Futures Lab 2025 built on the programme’s inaugural year, bringing together designers, researchers, technologists, strategists and cultural thinkers to explore how futures literacy can help shape more resilient ways of living, working and building.

Led by For Everyday Life and supported by Fondation USM, the 2025 programme focused on the theme Abundance & Scarcity. At its centre was the idea of The Pause: a deliberate slowing down that creates space to reconsider systems shaped by acceleration, overproduction, resource pressure and uneven access.

The year began with an Advisory Panel gathering at BEEAH Headquarters in Sharjah, where contributors explored signals of change and helped shape three speculative design briefs: The Radical Reset, An Age of Enough and Gaming the System. These briefs were then developed with international creative partners through research, workshops and design reviews.

The programme culminated in October 2025 at USM’s headquarters and factory in Münsingen, Switzerland, where the year’s projects were presented and discussed with the Advisory Panel, design partners and invited guests.

As USM Futures Lab Chair Colin Macgadie writes, “The Futures Lab was established to create space, not for prediction, but for possibility.” In 2025, that space became a way to ask what might become possible when progress requires pause.

Projects

The Radical Reset:
PANAME*2050

By IDK Architects

The Radical Reset imagines a future Paris shaped by a global moratorium on new construction. IDK Architects responded with PANAME*2050, a vision for a post-car, post-growth city where redundant infrastructure is transformed into civic space, ecological systems and places of collective care.

An Age of Enough:
Mi-Wi

By PlayLab Inc.

An Age of Enough explores a post-work future shaped by artificial intelligence. PlayLab Inc. developed Mi-Wi, a speculative platform for self-discovery and purpose, reframing AI not as a tool for productivity, but as a companion for exploring meaning, curiosity and alternative life paths.

Gaming the System:
Lore-Play

By Imagination of Things

Gaming the System considers the future of learning in an AI era. Imagination of Things developed Lore-Play, a cooperative game that uses role-play and dialogue to rehearse new education systems, testing how people might learn through uncertainty, collaboration and real-world experimentation.

Impact Projects

Futures Lab 2025 also continued the development of selected projects from the previous cycle, including Fire Walk With Me by Studio ThusThat with BEEAH, and Cotton 2.0 by Material Library of India. Both projects demonstrate how speculative thinking can move towards applied research, material experimentation and real-world partnerships.

Looking Ahead

Across its first three cycles, Futures Lab has moved from A Synergy of Intelligences in 2024, to Abundance & Scarcity in 2025, and now towards Regenerative Rebuilding in 2026, in partnership with the Ramboll Foundation and Fondation USM. The programme continues to explore how imagination, design and research can support more resilient and regenerative futures.