'Beyond the Report' asks how futures research can move beyond the limits of conventional reports, briefings and evidence formats. Reports are fast, familiar and easy to circulate, but they can flatten the lived, spatial and behavioural consequences of future change. Experiential formats can be richer and more affecting, but they are often slower, more expensive and harder to share widely. This project sits in the space between the two.

The work builds on an existing body of research in speculative spatial design, futures literacy, filmic communication, speculative ethnography and more than human research. Across this work, superFUTURES has been developing ways to make future scenarios more situated, discussable and actionable through film, artefacts, spatial storytelling, public prototypes and designed encounters.

'Beyond the Report' will test how these methods can be translated for decision makers working across public policy, environmental governance, civic strategy, systems change and organisational futures. The aim is to help future conditions become easier to examine before they arrive as policy, infrastructure, investment or institutional change.

The project will work with established and emerging partners through a series of conversations, workshops, exhibition encounters and roadmapping sessions between July and November 2026. These sessions will bring invited decision makers into direct contact with examples of speculative spatial research, asking what current reporting formats fail to show, what kinds of evidence are missing, and how future scenarios might be communicated in ways that include behaviour, atmosphere, spatial consequence, ecological interdependence and more than human relations.

Thanks to all who completed our early stage expressions of interest in taking part as a pilot use case. We will be in touch with you soon. Across these contexts, the project will ask how methods beyond the report might help organisations communicate ecological value, test policy conditions before implementation, and make complex trade offs around land use, infrastructure, community evidence and long term stewardship more understandable.

Thanks to the RCA for the funding which will support consultancy, exhibition and event materials, stakeholder engagement and videography to document the process. More importantly, it will help test a larger question at the heart of superFUTURES: how can future scenarios be made public, situated and usable without reducing them to another PDF?