Just a short newsletter to share a new workshop we’ve been developing: New Metaphors for Imagining Futures, 21–24 June 2026. Please share this with anyone who you think might find it useful!

Are you interested in how new metaphors can help us imagine futures in new ways? From design to community organising, from our relationships with nature, to radically reimagining society, new metaphors can be part of a creative participatory method for working with stakeholders—pluralising imagination and rethinking possibilities.

Join us at Norwich University of the Arts from 21–24 June where Dan Lockton, Josie Chambers, and Palak Dudani will be hosting an intensive, immersive, and international workshop suitable for designers, researchers, policymakers, artists, PhD or Master’s students, in futures & foresight, systems thinking, community development, energy & food transitions, public services, climate adaptation, social enterprise, local government, or NGOs, on a broad range of social and environmental topics. In an open, exploratory, supportive atmosphere, you’ll learn a process for deconstructing metaphors and creating new ones with a critical yet imaginative eye, and explore new ways to approach futuring through design and creative social science, systems, and fiction methods. In partnership with the Broads Authority, we’ll have a real case to work on, around a collaborative visioning process for the future of the national park, including a field trip on which you will ‘collect’ some new metaphors. 

New Metaphors for Imagining Futures | Norwich University of the Arts

Join us for an immersive and international masterclass workshop, hosted by the Institute for Sustainable Worlds.

Your work will also contribute, with credit, to a new edition of New Metaphors, the creative card deck for generating ideas and reframing problems which has been adopted internationally in education and research contexts and included in the OECD’s Observatory of Public Sector Innovation toolkit library.