futuresglossary.net

Title

Futures Glossary

Description

The Futures Glossary is a multilingual collaborative collection of key terms frequently used in the futures field. The project emerged from a collective intelligence process involving more than twenty practitioners, scholars, and researchers from diverse disciplinary traditions and cultural contexts. The glossary’s purpose is to make visible the similarities and differences in meaning that arise when futures-related concepts move across languages, cultures, and practices. Each entry in the glossary is the outcome of a comparative process that brings together different linguistic and interpretive perspectives. In this sense, the glossary is not only a compilation of terms, but a space for exploring the role of language in how societies and individuals imagine, discuss, and engage with the future. This website makes the results of this work accessible and opens these terms to the ongoing dialogue with a broader community of practitioners, scholars, and everybody interested in understanding how language influences the way we think about change, uncertainty, and the possibilities of futures. By its nature, this project is meant to remain open: new terms, languages, perspectives, and uses can be proposed and discussed, guided by the principle that the future is not contained within a single vocabulary, but takes shape through the plurality of languages and cultures that think and speak about it. Each entry shares the same structure: it starts with a short summarizing definition of the term in futures use as it emerged in this project, followed by general definitions from dictionaries and a look at the term’s etymology – always relating the word origins to the futures definition. The "Field of Terms," "Theoretical Foundations," and "Use in Practice" sections go wider and deeper, exploring neighbouring terms, the theoretical foundations, and current uses of the term in futures practice. Stewards for the English glossary: Stefan Bergheim and Christa Fraser

Language

en

Open Graph

url

https://futuresglossary.net

title

Futures Glossary

site name

Futures Glossary

description

The Futures Glossary is a multilingual collaborative collection of key terms frequently used in the futures field. The project emerged from a collective intelligence process involving more than twenty practitioners, scholars, and researchers from diverse disciplinary traditions and cultural contexts. The glossary’s purpose is to make visible the similarities and differences in meaning that arise when futures-related concepts move across languages, cultures, and practices. Each entry in the glossary is the outcome of a comparative process that brings together different linguistic and interpretive perspectives. In this sense, the glossary is not only a compilation of terms, but a space for exploring the role of language in how societies and individuals imagine, discuss, and engage with the future. This website makes the results of this work accessible and opens these terms to the ongoing dialogue with a broader community of practitioners, scholars, and everybody interested in understanding how language influences the way we think about change, uncertainty, and the possibilities of futures. By its nature, this project is meant to remain open: new terms, languages, perspectives, and uses can be proposed and discussed, guided by the principle that the future is not contained within a single vocabulary, but takes shape through the plurality of languages and cultures that think and speak about it. Each entry shares the same structure: it starts with a short summarizing definition of the term in futures use as it emerged in this project, followed by general definitions from dictionaries and a look at the term’s etymology – always relating the word origins to the futures definition. The "Field of Terms," "Theoretical Foundations," and "Use in Practice" sections go wider and deeper, exploring neighbouring terms, the theoretical foundations, and current uses of the term in futures practice. Stewards for the English glossary: Stefan Bergheim and Christa Fraser