As a Coordination and Support Action, project “Eye of Europe” aims to enhance the integration of foresight practices into Research and Innovation (R&I) policy making across Europe. Ultimately, the project envisions a more cohesive and influential R&I foresight community that contributes significantly, as a collective intelligence, to shaping and guiding policy decisions.

To this end, Eye of Europe builds on existing initiatives and experiences to foster knowledge-sharing between foresight practitioners and policy makers, attract domain experts in foresight endeavours, and engage a broader audience in futures thinking. Nurturing futures4europe as the online home for the community and running various face-to-face events with different stakeholders will underpin these ambitions.
Methodologically, the project relies on the following building blocks:

• futures4europe.eu as the online hub for the R&I foresight community in Europe: The platform accommodates the interests of various stakeholders such as foresight experts, beneficiaries, domain experts, and an active audience. It operates on multiple integration levels, from mapping organizations and experts to sharing foresight results and capabilities. Moreover, it acts as the communication gateway for ongoing foresight activities, events, educational and inspirational materials.
  
  
• Sharing of practices: This entails mapping institutions engaged in R&I foresight activities, promoting mutual learning through interactive formats, developing shared visions for the future of foresight in R&I policy within the European Research Area (ERA), fostering exchanges among the foresight in R&I policy community through conferences, encouraging dialogues between futurist/expert communities, academics and policy practitioners.
  Key figures: 5 mutual learning events (MLE): 2 online, 3 face-to-face events; 1 vision building event for the Future of R&I Foresight in ERA; 2 conferences
  
  
• Running foresight pilots: Conducting a series of pilot workshops and online consultations with diverse formats, methodologies, and participants. This involves identifying topics of common interest within the European Research Area (ERA), where foresight perspectives offer added value, designing and implementing tailored pilot foresight activities involving various stakeholders, harnessing lessons learnt and feeding them into the platform and other dissemination channels.
  Key figures: 11 Foresight pilot processes: 3 exclusively with citizens, 4 mainly with experts and researchers tackling specific R&I topics, 4 involving a bespoke group of participants. Out of the 11 events, 8 will be face-to-face events, and 3 pilots will take place online
  
  
• Boosting futures literacy: The project encourages meaningful engagement with diverse audiences, from foresight professionals, researchers, policy-makers to various futures sensitive profiles (e.g. entrepreneurs, journalists, artists) and the wider civil society. The project will provide guides, methodology toolboxes, and training modules for R&I foresight and futures literacy, incorporating written and multimedia content.
  Key figures: 5-10 short training sets for participants in foresight exercises; 1 training module for foresight beneficiaries; 1 foresight training for early career researchers, 1 Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on R&I foresight; 12 conversational podcasts; 6-8 Short videos and/or animated materials showcasing foresight processes and outcomes
  
  
• Fueling the public discourse around futures: Promoting the project and fostering the foresight community via the online platform futures4europe.eu and complementary channels such as social media and a dedicated newsletter. In addition to highlighting the project's own initiatives, Eye of Europe will also aim to promote foresight content developed in other projects, showcasing a diverse range of perspectives and insights within the foresight field. The quarterly newsletter will feature various content types like interviews, project updates, and foresight-related articles. Social media, particularly Futures4Europe's LinkedIn page, will be used to engage professional communities and wider audiences, with a focus on sharing project activities and fostering discussions.

Futures Garden: Pioneering Policy Innovation through Speculative Design

At Futures Garden, we embark on a visionary journey to redefine policy-making for Europe's future. Our unique platform collaborates with leading futurists, innovative designers, and engaged EU citizens to envision a Europe enriched by diverse potential futures, each with its own opportunities and challenges. Our mission? To revolutionize policy creation by intertwining speculative design with creativity, empathy, and analytical insight. Our four-step approach ensures a comprehensive and impactful exploration:

• Horizon Scanning: We dive into cutting-edge ideas and emerging trends, identifying opportunities that could shape Europe's future.
• Speculative Design: Our creative process transforms abstract concepts into tangible, thought-provoking scenarios, making future possibilities more accessible and engaging.
• Citizen Engagement: We delve into the societal implications of these speculative scenarios, gathering diverse perspectives and insights from EU citizens.
• Policy Reflection: The final step involves analyzing the potential impact of these innovative ideas on policy-making, ensuring that future EU policies are forward-thinking, inclusive, and impactful.
  

Creating fictional artifacts through speculative design
Futures Garden aims at creating inspiring alternative future scenarios through the use of fictional future artifacts that invite to reflection and debate. The pilot project took place in 2023 and addressed two themes:

• “Dealing with future selves” explores new ways of being, individually and collectively, examines new practices and technologies that enhance self-reflection and sharing of emotions, which help shape our choices in life and nurture a renewed sense of togetherness.
• “Extending human perception to new scales” explores the richness of non-human intelligences, expanding our attention and appreciation for their unique sensory worlds, their “umwelt” – what they “feel” and how they “think”. In doing so it departs from the human-centric worldview towards a deeper understanding and celebration of life on Earth.
  
  The resulting fictional artifacts took the form of short, thought-provoking movies – Inwards and Symbiotic – which render the imagined future scenarios more tangible, immersive and engaging.
  
  Watch "Inwards" - The 2050s a re a time of deep social reconfiguration. No longer believing in the myth of perpetual economic growth, recipes for self-empowerment, and technological fixes, citizens of Europe seek to regain agency by turning inwards.
  New cultures of emotional excellence and material minimalism emerge, supported by tools for assisted introspection and emotion sharing. In the wake of this quiet revolution, the social contract progressively integrates a renewed sense of togetherness.
  
  Watch "Symbiotic" - Set in the Symbiocene era of the 2050s, a time marked by an expanded understanding of intelligence beyond human confines, Symbiotic explores a revolutionary breakthrough. Scientists have created a device that allows humans to experience the perceptions and sensory worlds of other intelligent beings, immersing them in the 'umwelt' of these creatures. This film documents the first groundbreaking experiences through the device, capturing the profound experiences of those who ventured into these new realms of intelligence.

This foresight study aimed at supporting the development of the Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe (2025-2027), by providing early-stage strategic intelligence and sense-making that could contribute novel elements to the processes of strategic planning.

The study, which was launched in mid-2021 and lasted almost two years, has been the most widely engaging foresight exercise yet aiming to support EU R&I policy. Through this broad engagement, the study did not only develop intelligence for the 2nd Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe but also contributed to the development of an EU R&I foresight community hosted by futures4europe.eu, one that is an asset for future R&I policies across Europe.

The foresight process in support of the 2nd Strategic Plan comprised a wide spectrum of activities:

• As a reference point for the exploratory work, the explicit and implicit impact assumptions of the 1st Strategic Plan were identified and visualised with the help of a qualitative system analysis and modelling tool for causal loop analysis.
• An exploratory analysis of forward-looking sources (e.g. foresight reports, web-based horizon scanning) was conducted to identify relevant trends and signals of unexpected developments. These were discussed in online workshops and on futures4europe.eu.
• An outlook on emerging developments in the global and European context of EU R&I policy was developed drawing on a major online workshop in autumn 2021 with some 60 participants, experts and policy makers, who worked with multi-level context scenarios and specific context narratives about emerging disruptions.
• On that basis and in close consultation with the European Commission involving another major workshop in February 2022 which brought together 80 participants, Expert Teams were set up to develop disruptive scenarios in five areas of major interest. Each team ran several internal workshops but also involved further experts and Commission staff in their work, both through the online platform and through a final policy-oriented workshop. The foresight work within the five areas of interest resulted in deep dives on the following topics:
  > Climate change, Research, and Innovation: Radical Options from Social Change to Geoengineering
  > Hydrogen Economy – A radical alternative
  > The EU in a Volatile New World - The challenge of global leadership
  > Global Commons
  > Transhumanist Revolutions
  
• Further areas of interest identified were explored through review papers aiming to capture major trends, developments and scenario sketches in relation to further disruptive developments:
  > Social Confrontations
  > Artificial General Intelligence: Issues and Opportunities
  > The Interpenetration of Criminal and Lawful Economic Activities
  > The Future of Health
  
• A third major workshop took place in October 2022 bringing together all the thematic strands of work and addressing possible R&I policy implications from this work. Participation in this workshop reached 250 individuals over 2 days.
• Building on the workshop, the online Dynamic Argumentative Delphi survey Research4Futures collected suggestions from almost 950 contributors from Europe and beyond about the implications of this foresight work for the priorities of EU R&I policy.

The detailed description of the foresight work and the resulting outputs are available in the final report of the project.

This foresight study has been implemented through the Foresight on Demand framework contract, by a team of 40 experts. About 300 additional experts contributed to the project through its numerous workshops that helped shape the scenarios and their policy implications. 

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The ultimate objectives of TRIGGER are to provide EU institutions with knowledge and tools to enhance their actorness, effectiveness and influence in global governance; and to develop new ways to harness the potential of public engagement and participatory foresight in complex governance decisions, thereby also tackling emerging trends such as nationalism, regionalism and protectionism.

TRIGGER specific objectives are:

• Advance the state of the art in understanding global governance;
• Evolution of the EU’s interaction with global governance, in particular so-called “actorness” and “effectiveness” of the EU;
• Understand how global governance and emerging technologies interact, and what role the EU plays in this respect, in particular as “regulatory superpower”;
• Identify emerging trends that strengthen / loosen deeper global governance and cooperation;
• Build capacity for strategic foresight and public engagement inside EU institutions.

The TRIGGER consortium is composed of 14 partners, including four non-EU countries. TRIGGER will achieve its objectives thanks to the combined effort of four research sub-groups:

• a group focused on global and EU governance, which will create an unprecedented Atlas of Global Governance REGulation and Europe’s AcTORness (AGGREGATOR);
• a group focused on the relationship between governance and emerging technologies; 
• a group dedicated to strategic foresight and public engagement, which will use new techniques such as AI-enabled sentiment analysis and innovative public engagement methods to develop a tool on Co-Creating the European Union (COCTEAU); and
• a group specialised in dissemination and communication. All major deliverables will eventually be merged into a toolkit dedicated to Public Engagement for Responsive and Shared EU Strategies (PERSEUS).

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