Paper short abstract:

Imagine life on earth 30 years from now: How will people live? How will they eat, travel and dress? The paper reports from a recent documentation-and-research project. Methods and results are discussed, and the collected responses are compared with those from a similar project, carried out in 1999.

Paper long abstract:

The Norwegian Ethnological Research institute is a tradition archive that has specialised in documenting the history of everyday life through qualitative questionnaires. The paper reports from a documentation initiative carried out for the research project 'Imagine - Contested futures of sustainability'. The project aims at exploring the complex relations between how people imagine the future and how they act in the present.

The documentation initiative was designed to gather a variety of current ideas about the future. Informants were recruited mainly in two ways: from a list of regular respondents and through ads in social media. The questionnaire design allows for different response strategies, and some of them will be presented.

The collected texts have been analysed and sorted with a narratological framework, suited for extracting perspectives and priorities applied by the writers. Two of the dominant themes, labelled by us as 'The crisis ladder' and 'The Utopia of frugality', will be discussed. Finally, tendencies from the recent collection will be compared with results from a similar project, carried out in 1999, and an argument will be made for extended and repeated futurological documentation efforts.