Cosmic Vistas, Solarpunk Shores, and Playful Portals: A Conversation on Living Imagination
The Invitation
How do we move imagination from a fleeting thought to a living practice?
Following our recent inquiries into Imagination Infrastructure with Keri Facer and the interplay of Rationality, Intuition, and Imagination with Marcus Bussey , we are continuing our 2026 Imagination Series by bringing together three practitioners who are actively shaping futures in distinct, grounded ways.
This session brings together perspectives from the philosophy of space and visualisation, embodied play and futures literacies, and solarpunk-inspired cultural imagination in Southeast Asia. While their backgrounds are diverse, all three speakers are asking, in their own way, what imagination makes possible, how it shapes what we can sense or picture, and why it matters so deeply to futures thinking and practice.
At The Futures Studies Channel, we value the kind of exchange that allows ideas to breathe. This session is intentionally light on formal presentations and heavy on thoughtful dialogue and candid reflections. We see this as a layered conversation across three unique lenses: the scientific, the cultural, and the embodied.
Our Speakers
We are honored to be joined by:
Sabine Winters, exploring how the space sciences and AI visualizations shape our “mental pictures” of what is possible.
Sam Chua, curator of Seapunk Studios, who nurtures regionally rooted solarpunk futures for Southeast Asia.
Makēda Gershenson, a healing-centered futurist using play and reflection to turn uncertainty into creative material.
Whether you are a seasoned futurist, an aspiring educator, or simply a “curiouser,” come as you are. Bring your questions, your skepticism about AI-generated tomorrows, and your own stories of local possibility.
Meet the Imaginative Practitioners
Sabine Winters
Sabine Winters is a philosopher of space and science, writer, speaker, and curator based in the Netherlands. She is currently a PhD candidate at Utrecht University’s Freudenthal Institute, where she researches the epistemological role of imagination in the space sciences, with particular attention to visualisation, decision-making, and how new insights take shape. She also teaches at ArtEZ University of the Arts, works in art and technology programming at a theatre, and founded Future Based, an interdisciplinary philosophy platform that hosted more than 60 events between 2018 and 2025. She is currently working on her first book, The Imagination of Space, to be published in 2027.
Her session will explore the role of visualisation in shaping how futures are imagined, whether through mental images, gestures, graphs, models, or AI-generated images. Her work invites us to think more carefully about what it means to “see” a future, and how such acts of seeing influence both decision-making and the making of reality itself.
Makēda Gershenson
Makēda Gershenson is a futurist, educator, and artist who loves building playgrounds for the future. Born on Dena’ina land in Alaska, shaped by Afroasian roots, and now based in Berlin, she is the founder of Quest Labs and is currently completing an MA in Futures Research at Freie Universität Berlin. Her work lives at the intersection of embodied play, futures literacy, and collective intelligence. Her ABCs for Futures Literacies framework emerged from work with 170 educators across two healing-centred gatherings and continues to evolve in community. Alongside her thesis, she is developing the Black Menagerie, a card-based archetype exploration for futures thinking, while also running FLIP cohorts for educators and others rethinking learning, work, and change.
For Makēda, imagination is not simply an individual skill but a shared and emergent practice, one that helps create the infrastructures of care so urgently needed in the present. Her work brings a playful, relational, and deeply human approach to futures, where uncertainty is not something to fear but something to enter together.
Sam Chua
Sam Chua is a cultural entrepreneur, amateur futurist, and founding curator of Seapunk Studios, a research-and-imagination collective interested in fresh solarpunk-inspired public futures for Southeast Asia and the Global South. Seapunk Studios explores themes such as imaginary decolonisation, pluriversal and socioecologically rooted solarpunk, archipelagic coordination, protocol design fiction, experimental globalisation, and smallholder climate agency. Its collaborators have included Bangkok Climate Action Week, Plumia, Summer of Protocols, Edge City, CMKL University, Existential Hope, the Ethereum Foundation, and others.
Sam’s work opens up vibrant and grounded ways of imagining futures from and with the region, drawing attention to place, ecology, culture, and public life. His perspective offers a refreshing invitation to think about imagination not as abstraction, but as something rooted in local realities, collective aspiration, and more hopeful social possibilities.
About The Futures Studies Channel
The Futures Studies Channel (formerly the JFS Futures Community of Practice) is a community space where futurists and enthusiasts come together in a spirit of openness and care. We meet once a month to talk about topics we’re mulling over and to make futures literacy more accessible to a wider global community.
The Futures Channel is a space for exploration.
If you are new to futures thinking, you are most welcome.
If you have been working in this space for some time, we invite you to bring your reflections, your questions, and your stories.