The power of imagination: immersive and experiential counterfactuals to engage with sustainability

Imagination is a faculty that can underlie the transformations towards alternative futures, which are central in the discourses developed in Futures Studies and Design Futures, composed of different approaches and methodologies, such as Speculative Design (Dunne & Raby, 2013), Design Fiction (Bleecker, 2009) and Experiential Futures (Kelliher & Byrne, 2015). All these share a common goal: the crafting of questions related to futures to foster dialogues about present wicked issues rather than problem-solving (Angheloiu et al., 2020). Focusing on the topics of interest, imagination has demonstrated to be able to influence transformations towards sustainable and just futures (Moore & Milkoreit, 2020) and, if fostered and enhanced, it can be become a powerful medium to engage with more-than-human actors (Romani et al. 2022); however, as R. Bendor (2018) argues there is still a lack of collective ability to imagine rich possibilities for building alternative futures. Wapner and Elver (2016) note the same lack of options and pathways to achieve them. Imagination turns out to be necessary to draw experience and knowledge from the present and the past and to reconstruct this knowledge with a new meaning, thus acquiring a new (Abrahams, 2020; Salis & Frigg, 2020). This characteristic of imagination, also referred to as counterfactual thinking, and strongly linked to what-if questions, introduces an initial gap found both in the discipline of Futures Studies and Design Futures: it is clear the connection between counterfactual thinking and future thinking, and, consequently, the link that exists between pasts, alternative pasts and possible futures, which is a still poorly researched subject by future scholars and practitioners (Bendor et al., 2021). Like the future, also the past may be seen as a plurality and a sort of repository for opportunities and possibilities (Bendor et al., 2021) that can deepen and strengthen the engagement with alternative futures and their potentiality in shaping, in return, new worldviews and mindsets in the present. Within the field of Design Futures, several researchers highlight a second gap that can be defined as an experiential gap: the difficulty in making futures livable and tangible. To overcome this gap, immersive technologies can represent an important design opportunity, capable of implementing the frameworks, methods and tools related to Design Futures. In this direction, the research introduces the concept of Immersive and Experiential Counterfactuals, as an approach to be integrated to Experiential Futures.