Think ‘Future.’ Close your eyes. Observe what comes up. Open your eyes. What did you see? Flying cars and humanoid robots, spaceships, blue… dried out or flooded landscapes? Whatever it was, it probably holds you back from harnessing what the future can do for you. It’s not your fault; too many futures are recycled—visions meant to provoke or prepare us echo familiar tropes. This text is our attempt to make sense of that repetition and respond not with cynicism, but with a proposal: New Future Archetypes—our framework for making futures more imaginative, resonant, immersive, playful, and above all, useful.
Futures Deja Vu
Our studio, N O R M A L S, blends design, fiction, and futures—as in foresight and future studies more broadly. You could call what we do Speculative Design, Design Fiction, Futures Design—pick your label. We design things that may or may not ever exist, but that help us engage seriously with what the future could look like before decisions are made.
We’ve spent the past decade as active guests at the table of the established futures practice—testing new formats and collaborations, and adding unexpected flavors to the menu. Often, we brought dessert or a starter—something unexpected to shift the flavor of the meal. Along the way, we met brilliant futurists, made lasting friendships, and had both exhilarating and unsettling conversations. But gradually, we began to notice something:
We were being served the same futures, again and again. Nutritious, yes, but increasingly bland. Perhaps you’ve had the same feeling: flipping through scenarios and thinking, “I’ve seen this before.” A rural eco-commune. A green-blue smart city with self-driving cars and wind turbines. Maybe that’s just what the future might hold—and we have also used all these ingredients. But there seems to be a pairing of certain kinds of themes, aesthetics, metaphors, and future tropes. That has produced repetitive, recognisable forms much like archetypes. They are archetypal not in Jim Dator’s sense of the eternally valid four futures of Continuation, Limits and Discipline, Decline and Collapse, and Transformation. But one level higher—as specific themes that conjure up a particular future inventory of things and forces at play. As if LEGO created a set of modules, little packages of paradigm, technology, culture, and social order, that can be freely combined as long as they are not mutually exclusive. And the modules come with specific manifestations. We have rockets, flying cars, laboratory aesthetics, gooey materials, robots, military vibes, beveled angles, and all-knowing computers. It’s certainly not the lack of smart and creative people in the field but the future, it seems, is on repeat.
Many Futures are Boring. Why?
Is it the purpose, the methodologies, the market, the attention span or cultural fatigue?
Maybe that’s normal, we’re just getting a little bit bored. This is to be expected. At first everything feels new and fresh; with time in a field you start noticing repeating patterns. But once you see things too often, you lose interest. You probably don’t understand, but you recognise and get bored. That’s entirely possible and that’s probably alright, but it is also a chance to examine the causes and assumptions more closely.
What do people or organisations want from the future? How are they created? Under what conditions, and what is rewarded in that process? Maybe we are fetishising novelty and freshness as designers. Possibly they aren’t really that essential? In some cases, future tropes are certainly good business—robots and flying cars have been around for ages, everybody knows them, they represent The Future with a big ‘F’ and if you want to be successful, you build The Future, whatever it is. No need to elaborate further on this, just read the news. In this case, novelty is far less important than something old and established that merely acts as a caricature of novelty. The humanoid robot is just fine, thank you—never touch a running system.
The Limits of Strategic Tools
Novelty isn’t always what’s needed when you think strategically about the future either: What could happen, and how do we respond? The task of a strategic futurist is to identify key uncertainties and study how they might play out in all their permutations. These processes stay in the abstract for a long time. They might begin with signal scanning, doing interviews, identifying trends, building 2×2 matrices to examine interactions, or filling morphological boxes to structure possibilities. But once you arrive at an abstract outline, you are back at your LEGO box—the toolkit of clichéd tropes and familiar imagery waiting to fill in the blanks. These scenarios might still serve their purpose while also reinforcing the very future archetypes we seek to challenge.
Scenarios can be incredibly pragmatic: they help us understand what might lie ahead and how to prepare. But this also implies a rather passive conception of the future as something shaped by external forces, where our role is simply to be ready. Even if the analysis is deep, the messaging is often simple. For your hiking trip: pack a camera if everything goes perfectly and you can focus on the beauty, take some additional snacks if it gets unexpectedly tedious, maybe a swimsuit if you find hiking isn’t your thing, and an emergency beacon just in case you get covered by a landslide. Start by going west. Fair enough.
Novelty still matters when anticipating how others—competitors, adversaries, allies—might act. But here, creativity often stays within existing parameters. It’s not about changing the game, just playing it well. That kind of thinking doesn’t challenge assumptions; it details consequences. And by doing so, it often solidifies the tropes it draws from.
In fields such as risk management, disaster preparedness, and logistics, established scenario frames are often not just efficient—they’re essential. These fields rely on structured assumptions to stay prepared and cut uncertainty. Yet even here, novel risks arise and break inherited models. Nevertheless, too much creativity might also be perceived as a distraction, while producing results that are consistent across the field might reinforce credibility.
Why We Need New Futures
In contrast, whenever we aim to shape something new—be it a strategy, a product, a social vision, or a policy—new futures become essential. Not because novelty is a virtue in itself, but because thinking creatively about what could be is a way to break out of inherited constraints. It’s the difference between preparing for what might happen and preparing to make something happen.
Countless initiatives of Futures Literacy advocate for developing the ability to identify and challenge the assumptions behind culturally shared or manufactured visions of the future—often designed to serve specific interest groups. Mastering this skill is increasingly recognized as vital. As such, constructing personal or collective futures becomes a powerful way to gain agency and freedom. In this case, novelty is not the point, rather than taking responsibility for your own futures. Since established futures are often analysed in terms of whom they serve, creating alternatives necessarily implies novelty—at least as a way to question the status quo. Uncertainty, then, is not a regrettable gap to be controlled through prediction, but quite the opposite: a force that tickles existing power structures. The future's not set; make it your own.
Futures as Cultural Capacity
Beyond tools and techniques, there’s something deeper at stake: the cultural function of futures. Drawing on the distinction between present futures (the futures we currently consider possible) and future presents (the futures that will actually unfold), we can think of futures as forming a cultural—and personal—reservoir. This reservoir conditions how we interpret the present and what we believe to be possible. You might think of it as an immune system, or more constructively, as a form of evolutionary potential. The diversity of futures we hold shapes our capacity to respond to complex and shifting realities. And that’s why updating and expanding this reservoir isn’t just useful—it’s essential.
But it’s not only about the diversity of futures out there. It’s about our ability to appropriate, manifest, and experience them in ways that let us derive meaning and insight. Ultimately, we need to be able to project ourselves into these futures—in all their granularity—to understand, question, and evolve them further.
Introducing New Future Archetypes (NFAs)
Now this thread of thinking about the usefulness of futures—or the hesitations, questions, and introspections that wove it—isn’t worth much if we were to just dump it here without offering a path ahead. After all, this is what we promise as professionals, and to us, the path is very clear: we need new future archetypes. And this is precisely how we’ve decided to encapsulate our practice into a simpler and more direct framework, which we aptly call ‘New Future Archetypes,’ or ‘NFAs’ for short.
NFAs are immersive, authored future worlds designed to help people and organisations think differently about what’s ahead—and what they could create. They work like sandboxes: spaces to explore unfamiliar futures, shift perspective, and generate new ideas.
Each NFA revolves around a distinct future logic, sourced and amplified from the present—a combination of social values, emerging dynamics, and imagined realities. This logic comes to life through visible signs: objects, spaces, technologies, and ways of living that feel both unfamiliar and strangely plausible.
While we do refer to them as archetypes, they aren’t designed in a detached, soulless way, but rather strive to offer emotionally resonant, context-rich environments that we believe better support futures-led innovation. They help identify strategic questions, stimulate ideas, open up design opportunities, and uncover possibilities that often remain hidden in abstract or analytical settings. They are not predictions, but exploratory tools—inviting reflection, invention, and experimentation from within the texture of a world that could emerge.
Take Pyria, for example—a New Future Archetype that reframes collapse not as a disaster but as a strategy. In Pyria, the state acknowledges that the existing order cannot last and guides an orderly descent: cities are redesigned for durability rather than expansion, supply chains favour local resilience, and citizens learn skills for life beyond growth. Pyria enables teams to imagine and test policies, products, and cultural choices against a radically different operating logic.
NFAs like Pyria support innovation that begins where it should: not in abstract assumptions, but in tangible, resonant environments where futures can be felt, tested, and transformed.
Can Archetypes Be Designed?
But wait—if outdated archetypes are part of the problem, why propose new ones? Wouldn’t that just replace one set of clichés with another? And can we even design new archetypes at will? We don’t think so—not exactly. The packaging of themes, aesthetics and future inventory makes archetypes powerful to share, to remember and to work with. But they need to be dynamic, living and growing to help us respond to our present in useful ways. And no, we can’t just design archetypes at will, after all, they are cultural forms, not inventions. But we do believe in working towards them: as shared, resonant structures that blend abstract systems with concrete imagination. When we talk about New Future Archetypes, we use the term programmatically—we propose starting points towards what could become New Future Archetypes and a way of engagement that can contribute to bringing them about, while producing strategic insights, design opportunities and new perspectives on the way.
Earlier we glimpsed at Pyria; returning to it now shows what NFAs can do. By guiding collapse strategically—redesigning cities for durability, localising supply chains, and teaching post‑growth skills—Pyria elaborates on the nitty gritty of a foundational shift and demonstrates how an archetype can enlarge the space of action rather than merely describe it.
What Makes Futures (and NFAs) Useful
Concepts, ideas, and futures only become meaningful when they are connected to real challenges and actively appropriated. How do you understand their implications and how can you use them to create new answers and perspectives? For that, NFAs need to be immersive, detailed, playful and relevant. We’ll explore how NFAs are used in practice—and what they can do in an upcoming Part Two.
