Most "innovation" looks like shiny chrome and Silicon Valley gadgets. We're imagining the mundane stuff that actually sustains a community: housing deeds, wellness kits, transit passes, neighborhood governance.
We adapted Stuart Candy's classic game to inhabit worlds where the status quo has already crumbled. Choose your deck:
These prompts move you past abstract dreaming into the practice of building what comes next. Pick a future. Build its artifacts.
Based on The Thing From The Future by Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike 2.0.
Click any card to draw a new prompt — or hit Deal All Three to flip them all at once.
Read your three cards together: "In a/an [future] future, there is [object] related to [theme]." That's your prompt. You can also change your prompt manually by clicking Create Your Own Prompt at the bottom of each card.
Describe, sketch, or write about the artifact your prompt conjures. What does it look like? Who uses it? What does it mean that it exists?
Playing with others? Everyone writes in secret, then share and vote on the most vivid, surprising, or moving artifact.
or click any card to re-draw it individually
Want to make artifacts with other people? Join a live workshop on Zoom. Join a live workshop →