Creating a Better World: To Transform Futures Knowledge into Action

Among the required skills to be infused into the Futures Research curriculum, facilitating the final aim which is “creating” a better world is concentrated in this paper. In fact, all knowledge, skills, methodologies and theories about better futures, need to be converted into the actions to be able to make the better futures. Therefore, the skill of how to use futures-oriented knowledge and theories to create the futures is too essential and needs to be more developed. So far, in many training sessions and curriculum of Futures Research we teach and learn theoretical values which are in fact very useful and the result of great job by researchers and scientists, but the learners who supposed to take action using such knowledge, are not usually aware about how to put it in practice to make preferable futures.

This paper, by providing several examples, proposes a way to include practical parts in theoretical courses to transform the knowledge and information into action and teach the learners the art of applying learnt knowledge and information in creation of preferable futures. In these examples each session of a training course includes three parts. The first part is Theoretical Knowledge, second part is Learning Workshop and the third part is Output and Action Design Workshop. Theoretical part, as usual, provides the information and knowledge about the topic, the part of Learning Workshop helps the learners to practice the Key Message of the session to be well understood and the part of Output and Action Design Workshop helps the learners to understand the relation between learnt knowledge and the process chain of creating the futures as well as making actions towards creating preferable futures with applying such knowledge. This session program design could be applied for university courses as well as public futures training programs.