Future Now
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Announcing the winners of the California Dreams contest!
From the Gold Rush to the rise of the film industry, from the free speech movement to the emergence of Silicon Valley, California has always been a frontier—a place of change and innovation, and today the state is facing some of its toughest challenges yet. Looking ahead, we need to ask …
Will California reinvent itself again for the 21st century? Can everyday citizens be empowered to help transform California? Will California keep growing, start conserving, reinvent itself, or completely collapse?
These were the questions posed to the participants of IFTF's California Dreams: Which Future is Yours contest—challenging everyday people to make a better future for our state.
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Five winners were chosen from a pool of almost 100 ideas and were brought to IFTF's offices in Palo Alto on May 3 to present their ideas. Our collaborators at The Bay Citizen helped produce the event, which included small-scale installations of each of the five winning ideas; including a 3-story tall beanstalk, an interactive touch screen, a miniature futures festival pavilion, a meditative soundscape, and an open-source school.
Five winners were chosen from a pool of almost 100 ideas and were brought to IFTF's offices in Palo Alto on May 3 to present their ideas. Our collaborators at The Bay Citizen helped produce the event, which included small-scale installations of each of the five winning ideas; including a 3-story tall beanstalk, an interactive touch screen, a miniature futures festival pavilion, a meditative soundscape, and an open-source school.
We also asked our guests to contribute one signal for change—a real-life example of a small indicator of real change happening in California today, which graphic recorder Anthony Weeks aggregated around the seven big questions presented on our California Dreaming map. The winning signal, contributed by Kristi Miller-Durazo of the American Heart Association, was about the movement toward localism—people are identifying the value of local everything and rebuilding their communities to support themselves rather than relying on large, outside corporations. Kristi's prize is a presentation of the Future of California map and forecasts to the community organization of her choice. If you'd like to contribute your own signal of change, visit our Facebook group, where you can post your idea to the wall, and see what signals other Californians have been highlighting.
From the five winning ideas, one grand prize winner was chosen to receive the Roy Amara Prize for Participatory Foresight. Mike Minadeo received the grand prize for his "Beanstalk"—a carbon scrubber that recycles CO2 from the air and converts it into oxygen. The beanstalk is designed to look like an organic, hopefully inspiring people to place them in their yards and other public spaces.
You can see all the entries from the California Dreams contest at the contest page.