The UNESCO (Cairo Office and Research, Policy and Foresight Section) and the Egyptian Ministry of Youth and Sport, with support of Bibliotheca Alexandrina, UNFPA and UN Women, organized a Futures Literacy Laboratory - Novelty (FLL-N) entitled “Egyptian Youth Rethink the Future of Wellbeing in 2050”. Held online during 21-24 July 2020, and deploying the latest advances in anticipatory systems thinking and collective intelligence processes, the Lab brought together around 30 persons from across Egypt for 8-hours intensive work spread over a week’s time.
Thirty young participants explored the topic of ‘wellbeing’ in Egypt in 2050 using a tool called the Futures Literacy Lab-Novelty (FLL-N). Wellbeing is an open concept that invites many different ways of defining what it means to ‘live well’. The participants engaged in learning-by-doing activities that exercised their imaginations, exploring questions like, how do people in 2050 in Egypt describe ‘wellbeing’? What is daily life like such that people in 2050 believe that they have achieved ‘wellbeing’? By working together to imagine the future this Lab provided an opportunity to better understand the origins of what we imagine, why and how we create the images of the future, and crucially the powerful influence such images have on our fears and hopes, perceptions and choices.