SPREAD Counting Backwards Workshop, 24-25 November 2011, Helsinki, Finland

The SPREAD Counting Backwards Workshop brings 60 leading thinkers, forerunners, futures thinking experts and young social entrepreneurs to Helsinki from all over Europe. In two workshop days the participants create scenarios and narratives on how to reach sustainable lifestyles by 2050.

Goals of the workshop:
• To create 4 scenarios, reaching from sustainable society of the year 2050 to 2012 and depicting a sequence of visions, regimes, paradigms and events. The scenarios will be delivered in a format of (1) a visual timeline consisting of text and visaulizations and (2) a report consisting of scenario narratives, description of methods and backround material.
• To empower 60 participants to think of alternative long-term futures through a inspiring 2-day workshop.

The ingredients for the counting backwards exercise include:
1. The system boundaries defining the constraints for a sustainable lifestyles of 2050.
2. The matrix defining 4 alternative types of sustainable lifestyle landscapes for 2050.
3. Ideas of megatrends, paradigms, policies and technologies defining the future 2012-2050 collected through a Delphi-survey.
4. Promising practices (40) gathered in previous project activities.
5. Emerging practices of the future 2012-2050 (40) based on the Building Visions workshop results.

At the end of the workshop, we aim to have various paths towards sustainable lifestyles in Europe 2050. These scenarios will be visualised and presented online. The scenarios and narratives will be used to encourage the change towards more sustainable lifestyles at all levels: individual, community, business and policy.

Discussion is still going on in Spread online community and most of you are already there sharing their views. You are all very welcome to sign up and join the discussion. This is a perfect way of sharing findings of the workshop and other material related to sustainable lifestyles.

The material gathered in the workshop will be processed and  carefully analyzed in order to prepare the final, detailed scenarios by early 2012.

Photos from the Counting Backwards can be found here: Counting Backwards photos in Flickr

Presentations seen in the workshop can be found here: Counting Backwards workshop presentations in Slideshare.