Currents
of Tomorrow

Copenhagen is often described as one of the world's most liveable cities, and yet, beneath that admired surface lies another city: layered, contested, and full of signals about what's coming next.

The City Scanning is the activity that opens every edition of Future Days Festival. Before exploring the program, we first need to know where we are.

What are the local tensions, the emerging signals, the gap between the image a city projects and what truly lies beneath? It's how we honour the place we're meeting.

This year, the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies co-curates “Beneath the Surface”: small groups dispersed across Copenhagen, scanning for what that postcard version leaves out.

The session is followed by a talk from Nicklas Larsen, who will introduce the “Two Loops” model, the methodology we will use to uncover where Copenhagen stands in its own transition: what is losing strength, and what is beginning to emerge.

Organizational change is quiet, gentle, and comes from within. In 2024, Futurist Lia (Linda) Arvidsson and Head of Innovation & Exploration at H&M, Alexandra Frid Razola were among the first participants at the Future Days inaugural edition in Lisbon.

Two years later, H&M Exploration is partnering with Future Days to host a Lab session from the lens of “Economies of Meaning”.

In a time where value is shifting and the systems we work in are under pressure, this session explores fashion not as product, but as a lens on meaning. Blending a short talk with hands-on practice, we move from personal reflection to collective dialogue, inviting participants to sit with real tensions, and shape what creative industries could stand for next.

In a world of scattered attention, the commitments that matter most are often the personal ones we forget to keep.



Through this lab, Noun Inc invites you to slow down, reflect on what it means to make a commitment, and craft your path toward the future.


Noun is bringing darumas, traditional Japanese dolls gifted or acquired when someone is moving toward something that matters. When received, their face is blank.

One eye is filled with when they have a goal, and the other is filled once that commitment has been fulfilled, completing the daruma. It’s a tradition that brings together intention and perseverance. This lab invites attendees to engage with the daruma to explore the Future Days theme of Back to Connection: returning to ourselves, to one another, and to the promises that shape what comes next.


Throughout the three days of Future Days, attendees will have come across new questions, new tensions, new possibilities. This lab is a place to gather what has surfaced and turn some of it into personal commitments to carry forward.


The entire practice is about slowing down: thinking with our hands, being present, and pushing gently against the rush at which the world moves. What does it mean to reconnect to ourselves, to others, and to the promises we make? This lab makes space to pause, to think, and to commit with intention.

Most professional commissions within the mainstream business of design tend to begin with a known destination: a predefined output, a defined timeline, a fixed method and a prearranged set of tasks… all built on the agreement that we will get there even before anyone enters the room.

This lab will start with a position that is rarely taken, but that feels more fun and authentic: Rooted in the belief that real trust requires the opposite.

We'll follow everyday practices we’ve all experienced: conversation, physical proximity, and exposure to the unresolved. Letting meaning emerge between us rather than delivering it to you.

We believe you will leave the room with something valuable, perhaps even unexpected. We can’t name it in advance. That’s precisely the point.

Atlas 2077 is a two-hour futures workshop powered by a live simulation game that responds to every decision the room makes.

It is 2047. The world's freshwater reserves have collapsed. Distributed across 15 tables, each representing a territory in crisis, participants negotiate, argue, and make impossible choices under real pressure. But this is not a role-play exercise. Every answer fed into the system has consequences — the questions change, the narrative shifts, the story the room is building takes a different shape depending on what you decide.

You are not just imagining the future. You are practicing it — by negotiating with a simulation that pushes back. Futures are not predicted. They are constructed — through pressure, disagreement, and the courage to imagine systems that do not yet exist. Come build one.

This workshop will produce a final agreement document, a guideline for the human factor in this century, where everyone who joins is a co-author.

What if the real challenge in innovation isn’t creating solutions—but scaling them within systems?

In this lab, the WHO Innovation Hub invites participants to explore a fundamental shift in how health innovation is approached: from fragmented, supply-driven pilots to intentional, system-led, demand-driven scaling. Drawing on global experience, the lab will unpack what it takes to move from ad hoc experimentation to strategic, coordinated efforts—where scaling is designed from the outset, and where roles, processes and systems come together to enable innovation to deliver impact at population level.

Governments act as stewards of the national innovation mission, however, this doesn’t automatically mean making everything happen through top-down control. This guidance introduces three different strategies that will enable governments to scale better by either Making it Happen, Helping it Happen, or Letting it Happen.

The participants will be engaging in the real case scenario of applying the guidance to a the challenge and opportunity of scaling virtual care and telesurgery in LMICs –how can it be done in a way that is equitable and sustainable?

What would it feel like to live in a society where technologies that read, interpret, or influence brain activity have become part of everyday life? In this participatory futures lab, participants step into the year 2038 and take part in a fictional—but plausible—Citizens’ Panel on the regulation of neurotechnology. Instead of debating the future from a distance, the lab invites you to experience it from within daily life, public debate, and collective decision-making.