our peculiar world. We are as logical and rigorous as we are playful. You won’t be alone in the deep end; we’ll be there swimming with you.
The Practical Stuff:
Start Date: Yesterday? Seriously, we mean ASAP.
Location: Lyon, France (French-speaking is essential and English is needed for our day-to-day collaboration).
The Vibe: Passionate, unconventional, slightly odd (in the best way), and always, always curious.
If this sounds like a fun and fascinating opportunity, drop us a line!
Tell us what makes you curious.
hello [at] creativetimelab [dot] org
More details:
The Short Version Help us wrangle the cosmos. Support Creative Time Lab through project coordination, finding cool people to partner with, and helping us figure out what we’re offering to the world.
What You’ll Actually Be Doing We’re in a phase of growing from brilliant, chaotic experiments into something a little more… structured. (Don’t worry, we’ll keep the good chaos). You’ll be our partner in crime, helping us build the ship while we sail it.
Your main missions, should you choose to accept them:
Project Wrangling: Help coordinate workshops, pilot projects, and research events. Keep the trains running on time (even if they’re magical, philosophical trains).
Figuring Out What We Sell: Help us articulate our service offerings. What is a participatory workshop on the nature of time worth? Let’s figure it out together. This includes our immersive installations and training formats.
Spy Work (aka Market Research): Scope out the landscape. Where does Creative Time Lab fit in the world of culture, research, and innovation? Who’s doing cool stuff, and where are the gaps we can fill?
Finding Our People (Partners): Help us identify and map potential soulmates—universities, cultural institutions, municipalities, foundations, and other wonderfully weird organisations who should know about us.
Treasure Hunting (Funding): Dive into the world of foundations and public funding programs to find opportunities that align with our mission.
Telling Our Story: Help prepare project proposals and outreach materials. Translate what we do into a language that institutions (and their grant committees) can understand and love.
Getting Our Ducks in a Row: Help structure our internal resources — documentation, project tracking, shared digital spaces. Basically, help us be less messy.
Proving We Exist (Impact Reports): Assist in preparing impact reports and project documentation. Organizing research data, contributing to data analyses (quantitative and qualitative), writing summaries, co-designing impact measurement strategies … you know, the stuff that shows we’re not just making it all up.
Event Support: Help before, during, and after the conferences, workshops, and events we (inevitably) end up organising.
Some of the Skills You’ll Proudly Use and Grow:
The Professional: Project coordination, ecosystem analysis, partnership mapping, grant research, proposal writing, impact documentation, and the dark art of organisational development.
The Analytical: Figuring out where a weird organization fits in a not-so-weird world. Structuring chaos into coherent plans. Turning deep research into things people can actually do.
The Human: Radical autonomy and initiative. Communicating with artists, academics, and bureaucrats (sometimes on the same day). Collaborating in a tiny, intense team. Adapting when a project suddenly pivots (because it will).
Why Bother? (The Big Picture) This isn’t just about fetching coffee and filing papers. This is a hands-on, deep-dive into what it takes to build a mission-driven organisation from the ground up. You’ll get your hands dirty in everything from strategy to logistics, helping us transition from a series of brilliant pilot projects into something more… sustainable and scalable. You’ll leave with a real sense of how to make a cultural and research-oriented project actually work.
What You’ll Take With You (Learning Outcomes)
Experience building an emerging org at the intersection of research, culture, and innovation.
Real-world skills in market analysis, partnership development, and funding strategy.
A hand in designing actual service offerings based on real research.
The know-how to document impact and tell a compelling project story.
A toolbox full of project coordination and strategic analysis skills, tested in the wild.
The Nitty Gritty
Where: Lyon, France. We’ll be on-site for meetings and events, but flexible for remote work when it makes sense.
When: ASAP.
Hours: Part-time or full-time for 4-5 months. Heads-up: when we’re at festivals or running workshops, that might occasionally include a Sunday or public holiday. It’s the price of doing fun stuff.
Cha-ching: Compensation as per French legal internship regulations.
Perks: If we ship you off to a festival, we’ve got your transport, accommodation, and meals covered.
What is your relationship with the future, and how is it affecting you right now?
Join Creative Time Lab founder Anna Sircova on March 17 for a deep, live conversation with Johanne Schwensen from It’s Complicated. They’ll explore futurization—a concept that goes beyond simple future-thinking to examine how our images of tomorrow shape our mental health and actions today.
They’ll be tackling questions like: 🤔 How does “futurization” differ from just “thinking about the future”? 🌍 If someone has an apocalyptic view of the global future, how does that show up in their daily mental health? ✨ How can we use imagination not as escapism, but as a real tool for resilience?
Anna brings her unique perspective as a psychologist, researcher, and visual artist to discuss these and other questions.
đź“… When: Tuesday, March 17 | 12:00 PM – 01:00 PM CET đź“Ť Where: Live stream đź”— RSVP here: https://lnkd.in/dEuu2Bev
At the recent Forum de la Culture Durable in Brussels, we invited participants to step into an ephemeral time-travel machine. Guided by our ongoing research, we didn’t just discuss possible futures—we felt them, questioned them, and began to shape them, together.
Our research points to three recurring narratives about the future of culture: 🤖 one shaped by AI 🌍 one focused on building climate-proof cultural events 🤝 one where social bonds may become our most endangered resource
In this immersive session, participants explored these three paths and helped us map a fourth one, emerging from what they already carried with them.
🌱 What surfaced were very concrete worries: – Fears that AI might replace what makes us human — creativity, sensitivity, craftsmanship. – Concerns about losing skills by delegating too much. – Anxiety about impoverishment, shrinking funding, and cultural work becoming more competitive yet less meaningful. – And a recurring fear of being less together — fewer physical encounters, fewer shared moments, fewer human connections.
🌱 Alongside these worries, strong hopes were voiced: – That AI cannot replace empathy, love, or the ability to really encounter others. – That solidarity and mutual support can still be preserved. – That people — artists, technicians, cooks, teams, audiences — will remain the core ingredient of cultural life. – That rituals like live music, dancing together, celebration, saying hello, and simply being present can endure.
When asked what they would save if culture had to fit into a single van, many answered simply: the people.
In this express and immersive format, research insights became an embodied experience. Despite the late hour, participants stayed attentive and curious — and several lingered afterwards to share reflections about how rarely they get space to speak about emotions, values, and relationships in professional cultural settings.
What struck us most was how consistently one theme returned, across the different futures: the need to stay connected — to one another, to shared rituals, and to what makes culture alive.
Our research keeps pointing to this: it’s not only resources that make the difference. Collective imagination — especially when it is shared — may be one of the most powerful cultural technologies we have.
Moments like this remind us that culture is not fixed. It is dynamic. It is alive, and shaped by what we choose to nurture. And perhaps the future of culture is not a single vision, but something that emerges between anxiety and action, when we choose connection over isolation.
After our recent sessions at Ashoka University, one powerful question stayed with us: “Could this become a permanent installation on our campus?”
That question goes to the heart of our long-term vision. It is not an either/or logic, but an and/and one. We envision multiple futures for the Space — as the starting point of an ecosystem:
🔹 Pop-Up Catalysts – Igniting conversations at festivals and events 🔹 Touring Deep-Dives – Semester-long residencies and co-creation 🔹 Permanent Anchors – A lasting resource for institutions committed to futures literacy and emotional resilience
This work is already growing. We are grateful for Nicolas Fieulaine’s invitation to bring our Images of the Future workshop to students at Sciences Po Lyon on Jan 29 & Feb 5.
We are now looking for our next partners.
Is your university, cultural institution, or organisation looking for a tangible, research-backed way to: • Foster hope and agency in the face of uncertainty? • Bridge the gap between personal optimism and global anxiety? • Create a safe space for sharing the emotions about the future?
We invite you to reach out. Let’s explore how a pop-up, residency, or permanent Space of Futurization could live within your community.
👉 Interested in hosting a conversation or workshop?
Back in 2017–2018, when the Futurization of Thinking and Behaviour project was just beginning, we conducted our first pilot study to understand how people perceive the very word “futurization.”
What does it make you think of? How does it make you feel? What colors or images come to mind?
Our small survey and the first focus-group revealed some fascinating impressions:
💡 Futurization was often linked to technology, innovation, robots, and automation — a kind of ultra-modern world shaped by human design.
🎨 The colors people associated with the future were cold and metallic — white, chrome, silver, steel grey — with only rare traces of green or blue, and almost no warm tones.
🦸‍♂️ When asked to imagine a “character” of futurization, participants named robots, superheroes, and tech icons — mostly male, mostly artificial.
Emotionally, the future felt mixed: ✨ Curiosity (70%) and optimism were paired with uneasiness (60%), hope (50%) with strangeness (40%), and even fear (30%).
These early findings already hinted at something essential: our collective imagination of the future was technological but emotionally distant — bright and shiny, yet disconnected from nature, humanity, and warmth.
That’s where our work began: to reconnect imagination, emotion, and meaning in how we think about the future.
🌱 The Futurization Project has grown immensely since then — but this first glimpse remains a powerful reminder of why we need to reimagine what the future feels like.
👉 Follow Creative Time Lab to explore how our relationship with the future continues to evolve — through research, art, and collective imagination.
