An interdisciplinary exhibit and series of events called The Futuring Lab, led by Associate Professor of Architecture Sandy Litchfield, will run from Nov. 8-9 and Nov. 28-30 in the Design Building Gallery. The timely exhibition seeks to respond to pervading anxieties about climate change, rising social inequity, racism, political division, ecological collapse, and the realities of what the near future may hold. All programming and events are free and open to the public. A related series of events, Y3K: On Distant Keys, is scheduled for spring.

“Architects are future planners. Everything they design is a plan for the future; it’s not what exists right now, but what may exist,” Litchfield says. “I teach at the boundaries between art and architecture and writing, and I’ve always been in my heart a futurist. I can’t help but think of what that future is going to look like, so this project captures that.”

The Futuring Lab, hosted in the Design Building Gallery, will feature a large interactive wall installation called Khronika where visitors can use sticky notes to visually share personal and political events, historic and speculative, known and unknown. Khronika is on view all semester during the Design Building Gallery’s regular hours.

In addition, there will be a series of auxiliary public readings, talks, musical performances, workshops, roundtable discussions, fortune telling, poetry, climate science lectures, and more in what Litchfield describes as an “almost carnival-esque series of events” held over five days. 

These events invite participants to imagine futures that are not only possible and probable, but also preferable.

“I think it’s a problem when discussions about sustainability and climate change are exclusive to academia. These are conversations that need to involve everyone—communities from all over,” Litchfield explains. “We need to listen to the elders, and we need to listen to the children, and we need to let them have their voice in this. How do all these different people want to make their future visible?” 

To create The Futuring Lab, Litchfield called upon more than 50 collaborators, including UMass Amherst students, faculty, and staff, all of whom contributed to the project. Its curatorial design team includes Litchfield; Ray Kinoshita Mann, professor of Architecture; Madeleine Charney, research services librarian; and students Bella Donovan, Meredith Degyansky, and Ben Richter. Writer and artist Kelly Feeney is also involved.

“This very expansive community has come together to contribute. Everyone is bringing their own ingredients to what is really a ‘stone soup’ operation,” Litchfield says. “I may have brought the pot, the water, and a few stones, but the real nutrients of this project come from everybody else in the community.”

As for what Litchfield hopes this project inspires in participants? 

“Agency. We want people to feel like they can have impact; that they should get involved and be part of the change, the revolution, we’re facing,” she says. “We are the activists. We are the changemakers. What do we want that change to be? And what does that preferred future look like?”

The Futuring Lab is sponsored by a UMass Amherst Faculty Research Grant, Architecture Research Collaborative, UMass Libraries, Office of Equity and Inclusion, Design Building Gallery, School for Earth and Sustainability, and The Puffin Foundation.