Epaminondas Christophilopoulos

Dr Epaminondas Christophilopoulos leads the UNESCO Chair on Futures Research at the Institute of Technology and Research (FORTH), established in 2019. He is in charge of the design and realization of the program “Futures Literacy” for public and private education institutions in Greece.

The project aims to enable students understand that their images and assumptions about the future frame what they see and what they do in the present. At the same time, the process of exploring the future is integrally linked with cultivating imagination, critical thinking, and resilience. During participatory workshops, the students (a) explore the future (weak signals, trends, megatrends, forces of change); (b) they make sense of the future (evaluating what is desirable and what not, what is possible and what is less likely to happen); and (c) eventually come up with a shared vision for a desirable future for the team, the class, and the school.

In support of teachers and children, the UNESCO Chair team adjusted in Greek the activity book “Playing with the Future”. Published this year by the University of Crete Press, the book aims at helping younger generations think about, reflect and shape the future.

Since 2012, UNESCO has been promoting Futures Literacy as a soft skill that enables us to: (a) realize why it is important to imagine the future, and (b) to learn how it’s done. It allows us to understand the root of our fears and hopes, improving our ability to take advantage of the power of images of the future in order to grasp the diversity of the people around us, but also of our choices.