As the climate crisis continues, the question of who gets to shape the future, and how, has become increasingly urgent. Visions of the future are the building blocks of the futural public sphere; spaces where futures are imagined, deliberated and pursued. Desirable, alternative futures and pathways for their realisation reveal whom a group considers to be important social actors and what they believe are the necessary political levers for enacting change. Youth, although often marginalised in futural and environmental politics, are no different. In this paper, we ask how a future vision created by a Dutch youth environmental advocacy group seeks to intervene in the futural public sphere of water governance in the Netherlands. We employ techniques of close reading, thematic content and critical discourse analysis, and concepts of protagonists, antagonists and victims and of the future. Our findings reveal that the vision primarily extends existing governance frameworks into the future, reflecting dominant beliefs in Dutch political culture about pursuing change, and point to a potential gap between the politics of participation and politics of imagination in this instance of participatory futuring.

Against the background of continuous calls to democratize futures research and practice, this paper reports the results of a systematic literature review of the involvement of publics in participatory futuring processes. The paper considers three key research questions: Who participates in public futuring processes? Why are publics included in these processes? And what roles do they occupy? By considering practices of participation in futuring, we aim to build a comprehensive picture of the participatory futuring landscape and highlight elements of process design that may enhance or diminish a process's democratic potential. We conclude by suggesting directions for possible future research that could serve the field's continuing desire to democratize and further integrate participatory and critical approaches to futuring.

Speculative design is a subsidiary field of critical design practice. It generally involves developing scenarios based on a central object, often a prototype. Because it is concerned with alternative present and future states, many acknowledge the potential of speculative design for raising critical discussion and public engagement on science, technology, and society. In this article, we ask how the analogy of speculative design to thought experiments highlights or problematizes certain aspects of speculative design. Building on the work of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, we answer this question through a comparative conceptual analysis of speculative design and thought experimentation as they are understood in their original contexts. We go on to create a theoretical framework applied to four cases: Metamorphism; Walden, a game; The Substitute; and GoatMan. We argue that understanding speculative design by analogy to thought experiments could help design practitioners better achieve the aim of public engagement, enabling a more inclusive and nuanced discussion about the form and style of speculative design.