Co-creating circular futures – developing scenarios with school children's imagination and scientists' biophysical perspectives

Unfolding climate crisis, loss of biodiversity, mounting trash heaps, dwindling resources: our common home is in a deep crisis. Research tells us what we need to do for building a sustainable society: limit the consumption of resources to the carrying capacity of the planet, circulate materials in the technosphere and power sustainable material cycles with renewable energy. However, conditions, pathways and constraints are not very tangible, intuitive or aspirational. Envisioning how we may live, interact, collaborate, move around and work within a sustainable circular economy is important to drive change towards a desirable future. This presentation showcases a co-creation process for such visions, bringing together the imaginative power of school children with the bio-physical perspectives of scientists. The process builds on design thinking approach, divergent-convergent ideation and allows different parts of the future scenarios come together over time. The visions will be created over the course of one term in a gifted program at public schools, preserved in an illustrated children's book and further developed into a curriculum unit for schools. As such it aims at science communication, integration in formal education and may lead to new research directions for investigating and enabling the co-created visions.