The Idea Team

We are a team of students from the Master's program in Futures Studies at the FU Berlin and want to put what we have learned into practice. We think there is agreement on the goal: the world must change and this requires ecological, economic and social sustainability. But what does that mean in concrete terms? What does it mean for the people who are supposed to bring about and live this change? How can a broad and lasting commitment to sustainability be created in everyday life?

About the Idea

Our project idea included the conception and implementation of a normative scenario process involving all groups of people at Freie Universität Berlin - students, administrative staff, service employees and academic staff - in order to answer these questions. Guided by students from the Master's degree program in Futures Studies, all participants imagined a desirable everyday working life at Freie Universität Berlin in 2033 - under the condition of a sustainable and climate-neutral transformation. The project builds on a practice-theoretical approach by addressing reflected changes in behavioral habits in the participants' everyday lives. By creatively imagining desirable futures, a reflexive process in relation to existing practices and habits should be initiated and a formative social learning process enabled, thus addressing, above all, problems of the so-called attitude-behavior gap.

Conclusion

In a participatory workshop, members of Freie Universität Berlin imagined a climate-neutral campus in 2032 under the guidance of us students from the Master's program in Futures Studies. The focus of the technical and social innovations was the interplay between (more) nature and (more) digitalization.

The results of the workshop were presented during the FUturist Award event as part of the Sustainability Days 2022 and supplemented with further suggestions. We also shared our results at the international FU alumni workshop "Innovating for Sustainability" in September 2022.

Our final report FUturist: Climate Neutral Freie Universität Berlin 2032 with the results is published on the Institut Futur website.

Contact

Sascha Dannenberg, Malte Terzer, Jenni Haberland