Researcher and Lecturer
Fontys Academy for Creatives Industries

Workshop | Prototyping for a Preferable Sustainable Future; Tackling the Grand Societal Challenges

As a researcher and lecturer in sustainable futures, Quality of Life and food systems, Linda Hofman is part of Fontys Academy for Creatives Industries in Tilburg, the Netherlands. Linda studied Food Technology and Mass Communication. How society may handle big challenges in the future is the topic she is most interested in. These wicked problems ask for a vision, which means that students developing future-resistant concepts have to be aware of the future and their role in the future. They have to learn to be future-conscious.  Therefore, she and her colleague Christianne Heselmans developed the method ‘protoptyping for a sustainable future with value’. The best reply from our students using the method is that they experienced that this model can influence the future and feel themselves empowered to act. By imagining a preferable future, we can take the first step towards solving huge problems in, for instance, the food system.