The Tomorrow Party

We cannot build more just futures using the same building blocks that created our worlds today. We also cannot design more equitable tomorrows without creative methods that invite attuning to imaginative, cultural and embodied ways of knowing and being. With the Tomorrow Party, hope is deployed as a liberatory force—a light shone from the future onto current inequities. We aimed to design a more speculative, less extractive, method that learned from people’s first-hand past experiences by empowering them to sketch a more desirable future. In return, the party collectively builds peoples’ imaginative capacity to think with an unknowable future.

The Tomorrow Party, is a co-design method that engages with individual’s hopes and dreams for the near future. Piloted across multiple professional and cultural contexts, the party prioritises plurality in designing with people and respects uncertainty when designing with the future. The two-hour convivial party scaffolds a co-creative experience that has guests time travel to a near future. Along with gathering first-hand experiential insights, the event builds the guests’ capacity to imagine more just and equitable futures. The relational method forges coalitions that help to mobilise partnerships around social outcomes relevant to the guests and the project context.

More than 500 people have attended Tomorrow Parties in Australia, Aotearoa (NZ), UAE, UK, Malawi, Italy, and Denmark. We have also hosted Tomorrow Parties at COP28 and the Design Museum in London. However, the social impact of the Tomorrow Party cannot be reduced to counting attendance — for the work of designing more equitable futures calls on us to re-calibrate what counts. The evocative Tomorrow Stories co-created help to explain people’s affection for the Tomorrow Party. In guiding participants to imagine a future where hope resides, the perspective-shifting experience presents guests with a resonant way to explore what matters to them.

Tomorrow Party Structure: The Tomorrow Party is a 2-3 hour gathering that unfolds over three acts designed to help people imagine into the near future how they personally hope to be living, working and thriving. The three-act adaptive structure centres around time travel in Act 2. Tailored for the specific party objectives, context, and stakeholders, Act 1 sets the scene and Act 3 shares the tomorrow stories co-created. Project Commitments: Informed by Indigenous conceptions of time, the first-hand experience to travel forth in time, intentionally embraces the value of learning about the past and present by imagining with the future. The Party design and atmosphere is grounded by Indigenous principles of relationality, respect and reciprocity. The Contribution to Equitable Worldmaking: - A reciprocal lived experience method that ensures the guests’ experience is equally important to the research insights. - In contrast to abstract foresight models, a first-person perspective on people’s hopes for the future allows context, emotions and embodied knowing to inform the futures we seek to create. - With hard scientific data not enough to drive change, the imagination gap is recognised as a reason. An accessible, democratic futures method that doesn’t rely on professional expertise helps build our collective creative capacity.