Future Box Tourism
The Future Box Tourism contains innovative educational materials on the future of tourism, which were developed by Helga Mayr (PH Tirol) and Christian Baumgartner (response & ability) based on the Future Boxes of the futurium, the House of Futures in Berlin. They are published under a creative commons license and freely available in German and English. They can be used flexibly in teaching and learning:
- Selected methods in a single or multiple teaching unit(s) and/or
- several methods combined in the context of one or several project day(s)
What's in the Future Box: a guide, various sets of cards (trend cards for developing scenarios, megatrend cards, perspective cards, wild cards, challenge cards, impulse cards, a brief guide and the individual method descriptions).
An activity in the form of a three-days Bootcamp Climate Change, Tourism, and Sustainable Development is described in the guide. At the bootcamp, participants look for traces of climate change in the context of tourism and sustainable development, discuss with experts, conduct interviews, develop possible scenarios and a vision of tourism of the future. Based on their knowledge of the current situation and possible developments as well as their own visions, they formulate concrete challenges or problems for which they finally develop solutions in teams and implement them as prototypes.
Guide
The guide contains background information on
- futurology,
- on the (possible) future of tourism in the context of climate change and Sustainable Development,
- on the card sets of the Future Box (see Developing Scenarios with the Future Box and Extensions of the Scenario Technique)
- to the Bootcamp Tourism, Climate Change and Sustainable Development as a three-day application of the Future Box
- futurium, the House of Futures in Berlin, as a source of ideas for the format and the project partners.
Zukunftsbox Tourismus - Leitfaden (german)Developing scenarios with the Future Box
The trend cards are the heart of the Future Box. They contain descriptions of possible developments in the categories destinations, travel motives, mobility, population, work, food and companies. With these cards, various future scenarios can be developed and discussed in a playful manner and, with the use of joker cards, supplemented with the participants' own developments.
Extensions to the scenario technique
Further sets of cards allow a deepening of the scenarios or can be used independently of them:
Megatrend cards: powerful trends that shape society in the long term are described on a total of 10 cards. Central questions: How do these megatrends affect tourism (of the future)? What are the consequences of the trends for a previously created future scenario?
Perspective cards: the total of 14 perspective cards enable a multi-perspective view on scenarios and/or megatrends. The perspectives politics, civil society, local population, economy, entrepreneur:in, guests and environment are each represented by two personas who have different perspectives on the topic. Central questions: How do the individual personas wish tourism (of the future) to be? Why? What are the consequences? Which areas of tension arise due to the different perspectives? Why? ...
Wildcards: extreme/unexpected future events or developments are described on 5 cards. Key question: how does the event/development affect the scenarios?
Challenge cards: each of the 5 cards contains a challenge formulated as a "How might we ..." - question as a starting point for the co-creative development of solutions (ideas?).
Impulse questions: a total of 5 impulse question cards each contain a provocative question on the topic that learners must answer either "YES" or "NO", although this is not easily possible. They then discuss the topic.
Methods around the future box
At the Bootcamp Tourism, Climate Change and Sustainable Development, a design thinking process is followed: from researching the current situation and possible trends to developing visions of a tourism of the future, formulating a concrete challenge and generating concrete solutions. The total of 17 methods can also be used individually.
