This article proposes that creativity and criticality not only can but
should be entangled and elevated in participatory futuring engagements.
Selected concepts from creativity theory and critical futures studies
are applied to develop a set of futuring games through action research.
We claim that participatory processes designed to entangle and elevate
creativity and criticality produce more novel and varied ideas that
better fit the purposes of futures studies. This article offers four
arguments for combining creativity and criticality in participatory
futuring engagements. First, due to complexity and uncertainty, the
future is ultimately unknowable and requires tools to probe the unknown.
Second, novelty is difficult to achieve in practice while creativity
and criticality can help overcome these challenges. Third,
discontinuities are the main sources of futures that are most radically
different from the present and will have the biggest impact. Fourth,
creativity and criticality support the rigorous imagining required for
exploring and discovering new possible futures. This article analyzes
three experimentations in entangling and elevating creativity and
criticality in game-based futuring, stemming from Causal Layered
Analysis. Based on these examples, we demonstrate that creativity and
criticality, when combined, help people break through the limitations of
current understanding, reveal approaching tipping points, and find the
“unvisited cavities” through rhizomatic knowledge creation. However,
there remain challenges in evaluating how well various participatory
designs support creativity and criticality in practice.
Context-sensitive evaluation tools and open sharing of outcomes are
needed to develop participation design principles capable of supporting
creativity and criticality in participatory futuring.