Hello Futurist,
By now, you know that the future isn’t something we predict, but it can be something we listen for…Imagine futures found in everyday conversations, shaped by memory, aspirations, and quiet desire. They live in gestures, in choices, in the stories people tell when no one’s asking for trends. When we tune in, those signals become a map. Not to what’s fashionable, but to what’s meaningful.
What you will find inside today’s issue:
The Tool: Ethnographic Futures Research (EFR), a way to draw out vivid, personal visions of tomorrow straight from the people who will live it.
Step Into the Future: how EFR might help us understand a specific beauty segment.
Back to the Present: a practical checklist for running your own EFR exercise, so you can start shaping more human futures today.
Let’s jump right in.
THE TOOL
✦ What Are We Talking About? ✦
In the late 1970s, Dr. Robert Bayard Textor, a pioneering anthropologist, felt that most future-thinking was too removed from real people’s lived experiences. So he developed Ethnographic Futures Research, a way to explore the future by asking people to imagine it. EFR is about surfacing multiple, culturally-informed visions of what might be.
✦ How It Works ✦
Instead of relying on trends or data alone, EFR invites individuals to imagine their own future, in their own words. Through deep, one-on-one conversations, participants are asked to explore three versions of what might lie ahead: the best case, the worst case, and the most likely outcome. These imagined futures are rooted in personal context and shaped by culture, memory, hope, and fear.
What emerges isn’t prediction, but perspective. By listening closely and looking for patterns, repeated themes, tensions, desires, we begin to see what matters most. These insights can then be translated into strategic direction, brand positioning, or creative exploration. It’s a way of making the future more human, of building it from the ground up.
✦ Why It Matters ✦
EFR helps professionals uncover the hopes, fears, and cultural values that shape how people actually envision the future and leads to:
Deeper emotional insight: to go beyond surface trends and understand what truly matters to audiences on a personal level.
Culturally grounded innovation: to develop products, services, and experiences that resonate with lived realities.
Strategic empathy: to design with, not for and align vision with the communities it serves instead of imposing one from the top down.
STEP INTO THE FUTURE
Now let’s imagine the future of textured haircare through an Ethnographic Futures Research lens. To keep this exploration grounded, we’ll focus on a specific community and need: people of African descent living in Europe and how their relationship to textured hair might evolve by 2040 across identity, culture, and care.