A glimpse of the future through lenses of today

With the coronavirus pandemic still impacting our lives in different areas, Aalto pursued an opportunity to learn more about the future through the alumni community's lenses. Aalto Futures workshop event was a foresight-related workshop conducted among the alumni as part of the University process. This helped to gain an insight into their fears, curiosities, predictions and suggestions regarding the future.

Living strategy in itself being iterative, workshops are identified as one of the major platforms for the bringing together of the community and making it possible to contribute during various stages.

This workshop highlighted the moments of excitement amongst the participants as they worked with different people and got to learn about distinct views on the future. It also enabled them to express their thoughts and ideas more interactively through the workshop tasks and their conduct flow.

The tasks were designed so that it created an opportunity for the participants from different backgrounds to have unified conversation and contribute to the event with their diverse expertise.

The discussions among the participants opened up topics which led to engaging discussions among the participants for further retrospection. For example, they expressed their views on new structures in various services, shifting towards the virtual world, Politics, uncertainty and fear, and so on. This helped create a sense of belonging among the alumni towards the university's activities, thereby increasing the community feeling among the different groups of people.

Participants concluded the workshop by summarizing their ideas and translating key themes into a magazine cover. Having a magazine cover as an outcome made people creative in terms of their expression. Three teams portrayed three bold themes of Uncertainty, Empathy and Minimalist, which helped to understand their perspective on the future.

Participants found the tasks very engaging as it involved activities which required them to build on each other's ideas. Navigating through Miro software for the first time had its own set of challenges for most of them. Still, their curiosity in learning about the software and overcoming it together made the workshop more authentic and engaging.

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Contribute to Aalto's living strategy

We are interested in how our community experiences recent developments in the world and perceives the future. Therefore, we have created a brief survey to gather observations regarding weak signals and trends. The purpose of the survey is to collect raw material for Aalto University's strategy work.
    
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Weak signals help us see the present more precisely and build better futures.