LEARNING DAYS
This year, the Dubai Future Forum’s signature learning experience expands into two full days – 17 & 20 November – dedicated to building the mindsets and skillsets needed to navigate an uncertain future. Through a dynamic mix of hands-on workshops, interactive labs, and collaborative sessions, participants will explore how to apply strategic foresight in practice – from scenario design and systems thinking to anticipatory governance and future literacy. Designed for futurists, policymakers, researchers, and change-makers, Learning Days 2025 focuses on learning through doing, fostering peer exchange, and encouraging cross-sector collaboration.
Building on the momentum of the first day, Learning Day 2 on 20 November focuses on translating foresight into action through immersive exercises and practice-based sessions. Participants will engage in hands-on workshops, scenario labs, and creative provocations that challenge conventional thinking about systems, power, and inclusion. The day explores how futures methods can inform strategy and innovation across domains – from artificial intelligence and planetary governance to resilient urban design and social transformation. It invites participants to move from analysis to experimentation, testing new models for collaboration, policy, and design that bridge long-term vision with near-term impact. Learning Day 2 embodies the Dubai Future Forum’s commitment to “futures in practice,” offering an environment where ideas evolve into tangible frameworks for equitable, adaptive, and sustainable futures.
Registration is required. Download the DFF Connect app and sign up through the Learning Day 2 portal.
DFA AUDITORIUM,
EMIRATES TOWERS
09:30 – 12:30
Designing Tomorrow Together:
How Should We Rethink Power,
Systems, and Inclusion?
Explore radically inclusive futures in this hands-on workshop using UN Women’s gender-transformative foresight framework. Through collaborative storytelling, future persona creation and speculative city-building, participants will reimagine systems – governance, health, education, climate, and labor – in an age shaped by artificial intelligence. Centering care, equity, and belonging, let’s co-create bold narratives and actionable visions for tomorrow’s future that advance justice and inclusion.
Facilitator
Navin Haram
Facilitator
Jimena Califa
Facilitator
Hannah-Sophie Wahle
14:00 – 17:00
Radical Change Waves: What Does It Take to Design Lasting Futures?
This workshop guides participants through a layered framework to identify cascading disruptions across seven levels: global, national, regional, local, community, family, and self. After identifying personal disruptions, participants will reframe them as catalysts for growth, making incremental progress toward desired futures and positive global impact. As part of an ongoing initiative, participants are invited to refine the framework between Dubai Future Forums. The session will appeal to foresight practitioners seeking to deepen their practice through human-centered methods, including members of the Global Futures Society.
Facilitator
Julienne DeVita
Liminal
OUTDOOR GARDEN,
DUBAI FUTURE LABS
09:30 – 12:30
Rewilding the Boardroom:
How Might Business Change if Nature
had a Voice and a Vote?
Step into Dubai’s first Living Boardroom, where nature claims its rightful role as shareholder, cofounder, and decision-maker. In this immersive workshop, you’ll learn and experience how to bring nature’s intelligence from people leading nature-centred progress about how to bring the intelligence of nature into the organisations of the future, and how we might work together to help nature-centred organisations thrive on our planet.
Facilitator
Andres Roberts
Facilitator
Adib Dada
Facilitator
Tariq Al Olaimy
Facilitator
Leena Al Olaimy
14:00 – 17:00
The Futures Within:
Are you Ready for a Playful Journey
into Personal Foresight?
This workshop explores our personal relationship with the futures—the missing link in introducing foresight across cultures and contexts. Through four playful, immersive stations using methods like LEGO® Serious Play®, zine-making, and rapid prototyping, participants will deepen their futures mindset and experiment with a new Personal Futures Readiness Tool. Blending play, reflection, and capability-building, the session offers practical tools for making futures more human-centered and actionable.
Facilitator
Mathias Behn
Bjørnhof
Bjørnhof
Facilitator
Darwin Antipolo
3D CLASSROOM,
DUBAI FUTURE ACADEMY
09:30 – 12:30
New Lenses for the Age of AI: How Can Futurists and Others Think
Differently – and Better?
This workshop will explore how AI is changing the process of sense making broadly and the field of foresight in particular. It will explore various lenses from different fields that can be used to make sense of AI and anticipate how it may drive transformation – complex adaptive systems, the commons and polarity management. It will then ask what specific implications each lens, and all the lenses together, have for the future of the foresight profession.
Facilitator
Dexter Docherty
Facilitator
Karolina Schütt
Facilitator
Dr Aaron Maniam
University of Oxford
Facilitator
Leonardo Quattrucci
Centre for Future Generations
14:00 – 17:00
Building a Star Alliance
in Futures Studies: From Quality Standards to a Global Masters
This expert meeting explores how to strengthen the quality and collaboration within the rapidly expanding field of futures studies. Bringing together leading practitioners and institutions, it aims to develop a “Star Alliance” model for the field – enhancing global and regional networks, improving teaching standards, fostering certification pathways, and connecting online and in-person learning through these networks and key partners.
Facilitator
Dr Sohail Inayatullah
UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies
GOVERNMENT ACCELERATORS,
EMIRATES TOWERS
09:00 – 12:00
From Theory to Practice:
Co-creating Future Ready Urban Strategies
Join DM’s Future Foresight team in a hands-on workshop to explore the future of cities. Using the interactive Scenario Vignettes methodology, participants will co-create strategies to tackle complex urban challenges. This session offers a unique opportunity to apply foresight tools, challenge assumptions, and contribute to building more resilient urban environments. Discover how strategic foresight is shaping Dubai’s next chapter and walk away with practical tools to apply in your own organization.
Facilitator
Dr Mohamed Ali
13:00 – 16:00
Digital Futures Unplugged: Rethinking Connection, Control, and Choice
Digital technologies increasingly shape every aspect of human life, disrupting the status quo with growing speed. Join the Futures team from Singapore’s MDDI to explore possible digital futures – from total immersion in technology to collective retreat from it. Together, we’ll examine how unpredictable human behaviour intersects with innovation and imagine new narratives for more meaningful relationships between people and the tools we create.
Facilitator
Liana Tang
Facilitator
Sumana Prasad
CODERS HQ,
EMIRATES TOWERS
09:30 – 12:30
Vision to Velocity: What if the Global South is at Forefront
of Foresight Development?
This workshop offers a live incubation space to co-create a sustainable, collaborative infrastructure for foresight across the Global South. Building on the legacy of Foresight for Development, it will prototype a scalable platform for shared knowledge, collective intelligence, and regional cooperation – advancing decentralized, equitable, and future-oriented governance in alignment with the Dubai Future Forum’s mission to drive systemic global change.
Facilitator
Dr Geci Karuri-Sebina
Facilitator
Dr Olugbenga Adesida
14:00 – 17:00
The Future Value Dilemma: How Much Future is Too Much?
This workshop explores the ethical tension at the heart of future-oriented policy: the “future value paradox.” As long termism gains influence, how do we balance the wellbeing of present generations with uncertain distant futures? Through immersive exercises blending foresight, behavioural economics, and speculative modelling, participants will expose where our value systems break – and reimagine governance frameworks grounded in justice, realism, and resilience.
Facilitator
Roberto Ottolino
Facilitator
Dr Luca Simeone
ATÖLYE DUBAI HUB,
EMIRATES TOWERS
09:30 – 12:30
Power of Communities: How Can We Co-Create
Innovation That Lasts?
Rooted in ATÖLYE’s belief that transformation begins with people, this interactive workshop explores how collaboration, trust, and shared purpose can drive innovation within organizations and society. Building on the Dubai Future Forum’s Empowering Societies theme, the session invites participants into dialogue and co-creation to imagine more adaptive, connected, and regenerative futures where communities become catalysts for systemic change.
Facilitator
Mariana Ribeiro
Facilitator
Polen Gökbuget
14:00 – 17:00
Making Futures Work: How Do We Turn Visions into
Roadmaps That Deliver?
This workshop offers practical ways to bridge foresight, design, and strategy. It explores how design can play a pivotal role in futures work – helping translate insights into action, build stakeholder buy-in, and define measurable steps toward realizing a future vision. Designed for early to intermediate practitioners, the session combines presentation, discussion, and hands-on exercises to build confidence and fluency in designing for the future.
Facilitator
Phil Balagatas
HABITAT
Facilitator
Caelan Tatz
Creative Strategist
NEW ECONOMY ACADEMY,
EMIRATES TOWERS
09:30 – 12:30
Fast & Frugal Futures Thinking: How do you Build Scenarios with Limited Time or Resources?
This workshop introduces practical techniques for applying strategic foresight in time- or resource-limited settings. Through a crisis management lens, participants will explore adaptable methods and work as a ‘foresight team’ to create real-time future crisis scenarios. The session demonstrates how constraints can fuel, rather than hinder, rigorous futures thinking, offering tools and insights to embed effective foresight processes across diverse organizational contexts.
Facilitator
Dr Steven Curnin
Facilitator
Dr Benjamin Brooks
14:00 – 17:00
A Global Foresight Standard: How Can We Enable Quantum Shifts?
In an era defined by ‘quantum shifts’, foresight is more important than ever. Shaping the future is not merely a choice; it is a profound responsibility that requires inclusive leadership, effective collaborations, and organisations that can adapt and respond in new ways. Globally accepted standards are critical to this. Standards enable innovation, reduce collaboration barriers, and drive global competitiveness and quality of life. In this session, we explore how such a foresight standard can be developed and the impacts it could have, for future-looking organisations. We will share examples from foresight-led innovation to cross-industry collaborations in industry spaces, such as space, artificial intelligence, and health.
Facilitator
Saar Ben-Attar
Facilitator
Meval Dantis
CREATORS HQ,
EMIRATES TOWERS
09:30 – 12:30
Tomorrow’s Children, Today’s Voices: An Intergenerational Unconference
Coinciding with World Children’s Day, this youth-led “unconference” brings together adolescents, adults, and renowned futurists Bill Sharpe and Peter Bishop to co-create the futures of childhood. Using a range of foresight tools like UNICEF and DFF’s Future Child Persona Methodology, participants will imagine alternative futures for every child – through intergenerational dialogue, hands-on futuring, and a rare moment where world-leading futurists become keynote listeners.
BOCA RESTAURANT,
GATE VILLAGE 6, DIFC
11:30 – 14:30
From Lifespan to Healthspan: How Can We Reimagine Aging as an
Opportunity through Foresight?
Longevity is one of the defining opportunities of our century; yet aging is often seen as a burden rather than a catalyst for innovation. This session reframes longevity as a source of creativity and societal transformation, exploring how futures thinking can shape healthier, longer lives. It concludes with a lunch curated by BOCA’s chef, featuring ingredients inspired by the past, present, and future of longevity.
Facilitator
Chloé de Ruffray
Trend Researcher &
Cultural Analyst
Facilitator
Julie Ezan-Zecca
University Paris Dauphine-PSL
Host
Omar Shihab
Founder of BOCA Restaurant