Cosy Futures Creator

What are your project goals?

The Cosy Futures Creator (CFC) is an AI chatbot that aims to convert future anxiety into empowered optimism. Targeted at a youth audience, it helps users imagine what they would like their ideal daily lives, their cosy futures, to look like, and how they can individually and collectively work towards making them a reality.

Our project goal is to develop a functional prototype that has been tested with youth audiences and is ready for further development and integration with our media partners.

What value does the Cosy Futures Creator provide for journalism?

The CFC is a novel tool for media houses to engage younger audiences. Our tool integrates analytical and solutions-oriented journalism into established future planning frameworks from future studies. Instead of just consuming news, users can interactively explore topics relevant to their lives. The CFC tool uses high-quality, customised information from the media houses’ databases to help users plan how they can start building their cosy futures.

We aim to generate value for media houses by providing an interactive journalism engagement tool, and by making quality journalism more relevant to the daily lives of audiences worried and feeling disempowered about their futures. We are partnered with wochentaz and their future section for the development of our project. Our pilot tool will be based on taz content, and be tested in partnership with them.

Who are you?

The CFC is a project of Next Era, a youth media initiative exploring how we can build brighter futures for our generation.

Nour Attalla is a futurist researcher. He’s passionate about creating more inclusive, empowering, and future-oriented discourses in society. Nour has a background in futures research and youth media initiatives.

Mitsuo Iwamoto is an award winning journalist. He’s passionate about channelling the power of storytelling to create more democratic and just futures. His work has been published in wochentaz Zukunft, Spiegel and Zeit Online.

Robert Manschke is a software developer working at Amazon Web Services (AWS), with a specialisation in AI and machine learning. He leads technical development of the CFC.

Our project is supported by Luise Strothmann, co-managing editor of wochentaz and Aleksi Neuvonen, founder of Demos Helsinki think tank.

Information on the Funding Program