Advances in qualitative approaches to generating futures knowledge are uneven across sectors. As we anticipate a shift towards sustainable clean-energy futures, the energy sector provides one early example of successful implementation. This has led to new accountability to human and societal futures, with benefits in guiding strategy, investment and development. Companies, governments and multilateral bodies have historically depended largely on quantitative knowledge derived from economic forecasts, predictive data analytics and expert opinion to inform energy scenario-building and decision-making around long-term investments in costly infrastructure.²⁴ The inability of these methods to envisage more diverse, inclusive and subsequently realistic and plausible futures has led to a lack of reliable knowledge and a crisis of the imagination.

In response, social sciences, humanities and speculative design have produced accessible new qualitative knowledge to guide decision-makers who realise the need to attend to and account for social and societal futures in the energy sector. This new layer of knowledge has both productively complicated existing assumptions and ensured that the roles of diverse experiences and agencies in shaping futures are ethically and inclusively accounted for. For example, researchers have used qualitative research to revise existing assumptions: where “social acceptance” of energy technologies or interventions has not worked, energy stakeholders have been open to new social-science-evidenced concepts of “social readiness” and “social value”. Other sectors where futures scholars have translated qualitative futures knowledge to address stakeholder challenges are related to city data, education, net-zero transition and commercial product development.

Contrastingly, social scientists, humanities and design research theories from the Global South and North, and treat futures as emergent, possible, plural, situated, contingent and not necessarily causal or linear. To embrace the conditions and experiences of futures aligned with this theoretical perspective a series of concepts have been proposed and tested. These include (but are not limited to): uncertainty, trust, hope, anxiety, friction, breakage, repair and aspiration, desirability and utopia. This framework can be used to ask how emerging technologies might be reshaped by the agency of people who use them in society and what this implies for realistic and plausible community futures; or how ethical futures might be shaped when plural preferred futures exist in society, for example in the present dialogue relating to just transitions to net zero-carbon emissions. Often these challenges cannot be solved by linear theories of futures, where technology is thought to simply impact on society or where building adaptive systems is assumed to lead to resilient societies.

Bringing social-science theories and concepts to bear on technical and system solutions can improve our ability to develop plausible, realistic and ethical solutions and achieve goals of inclusive and just futures.

Qualitative methods innovations tackle the challenge of enabling diverse participants to imagine futures beyond those promoted in dominant narratives.²⁹,³⁰,³¹ They include: futures-ethnographic techniques where participants are invited to experience and imagine possible futures in situ in their homes or cities (for instance); place-based methods to co-design and reimagine community futures playfully; carefully curated design futures workshops which employ speculative devices such as futures mapping, “thing ethnographies”,³² and generative AI provocations;³³ futures card decks; speculative reverse engineering; and futures storytelling and narrative.³⁴,³⁵ The outcomes of these methods include: new accounts of possible future life; provocative personas that challenge dominant assumptions about people; and alternative scenarios and narratives developed with ethnographic evidence that centre voices of those often neglected in imagining futures.³⁶

These qualitative innovations are complementary to existing forecasting and foresight methods and designed to build important relationships and continuums between qualitative and quantitative methods. For instance, the richer, deeper insights that qualitative futures methods produce have been integrated with existing large-scale, quantitative techniques by ensuring surveys include innovative questions derived from in-depth ethnographic and speculative research to validate and reproduce findings at scale. Such approaches can also be used to expose blind spots in prevailing thinking and open up new lines of inquiry.

Qualitative futures methods have had success across social science, humanities and design research focused in, for example, the energy sector, net-zero transitions, education, ageing societies,³⁷,³⁸ Indigenous self-determination, disaster preparedness and city data futures.³⁹ However, these new methods are not familiar in many of the domains where futures thinking and decision-making are currently practised.

A growing body of clear and accessible qualitative futures knowledge is freely available, backed up by the scholarly integrity and peer review which ensures its quality and rigour. Report series have been carefully designed to communicate accessible findings to industry partners in energy, older-care, construction, mobilities, city and other sectors.⁴⁰ Creative storytelling,⁴¹ comic strips, workshops,⁴² documentary films,⁴³,⁴⁴,⁴⁵,⁴⁶,⁴⁷,⁴⁸ exhibitions or speculative objects and online games⁴⁹ have been developed. Often co-created with those at stake, these creative works make possible futures present and participatory in tangible and experiential forms, and have been shared across diverse audiences. These formats acknowledge the plurality of global South and North "futurisms" to be accounted for (for instance including feminist futures, Afrofuturism,⁵⁰ posthumanism and environmental futures). Integrating social-science futures knowledge and theories makes visible the power relations and ethics of shaping futures with diverse communities.

Next steps involve bringing qualitative and quantitative knowledge into closer dialogue to deliver powerful new foresight for decision-makers to cite as the basis for action.