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.
