Expeditie RWS2050

In 2020/2021 I contributed to a fascinating future vision project by the Dutch Ministery of Infrastructure and Water Management on what The Netherlands may look like in 2050. In this project I collaborated with prof. Caroline Hummels and two PhD students from TU Eindhoven. The client asked our team to investigate how citizens felt about future trends and developments by conducting interviews with a cross-section of Dutch society. We were given a document consisting of dozens of trends, written by experts for experts. As this document was full of complex, techno-scientific jargon, we were concerned that it would not be a suitable basis for discussion with non-experts. We therefore converted a selection of these trends into six ‘stories of the future’. These stories, each four to five minutes long, describe ordinary situations as experienced by people in 2050. Yet each story is intended to provoke the reader to take a stance on a complex issue. Some of the issues we included were personal freedom in the context of public health, sea level rise and cultural heritage, and geo-engineering and climate activism. Using these stories as a starting point, we conducted interviews with six user groups and kept track of the discussion by means of a tangible toolkit developed by TU Eindhoven. The discussions resulted in rich user feedback which differed considerably from how scientists and engineers talk about the future.