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The RADAR Cycle Archive

A Future in Sync

"These days, it's hard to feel like we're on the same page: with each other, with the world around us, even with ourselves. In response, it feels like we're seeking the solid ground of synchrony: reaching out to the collective, reaching back to our roots, and reconsidering our relationship with space and time to find our footing yet again."

A Future in Sync was RADAR's inaugural cycle, exploring how we might find new rhythms of connection in an increasingly disconnected world. It featured our first experiments with decentralized research and collective imagination.

A Future in Sync

"These days, it's hard to feel like we're on the same page: with each other, with the world around us, even with ourselves. In response, it feels like we're seeking the solid ground of synchrony: reaching out to the collective, reaching back to our roots, and reconsidering our relationship with space and time to find our footing yet again."

A Future in Sync was RADAR's inaugural cycle, exploring how we might find new rhythms of connection in an increasingly disconnected world. It featured our first experiments with decentralized research and collective imagination.

While the site itself is no longer live, you can find all of the contents of our exploration archived here.

Front Matter

60 PAGES. THOUSANDS OF SIGNALS. ~50 CONTRIBUTORS. 12 EXPERTS. 1 COMMUNITY. A FUTURE IN SYNC.

How We Got Here

We know, you know, NASA knows, Timothée Chalamet knows: The vibes are decidedly off. We’ve lost our footing. We can’t find our rhythm. And it’s disorienting.

Our relationships with each other, ourselves, and the world around us have undergone monumental change at an unsustainable pace, hindering our ability to cope. “Everything, everywhere, all at once” is right.

Woof

From VUCA → BANI

Let’s summarize what we’ve covered so far: Loss; impermanence; misalignment; atomization; system overload. Each is accelerating out of hand in its own special way. Resilience is in the gutters, metrics of fragility are worsening, long-enduring staples of stability are finding themselves on shakier ground: Our brains are in constant fight-or-flight mode.

How It Feels Now

If this report hasn’t hit you in the feels already, it will now. Because this bit is visceral — at least, it was for us. We’re seeing post-narrative discomfort converging on fatigue, driving a feeling we can only describe as paralysis; it’s no wonder we’re hunkering down and slipping into nihilism. All of this is — almost painfully — relatable.

As you hear it from the voices of community members and respondents from around the globe, see it brought to life in absurdist memes and morbid TikToks, and confront the realities of life in this moment you just get it. You get that things ~aren’t great~.

How We Find Our Way Out

In the wise words of Red Redding: “Every man has a breaking point.” And as we swirl around in this particular vortex, it seems we’ve collectively reached ours.

But it’s not just at the individual level; entire fields of thinking are realizing that ‘what was’ won’t hold.

Conclusion

What started as one Signal (it was about a hospital building trying to figure out how to help its patients feel more in sync) amounted to all of this. And for so many in the community, the process was deeply cathartic. Because this was an exploration that truly touched us all. That captured the moment we’re living through as a global collective and reflected on what got us here to begin with.

The loss, misalignment, impermanence, atomization, and system overload have been bubbling up for some time. The moody mix of post-narrative discomfort, fatigue, and paralysis has led us to hunkering down and falling into the cold embrace of nihilism. And the realization that there simply has to be something different: a new way out; a break from the faulty frameworks of old.

FutureMapping

Most reports stop before they ever get started (in our humble opinion), failing to extend their thinking into imagined futures that drive meaningful implications for what’s to come. So for us, this is where things get really interesting.

Our Future Mapping process was built on a philosophy of 3 Ps: balancing push with pull so that we could ultimately plot a path of action into the future that would set the course for our incubation and delivery stages.

Gratitude

RADAR Instigator: Fancy

Research Lead: Keely Adler

A More Play-Full Future

"What if play wasn't just viewed as a leisure activity? What if it weren't diminished as the domain of kids? What if – instead – it was viewed as a new mindset and a new approach for how we exist in, interact with, and build the world?"

this cycle emerged organically from A Future in Sync, where we discovered that maybe – just maybe – cultivating a better future comes down to making the world a little more playful. we explored play not just as leisure but as a new approach to existence itself, asking big questions about who gets to play, whether it's a privilege or a right, and what's at stake if a more playful future doesn't come to fruition.

A More Play-Full Future

"What if play wasn't just viewed as a leisure activity? What if it weren't diminished as the domain of kids? What if – instead – it was viewed as a new mindset and a new approach for how we exist in, interact with, and build the world?"

this cycle emerged organically from A Future in Sync, where we discovered that maybe – just maybe – cultivating a better future comes down to making the world a little more playful. we explored play not just as leisure but as a new approach to existence itself, asking big questions about who gets to play, whether it's a privilege or a right, and what's at stake if a more playful future doesn't come to fruition.

While the site itself is no longer live, you can find all of the contents of our exploration archived here.

Front Matter

The live version of this report was jam-packed with play: from easter eggs and doodling and an in-report personality quiz that gave you your very own playful archetype, to a print-and-play activity book and a miro-turned-multiplayer-playground.

We've done our best to include as much of the fun in this archive as we were able.

A Trip through Time

An impromptu game of hide-and-seek in the park. A random, silly little dance after a small, personal victory. The calm surface of a lake inviting an irresistible urge to pick up a stone and skip it. Moments like these happen every day, everywhere, all around the world. These displays of universal human behavior are unprompted, natural, and remind us that there’s something powerful — in the deepest, molecular level of our cells, across our bodies and minds — that motivates us to play.

But what is play, really?

The State of Play

Our journey through time makes clear that the more power that play demonstrates — the more resistance, contempt, and hostility it meets — the more potent it grows. It’s this cycle that gives us an inkling into what play truly is.

A New Age for Play

Such playful questioning may start at the margins, but the disenfranchised margins are growing.

The old paradigms and structures of power established in the last decades and centuries have proven to be unsustainable and unscalable, leaving most people disillusioned and — in many ways — disempowered. As we explored in A Future In Sync, it’s time for new structures, new stories, and new behaviors to emerge in their place … and the charge is being led, snarkily and with many a meme, by young people all over the world.

Enter: The Play Archetypes

In the sections that follow, you’ll meet our five character types: The Enchantress, The Healer, The Mediator, The Teacher, and The Artist — each of whom brings something uniquely playful to the table, and helps us unlock a piece of play within ourselves and in the world. To truly manifest A More Play-Full Future, we’ll need all five cards in our hand, since their diversity of experience is critical to rounding out our relationship with play in every dimension.

And, of course, we’ll need our Trickster friend along for the ride. His ability to challenge norms, take risks, and bring a sense of fun and playfulness to even the most serious of situations acts like a power-up for each of our characters — and he’s known to bridge the gaps in between too, bringing our characters together in unexpected ways to multiply their individual impact.

Taking Play Off the Page

The Enchantress, The Healer, The Mediator, The Teacher, and The Artist.

If we can build toward a world where our collective hand includes each of these cards — where their roles are elevated in importance, and where we’re empowered as people, communities, and societies to embrace their gifts — that’s where we think we’ll find our better future.

Ready to build A More Play-Full Future?

If play is what we say it is, it's not enough for it to exist on these pages. Below, you’ll find two opportunities to turn this research into reality — in your life and in the world.

Partner Spotlight: KABOOM!

We believe that the future is community-owned.

We believe that better futures aren’t built in bubbles.

Gratitudes

Team ‍

RADAR Instigator: Fancy

Our Centaur Future

A Future in Love