Futures Line: What if the Park Dreamed Back?
Practice in Motion
At the Our Parks × TEN Baltimore Symposium, I facilitated a Spiral Lab called What If the Park Dreamed Back? Futures Thinking in Public Spaces—an experiment in listening with land as a living system and future-making partner.
Instead of asking participants only to reflect on their own experiences, we asked a deeper question: What if the park itself could dream?
Together, we treated the park as co-author of the future. Through reflection, dialogue, and creative prompts, participants surfaced its gifts and joy, its gaps and grief, the patterns to release, and the futures and conditions it called us toward.
Participants building their Spiral Maps in small groups.
From Workshop to Futures Line
To close the lab, participants were invited into a practice of time travel. Using a simple but powerful prompt—they dialed a number and left a message from the year 2075.
They were asked to imagine: What do you see, hear, and feel in 2075? What has changed to make it possible?
These future-voicemails became the raw material for the first Futures Line recording: a layered soundscape of nine voices speaking back from tomorrow.
Futures Artifacts as Method
At Point A Studio, we practice foresight not only through scenarios, maps, and strategies, but through futures artifacts—tangible fragments that carry the texture of imagined worlds.
Futures artifacts invite us to:
Feel what tomorrow might hold.
Practice new relationships with place, power, and possibility.
Ground long-term strategy in stories, sounds, and symbols we can carry with us.
The Futures Line series is one expression of this method. By layering voices as if left on a voicemail from 2075, each recording acts as both signal and seed: a prompt to imagine what’s possible, and a reminder that futures are always speaking back to us.
Nine Voices from 2075
Drawing from the Futures Line messages, these themes emerged:
Moving beyond gated, extractive systems toward a more connected human community.
Collaboration with nature as a healing partner—for the land and for visitors.
A culture of presence and stewardship: attention turned outward, heads up, looking after one another and place.
Signals of belonging and access—bilingual signage, clean water, abundant trees—and youth actively shaping green spaces.
Agency held with humility and gratitude, in service of community and ecology.
Futures Line Recording
How This Artifact Will Be Used
This Futures Line recording is not the end product. It’s a living artifact—one that can be:
Played in future workshops to spark imagination and dialogue.
Used by partners and planners as a reminder that parks hold memory and voice.
Built into a growing archive of community-rooted futures artifacts that Point A Studio will steward.
Each Futures Line becomes part of an expanding constellation of futures work—an archive of sound that communities can return to for guidance, inspiration, and accountability.
Why This Matters
At Point A Studio, we believe futures work isn’t only written or visual. It can be felt, voiced, and heard. Futures Line experiments with sound as foresight—offering artifacts that carry us forward into futures worth inheriting.
Credits
Produced by: Point A Studio (Futures Line series)
Soundscape: Voices from What If the Park Dreamed Back? workshop
Mixing & Production: Fury
Intro/Outro/Background music: Pixabay (royalty-free)