Abstract

The report documents the five Future Workshops that the IZT conducted for the Federal Ministry of Education and Research at the end of 2001 as part of the German Research Dialogue Futur. The aim of the Future Workshops was to support the work of the Futur focus groups with regard to the guiding visions and scenario construction, and in doing so to explicitly develop normative futures in a visionary way. In doing so, it was particularly important to take up topics that had been touched on in the focus groups but not explored in depth, and to establish cross-relationships between the questions posed by the focus groups. In this way, the orientation of the dialogue process to the needs of society was further strengthened. The method of the future workshops was adapted to the specific task (shortened realisation phase). The results of the future workshops were fed back into the focus group work. A comparative evaluation of the future workshops rounds off this report.

Authors

Gaßner, Robert; Steinmüller, Karlheinz; with the collaboration of Scheermesser, Mandy and Würtenberger Felix