The Tomorrow Party

Policy decisions play out in dynamic futures where the impact reverberates in unknowable ways. Existing approaches to gathering policy ideas, such as precedent scanning or big data modelling, focus on what is easily predicted, can be learned from the past, or has been tested elsewhere. The Tomorrow Party responds to two challenges. First, the impulse to mitigate risk requires policymakers to rely heavily on what can be known and quantified. This leads to working with abstractions that devalue people and context. Second, lived experience methods that reductively focus on the past can be experienced as more exploitative than supportive.

The Tomorrow Party commission did not call for designing a policy but rather mobilising creativity to support policymaking. This co-design method works with individuals’ hopes and dreams, in a two-hour convivial event that invites guests to time travel to the near future. Piloted across multiple policy contexts and phases, the party engages with uncertainty to address the need for non-predictive policy approaches. Along with gathering policy insights, the scaffolded, co-creative experience builds participants’ capacity to imagine more just futures together. The speculative, relational method also forges coalitions that help mobilise partners and inspire outcomes for the people affected by policy.

In the last year, more than 500 people have attended Tomorrow Parties in Australia, Aotearoa (NZ), UAE, UK, Malawi, Italy and Denmark. We hosted two Tomorrow Parties at COP28 and another at the Design Museum’s Policy Festival (2024) and have been invited to UN Climate Week. Yet the impact of the party goes far beyond attendance. For policymakers, the tomorrow stories recorded at a party are what counts the most, because the insights from guests’ future visions can inform policy advocacy and development. For guests, the value lies in the experience of collectively imagining the futures they hope to build.

Tomorrow Party Structure: The Tomorrow Party is typically a 2-3 hour gathering in three acts, designed to help people imagine into the near future how they personally hope to be living, working and thriving. The three-act adaptive structure centres around time travel in Act 2. Tailored for the specific party objectives, context, and stakeholders, Act 1 sets the scene and Act 3 shares the tomorrow stories co-created. Project Commitments: Informed by Indigenous conceptions of time, the first-hand experience of time travel embraces the value of learning about the past and present by imagining with the future. The Party design is grounded by Indigenous principles of relationality, respect and reciprocity. The Tomorrow Party’s Contribution to Policy Design: - Tomorrow Story insights can inform policy framing and development - Rapid rapport building in support of strategic partnerships for mobilising policy - Lived experience hopes and dreams in support of advocating for new policies - Ethical practice for engaging with peoples’ life experiences. - Early pilots helped refine a party where diverse voices are respected and deep connection is valued. Staying with the party theme helped the team lean into the role of hosts — attending to how the gathering supported a convivial, care-based, creative atmosphere.