Luiss Future Lab (LFL)

Head: Ian Paul McCarthy (imccarthy@luiss.it)

Reference center: CLIO

Foreseeing futures is transforming potential power into actual power. Imagining possible futures is a path of freedom. Experimenting a method to understand how futures can be plausible, possible, desirable, is a process that leads to design futures. LFL is a place where students, scholars, and staff meet to investigate and develop projects about possible futures.

For each research project, working groups deal with collecting facts and documents, creating surveys, taking interviews, organizing workshops and examining decision-making paths. Heuristics is the main research modality in futures studies, with formats ranging from forecasting to backcasting, going through the Delphi Method and the weak signals analysis. The choice of topics reflects the interests of both stakeholders and students. The network of experts is basically composed of Luiss scholars, although it can be opened to external colleagues. Research becomes part of the students’ learning path from both an intellectual and a networking perspective. Study and research areas are many and diverse, ranging from enterprises to cities, from technologies to the arts, from people to organizations.  

The LFL Projects are expected to give rise to different kind of outputs and outcomes: from papers to exhibitions, from conferences to real draft projects, also depending on the resources made available by the stakeholders. The set of research on the futures that will be initiated, compiled or just recommended by the LFL will be collected in an Annual Report to be presented at an annual conference.