Futures

Future laboratories for professional and personal development – FUTURES (2020-2023) is a European project which emphasizes the importance of high-quality adaptation skills as the means to support individuals in acquiring and developing key competences. A major part of these transversal competences and “soft skills” is the development of integrated and innovative ways of supporting personal development, resilience, adaptation, and critical thinking. As Futures Literacy  (FL) increases individuals’ capacity to ‘use the future(s)’ to explore the present, the project aims to adopt such methodology also to foster professional development. In particular, the project underlines the need to develop skills of young people, for anticipating and promptly reacting to scenario changes, and imagining professional career paths.

The project is co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education (KA203). The total value of the project budget is 398 173,00 EUR.

The current global pandemic highlights precisely the importance of futures thinking, developing foresight and preparedness, but also an ability to embrace emergence, adapting to unforeseen circumstances that might impact participants’ professional lives.

Within the FUTURES project, we aim to develop the innovative, future-oriented processes, tools, and methods that will foster personal and professional development among European University Students, Early Stage Researchers and High School Students, including also those that aspire to enroll in University. The training materials developed in the project will empower individuals to realize that their images about the future (anticipatory assumptions) have a significant bearing on (limit or open up) their actions and choices today.

The project will serve to reach the following results:

• Design principles for a Future-oriented Training Programme (Intellectual Output 1);
• Foresight Toolbox and Training Manual for improving University Students and Early Stage Researchers future-oriented competences for personal and professional development (Intellectual Output 2);
• Foresight Toolbox and Training Manual for improving High School Students future-oriented competences for personal and professional development (Intellectual Output 3).

Project partners:

• Bialystok University of Technology – Leader
• Hanze University of Applied Sciences (The Netherlands)
• Middlesex University (United Kingdom)
• Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (Greece)
• ValueDo S.r.l. (Italy)
• Łukasiewicz Research Network – Institute for Sustainable Technologies (Poland)

BUT team:

• Ewa Rollnik-Sadowska – Project manager
• Anna Kononiuk – Coordinator of the research tasks
• Joanna Ejdys – Project Researcher, Steering Commitee Representative
• Alicja Gudanowska – Project Researcher, Dissemination manager
• Justyna Kozłowska – Project Researcher, Dissemination team member
• Andrzej Magruk – Project Researcher, Quality assurance manager
• Julia Siderska – Project Researcher, Quality assurance team member
• Tomasz Trochimczuk – Technician, Dissemination team member