A living research landscape · Updated September 2026

Emotional Foresight
in context

Related practices, shared ground, and what Emotional Foresight brings together.

13 approaches · direct sources · explicit distinctions
Why this collection exists

What this field holds

A possible future, rendered well enough to be entered, produces real emotion in the present. That response carries information about the future being considered and about the people considering it. Emotional Foresight treats that response as evidence: elicited on purpose, compared across several possible futures, interpreted with care, and returned to the decisions being made now.

Emotion is information, not instruction. Resonance is not proof that a future is right; discomfort is not proof that it is wrong.

This is a shared field. The work below comes from foresight, design, psychology and behavioural research, and much of it was underway before the name existed. Each entry names the ground it shares with Emotional Foresight and where the emphasis differs. The list will keep growing. Anyone working on the same question belongs in it.

Emotional Foresight did not emerge in isolation.

Across foresight, design, psychology and behavioural research, people have explored how futures can be experienced, how imagined futures create emotions in the present, and how those emotions influence agency and action.

This is not a claim that Emotional Foresight replaces those approaches. It is a living collection that acknowledges the foundations, makes the relationships visible and clarifies where Emotional Foresight places a different emphasis.

The central question

“What does a possible future evoke in us now, while we still have time to question and change it?”
The landscape at a glance

Thirteen neighbouring approaches.

01Ethnographic Experiential FuturesForesight method02Prehearsals and pre-enactmentsExperiential practice03Designing future experiences of the everydayPeer-reviewed research04Imaginative AgencyDesign research05Emotion-integrated participatory backcastingPeer-reviewed method06Future-self VR and future-self continuityBehavioural research07Episodic Future ThinkingResearch field08The FEELS FrameworkCultural scanning09Futures We Feel and the Behavioural AtlasResearch initiative10Futures EmpathyPeer-reviewed framework11The Emotionally Valenced Futures ConeForesight research12Playing with UncertaintyResearch proposal13The Polak GameParticipatory method
Related frameworks, methods and research

Shared ground.
Different emphasis.

Inclusion means meaningful conceptual or methodological proximity—not equivalence, endorsement or a claim of direct influence.

01Foresight method

Ethnographic Experiential Futures

Stuart Candy and Kelly Kornet

EXF uncovers the images of the future people already carry, multiplies them into alternatives, turns them into tangible experiences, stages the encounters and investigates the responses.

Shared ground

Both reveal existing images, work with plural possibilities, translate abstract futures into experiences and return to participants’ responses.

Where the emphasis differs

EXF primarily makes images of the future concrete and discussable. Emotional Foresight places the emotional and bodily response to that encounter at the centre of the inquiry.

Read the 2019 paper
02Experiential practice

Prehearsals and pre-enactments

Maja Kuzmanović and Nik Gaffney · FoAM

Immersive situations use improvisation, play, meditation and embodied experimentation to let people experience possible futures at human scale.

Shared ground

Bodies, spaces, interactions and atmosphere become part of how a possibility is known—not decoration after analysis.

Where the emphasis differs

Prehearsals focus on uncertainty, experimentation and preparedness. Emotional Foresight adds explicit interpretation and retention of the emotions the experience produces.

Read the 2017 paper
03Peer-reviewed research

Designing future experiences of the everyday

Claudia Garduño García and İdil Gaziulusoy

Experiential scenarios make alternative futures virtually or vicariously experienceable and can create real memories of virtual events.

Shared ground

Both recognise that an ordinary room, relationship or routine may carry more emotional weight than a distant vision statement.

Where the emphasis differs

This research offers principles for designing immersive future experiences. Emotional Foresight continues into comparison, interpretation and decision-making through the resulting emotional memory.

Read the 2021 paper
04Design research

Imaginative Agency

Shanti Sumartojo and colleagues

Imaginative Agency develops people’s confidence and capacity to imagine plural, equitable futures through affect, embodiment and participatory co-design.

Shared ground

Both treat emotion and embodiment as part of how futures become available for judgment and action.

Where the emphasis differs

Imaginative Agency expands people’s capacity to participate in change. Emotional Foresight focuses on what a particular future evokes, how to interpret it without treating it as proof, and how to return to it later.

Read the 2026 paper
05Peer-reviewed method

Emotion-integrated participatory backcasting

Darren Sharp and Sophie-Marie Ertelt

Participants connect envisioned urban futures with activating, inhibiting and ambivalent emotions, which then influence goals and transition pathways.

Shared ground

Both treat emotional responses as legitimate information about what feels safe, threatening, meaningful, acceptable or beyond one’s agency.

Where the emphasis differs

Emotional backcasting mainly names feelings through reflection and cards. Emotional Foresight can first render a future through film, sound, VR, narrative or enactment, letting the response emerge before it is analysed.

Read the 2026 paper
06Behavioural research

Future-self VR and future-self continuity

Hal Hershfield, Jean-Louis van Gelder and colleagues

Age-progressed avatars and immersive encounters make a future self more vivid, connected and consequential for choices made in the present.

Shared ground

This research is particularly relevant to the Resonant Future Self Framework: both use immersion and future-self identification to reduce psychological distance.

Where the emphasis differs

Future-self interventions often focus on one projected self and one behavioural outcome. RFSF can compare several possible selves and connect their different forms of resonance to reflection and backcasting.

Saving behaviour study · 2011 FutureU study · 2026
07Research field

Episodic Future Thinking

Cognitive psychology and neuroscience

Episodic Future Thinking is the capacity to simulate specific events in one’s personal future. Research connects it with emotion, planning and present–future decision-making.

Shared ground

It supports the proposition that a vivid, personally meaningful future can evoke emotion now and influence present choices.

Where the emphasis differs

It is a psychological capacity and experimental paradigm, not a complete foresight practice involving plural futures, designed experiences, collective comparison and return to decisions.

Mechanisms and functions · 2017 Systematic review · 2022
08Cultural scanning

The FEELS Framework

Carmen Murray

FEELS reads Feelings, Escape, Expression, Legitimacy and Shift to detect the emotional temperature around current cultural change.

Shared ground

Both take emotion seriously as information about how people relate to change.

Where the emphasis differs

FEELS reads what people currently feel to anticipate change. Emotional Foresight makes possible change felt so people can examine and influence it.

Explore the framework
09Research initiative

Futures We Feel and the Behavioural Atlas

Kristiina Paju and the Institute for Behavioural Futures

A crowdsourced initiative mapping how hope, anxiety, curiosity, fear and resignation relate to people’s perceived agency and behaviour.

Shared ground

Both ask how futures are emotionally carried in the present and how feelings may open or close a sense of agency.

Where the emphasis differs

The Atlas maps an existing emotional climate. Emotional Foresight creates an encounter with a specific future and studies the response that encounter produces.

Explore the Behavioural Atlas Read about Behavioural Futures
10Peer-reviewed framework

Futures Empathy

Lauren M. Lambert, Cynthia Selin and Tom Chermack

An iterative double loop connects the present self with a not-yet-existent future through empathy, temporal perspective-taking and return to the present.

Shared ground

One of the closest parallels: both ask what changes when a future is personally connected and felt rather than remaining abstract.

Where the emphasis differs

Futures Empathy focuses on overcoming presentism and intergenerational connection. Emotional Foresight more explicitly elicits, compares and retains emotional and bodily responses to particular possibilities.

Read the 2024 paper
11Foresight research

The Emotionally Valenced Futures Cone

Ewa Lombard

The model examines how participants’ emotional and psychological states may expand or constrain what they can imagine in scenario workshops.

Shared ground

Both reject the idea that scenario work is purely rational: emotion changes which possibilities become imaginable and coherent.

Where the emphasis differs

The cone studies emotion entering the process. Emotional Foresight also studies emotion produced by encountering a rendered possible future.

Read the 2026 paper
12Research proposal

Playing with Uncertainty

Bridgette Engeler and Wendy Schultz

Design-fiction artefacts and experiential provocations explore individual and collective responses to uncertainty and radical futures.

Shared ground

Both move beyond text-based scenarios and attend to what happens when people encounter a designed future together.

Where the emphasis differs

Playing with Uncertainty explores sensemaking and responses broadly. Emotional Foresight makes emotional interpretation and its later return under decision pressure more explicit.

Read the 2019 paper
13Participatory method

The Polak Game

Peter Hayward and Stuart Candy · after Fred Polak

Participants position themselves physically according to whether they expect a better or worse future and whether they believe they can influence it.

Shared ground

The method turns an abstract relationship with the future into an embodied, visible group experience.

Where the emphasis differs

The Polak Game maps a general orientation toward the future. Emotional Foresight explores responses to a specific possible future or set of futures.

Read the 2017 article
Wider foundation

Futures Literacy and Anticipation

Riel Miller

Futures Literacy examines why and how people use the future in the present. Miller distinguishes anticipation-for-the-future, in which imagined futures support preparation, planning or optimisation, from anticipation-for-emergence, in which imagined futures help people sense and make sense of novelty in the present.

Futures Literacy Labs are designed to reveal the anticipatory assumptions shaping what people imagine and perceive—not to determine which future is correct. In Miller’s framework, the future does not exist in the present as fact or data. What can be examined is how different ways of imagining it change what becomes visible, meaningful and possible now.

Read Futures Illiteracy and the Reproduction of War Explore Transforming the Future
A related concept worth knowing

Aiglatson

“Nostalgia” written backwards, Aiglatson is associated with Gabriel Fackre and Jim Dator. It describes a sentimental longing or affection for a time in the future.

Explore the concept
Where Emotional Foresight sits

The contribution is the architecture.

No single element stands alone. The specific contribution is bringing experience, emotion, interpretation, memory and present choice into one deliberate loop.

  1. 01Reveal

    the futures people already carry, including assumptions, hopes, fears and identities.

  2. 02Render

    one or more possibilities in a form that can be entered, sensed or encountered.

  3. 03Recognise

    the emotional and bodily responses produced in the present.

  4. 04Rehearse

    what it might mean to inhabit, contest, adapt or move towards those futures.

  5. 05Return

    the experience to present choices, relationships, strategies and actions.

Experiential futures make possibilities tangible. Emotional Foresight makes our responses to those possibilities visible, interpretable and returnable to decision-making.
A developing practice

This collection will grow as new research and practices emerge. If you know a relevant framework, method or scientific paper that belongs here, please get in touch.

Suggest an addition