Exquisite Futures

Four domains. Four contributors. One future none of you could see alone.

Exquisite Futures adapts the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse for strategic foresight. In the original 1920s parlor game, players drew or wrote in sequence, each contribution hidden from the others until the final reveal. The surrealists used it to bypass rational planning and tap the collective unconscious.

Exquisite Futures applies that same principle to futures thinking. Instead of drawing bodies or writing poems, your group builds a unified vision of a future world across four domains: social, technological, economic, and political.

How It Works

The facilitator sets a theme and a target year. "Chicago in 2040." "Hospital care in 2050." "The music industry in 2035."

Each player claims one domain:

• Social: Values, routines, rites of passage, pastimes, media, everyday life, language
• Technological: Devices, infrastructure, obsolescence, foundational innovations
• Economic: Supply chains, resources, financial flows, wealth distribution, the nature of work
• Political: Laws, regulations, governance structures, political entities, treaties, borders

Players write their prediction on a sticky note and place it in their domain's section, then fold the sheet to hide their contribution. The sheet passes to the next player. Over four rounds, each player contributes to each domain exactly once, rotating through social, technological, economic, and political.

Then unfold. Read the full future aloud. Spend five minutes as a group telling the story of how these four predictions fit together into a coherent world.

Why It Works

Forecasting usually happens in silos. Technologists imagine technology. Economists imagine economics. Exquisite Futures forces integration. The social prediction has to live alongside the political one, even though neither author knew what the other wrote.

The result is futures that feel real because they contain the tensions and contradictions of actual complex systems.

Use It For

Strategic foresight sessions: Generate scenario seeds in 15 minutes that would take hours through traditional methods.

Workshop openers: Get participants thinking systemically before diving into detailed planning.

Team alignment: Surface hidden assumptions about how different domains connect.

Classroom exercises: Teach systems thinking and futures literacy through structured play.

Conference sessions: Engage audiences as active participants in building shared visions.

What's Included

Game sheets (one per round, per group)

Sticky notes for each player to record predictions

Facilitator guide with sample themes and debrief questions

Designed for groups of four (for larger workshops, each domain can be assigned to teams of 2-3)

Born at the Chicago Futures Salon

Exquisite Futures is one of several surrealist-inspired foresight tools developed by the Chicago Futures Salon, where futurists, artists, and strategists gather to explore what's next through methods the rationalists forgot.

Set a theme. Claim a domain. Build a future together.