Imagining a common future around a map

With Alice Mounissamy, journalist and scientific mediator, co-founder of the Nantes Futurable association and Jules Sekedoua Kouadio, research engineer at the Water and Environment Laboratory (LEE) at Université Gustave Eiffel.

How would you like to play at saving the world? Futurable explores how we can adapt to climate change, based on real, familiar territories. The aim of the game is to create a fair and desirable future by bringing together citizen and scientific knowledge.

Serious game, discussion-sparking game, mapping role play, local game: Futurable is all that at once. Created in 2018 by the Nantes Futurable association, it was developed and enriched through collaboration with researchers from the LEE and LISAA Laboratories at Université Gustave Eiffel. The purpose of this shared work is to bring together scientific disciplines, offering a game that invites players to understand the challenges of climate change and think collectively about relevant solutions for adaptation in a particular territory.

The method: writing to your alter ego in 2043

As part of the project, workshops were held, offering a space to explore these questions and test certain hypotheses for predefined areas of research. The objectives of this discussion time were to develop the form and modalities of the game, create the game content (characters and stories), and collectively imagine and build futures for the Loire estuary. To successfully achieve these missions, the workshops began with an initial phase of explanation and presentation. Then, each person was invited to share a lived experience on a subject concerning life in the local area and a socio-environmental challenge. These stories were “sent” to their 2043 alter egos. Mediators provided context for this territory of the future, using projections based on scientific data. To finish, a half-hour was spent sharing the emotions and reflections sparked during the workshop. Careful attention was paid to provide a safe and welcoming environment for each person to speak, in order to foster active participation.

Texts written by the Kogito agency after interviewing the co-sponsors.