How might the imagination of desirable futures rooted in overlooked territories and their communities be encouraged?

Overview

TURFU & Worldbuilding

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The word TURFU is the verlan, or french slang term for FUTURE, and is used to describe things in our everyday life that feel like they are so incredible and inspiring that they must come from the future. Under the name of La Banlieue du Turfu, Makan Fofana created a unique approach to speculative design by bridging worldbuilding, pop culture, and speculative design. Together, he and I have collaborated on many occasions prior to this project to organize workshops, create art exhibits, and give lectures, on what constitutes a speculative design practice rooted in the "peripheries" of the world.

Playbook co-production

The playbook was created to build on the respective consortium members' specializations, to complement Makan Fofana and I's existing approach to worldbuilding. This resulted in the formulation of a three phase methodological structure: INSIPIRING, WORLDBUILDING, CHANGEMAKING.

While workshop facilitators were encourage to pick and choose their own sequence of activities, this structure serve to both provide a shared structure across the different project "Menus" (see below), and to indicate how each activity fit in the larger TURFU-ist approach to worldbuilding.

❮ ❯	TURFU FORESIGHT MENU This set of activities places emphasis on creating a traceable, coherent journey from introspection to imagination to then translate the participants’ vision into an actionable project. Format: Table top game
❮ ❯	TURFU THEATER MENU This set of activities focuses on the use of the body, space, and sound to craft embodied visions of the TURFU. Format: Drama pretexts and stage directions
❮ ❯	TURFU TO-GO MENU This set of activities is designed for flexible settings, associative thinking, and improvisation. Format: Portable card decks
❮ ❯	TURFU EXTRAS This set of activities follows the same TURFU Journey as the three menus and can be used to compliment the experience offered by the menus. Format: Multiple including, online collaging, phone-based video-making, icebreakers

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Piloting & Training of trainers

A series of field tests were woven into the development of the project. They were broadly speaking structured as: Tool testing and shortlisting, a TURFU Jam to test the clarity of the playbook (a synchronous worldbuilding event across the three participating countries), training of educators, and a public launch event in Paris.

❮ ❯	Tool testing and shortlisting Tool testing was conducted in each geography to shortlist the consortium members' respective contributions to the playbook-to-be. In France, this included the testing of a ChatGPT powered conversational agent called "TURFU Ambassador" with the Tesslab community to support story creation. While the tests were very successful, the costs of implementing at scale caused the activity to be tabled.
❮ ❯	TURFU Jam On December 2 2023, the consortium organized a day-long TURFU Jam, run simultaneously across the three participating countries. The event was the occasion to pilot the first iteration of the Playbook. A virtual space was created to serve as a common platform for the participants from different countries to see each others' productions.
❮ ❯	Training of educators Trainings were organized over the course of two days of EU-certified sessions, followed by the trainers using the tools on their own, before a final experience debrief call.
❮ ❯	Paris Launch event On May 24th 2023, we officially launched the playbook during a Speculative Everything Paris event pairing tool demonstration facilitated by newly trained educators with a recap of the project.

Outcomes

The project resulted in the creation of an open-access toolkit available online here. With the toolkit we have also created support videos, an Instagram account, and a virtual space to collate case studies.