Building a Better Future Through Imagination
Project Unsung is testing the power of speculative storytelling and design — and the vision of a diverse collective — to rethink and shape the future of UNHCR’s work.
By Amy Lynn Smith — Independent Writer + Strategist
It’s human nature to dream about the future — to imagine what might be 10 years from now or even 1,000. Consider the stories of Ray Bradbury or movies like the Star Wars series. Although works of science fiction or futuristic fantasy sometimes predict a dystopian world, many are rich in wonder and optimism, imagining new universes with their own values, relationships, and visions.
That’s one way to consider Project Unsung, which was developed by members of the Strategic Communications team at the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR’s) Innovation Service in late 2020. An ongoing endeavor, the project has yielded a report, although it’s not a typical report. Instead, it’s a collection of stories, illustrations, poems, and more that imagine what the future might hold not just for UNHCR and displaced people, but for the world itself.
“This type of experimentation in art, design and narrative foresight work is not new, but it was new to us as the Innovation Service. And we wanted to move beyond this linear way of creating possible futures and attempt to build a constellation of worlds where there was more solidarity, more compassion, and more plural opportunities to see what might exist,” says Lauren Parater, Project and Creative Lead for the initiative. “It started with this seed of asking ‘How do we intentionally use imagination to challenge the status quo within our organization?’”
Although Project Unsung is iterative and ongoing, the initial concept was to imagine how the world could be different in the future, by using speculative storytelling and design. Speculation is a strategy for imagining and practicing the future, according to the Innovation Service project team, which also includes Cian McAlone, Project Manager and Editor, and Shanice Da Costa, who leads the project’s art direction and design.
“We had this basket of methodologies we thought would be cool to try out — what could things like speculative design, science fiction, and the role of narratives lead to?” McAlone says. “We started out thinking more about transformational innovation rather than incremental innovation, and how we can be a bit more radical in our work by locating it in the future, in this speculative zone that could open up the way for more creativity and bold thinking.”
Parater adds that putting challenges faced by the humanitarian sector — including persistent mindsets such as the “white savior complex” or colonialist thinking — in the context of the future was strategic. Rather than examining them in the here and now, people within the organization might feel less uncomfortable about exploring structures that still incorporate these outdated and often harmful views, and must be addressed to improve UNHCR’s work.
“As I began working on the project, I was very interested in how we were bringing in the future but also the past,” Da Costa says. “And I would get so immersed in working on the art that instead of feeling lost or confused, which is usually the way things go when you read about the world today, I felt hopeful.”
Sowing seeds of imagination and possibility
To begin assembling a collective of creators for Project Unsung, the team sought a diversity of perspectives and voices. Even more important, they wanted people who were asking questions similar to those the Innovation Service was asking and were “deeply interested in finding new ways to communicate around displacement and the future of our work,” Parater says. “We wanted to make sure we weren’t only hiring people with a Western point of view, because this project is really grounded in recognizing a plurality of perspectives.”
The call for applications for possible creatives resulted in a response that was “overwhelming” in terms of both quality and level of interest, she says. Project Unsung began with six initial consultants, who were joined by additional contributors from UNHCR and other institutions such as the Sierra Club and Parsons School of Design. The project included community meetings, workshops, and ongoing group chats, all done remotely due to COVID-19, as well as each contributor’s individual work. This structure created an opportunity for everyone — contributors and Innovation Service project team members alike — to learn from each other.
“I saw this connection like a little mushroom community,” Da Costa says. “It was organic, the way information was spreading to everyone and everyone was sharing. That’s where most of the lessons came from and, as Lauren described it, it became a collective. I see it as a multiverse where everyone belongs.”
In addition, the contributors worked closely with the Innovation Service team and other UNHCR colleagues to conduct research, as well as some working directly with refugees, again ensuring the widest possible view of the world and displacement.
“It’s about the imaginative capacity of UNHCR to innovate, to create new solutions,” McAlone says. “Instead of innovative solutions that are driven by people’s current structure or the narratives they’ve been taught, imagination says ‘Hold on a minute. Let’s depart from ideas that, on closer inspection, reinforce a system that is inadequate and let’s build something new: a future that is fundamentally closer to our values or objectives, or connects the dots with the other global challenges of the day that interlink.’”
For example, a mindset that believes we’re not connected to nature will create a very different outcome in working with climate displacement than one that thinks we are, in fact, connected to nature. What’s more, the potential future outcomes might shift even more if there’s a recognition that nature is a system we’re all part of, rather than something we want to control.
“Project Unsung uses the creative tools we have to make some of these invisible narratives visible and say, ‘How can we create new ways of encountering the world and valuing the world, to help us realize the best possible scenario for the context of UNHCR’s work?’” Parater says. “Because we do have choices when thinking about the world we want to build. But every decision we make today is creating those futures or taking away other possible futures — just as the choices of our ancestors are operating in our lives now.”
Da Costa has a unique take on the experience. “Speaking metaphorically and visually, it’s been like removing a pair of shades and replacing them with a kaleidoscope.” In other words, speculative storytelling and design doesn’t necessarily mean creating the opposite of what exists, but instead accessing alternate dimensions.
Parater adds that Da Costa’s work in art direction, illustration, and new worlds she envisioned that stir the imagination differently than the written word brought a novel perspective to the project — creating a “speculative playground” for people to engage with as part of the report.
Digging for foundational cracks
Although the stories and other work created for Project Unsung imagine the future, as noted they also examine the lingering remnants of the past. Harmful narratives such as humanitarians as the saviors to communities who are somehow diminished or creating archetypes of “good” refugees, which implies there are bad ones, need to be replaced with fresh approaches.
“We wanted to very transparently dig into the root causes of some of the complex challenges the organization faces,” Parater says. “We don’t talk a lot about colonialism or capitalism or these sort of imperial modes of working. But in trying to imagine different possibilities, they have to be acknowledged. Even innovation itself can be destructive in some ways if it can take away from possible futures. We were as critical of innovation as a tool for change and the narratives that upholds as we were of other narratives.”
That’s one of the many reasons the Innovation Service wanted to bring in a plurality of voices, to consider the many other forms of knowing and being in the world — the unsung songs and untold stories that might be buried unintentionally under decades or even centuries of ingrained perspectives.
What’s more, the team wanted to be intentional in thinking about a future that’s grounded in justice. “It’s very easy for us as an organization to talk about what we’re against,” Parater says. “But what are we for? And how do we embed that in UNHCR visions we think should be coming in the future? And how do we build toward those visions of what we’re standing for, not just what we’re standing against?”
Da Costa adds that having a dynamic group of collaborators, and a very inclusive one, brought about a new and exciting way of approaching how to create a different future. As she says, each story explores different views yet allows the reader to feel as if they’re part of the picture.
The stories and illustrations in the first report are most powerful when experienced, rather than described, but they include reflections on displacement, identities, generating futures of belonging through solidarity; imagining UNHCR in 2047 and a new unit devoted to intergenerational responsibility; and an essay that weaves non-Western theories of the creation of the universe into a critique of humanitarian work.
Visions for a flourishing Project Unsung
In addition to uncovering fault lines — areas for UNHCR to improve — Project Unsung provided numerous lessons learned the team intends to take into forthcoming iterations of the project.
The team learned that a great deal of time is needed to do work like this, more time than originally expected. Although UNHCR is an emergency response organization, there’s a need for what Parater calls “slow innovation” if it’s going to be inclusive. A tight timeline also didn’t allow much time to develop a theory of change, which would define what true success looks like and set more clear objectives.
Also, the team was initially very deliberate about who was brought into Project Unsung, to create a safe space for imagining every possibility. She says in the future, there could be value in bringing in UNHCR personnel who might be more skeptical.
McAlone brings up a significant lesson learned from the project management perspective. “It didn’t always feel easy but it proved very beneficial to put our entire trust in the collaborators to really run with their instincts and to be creative and push the boat out in the way they’re confident and impassioned by,” he says. “Putting faith in the collaborators we had on board, rather than insisting on a predefined output, was a risk that proved fruitful.”
Although publishing a significant story collection is one major output of Project Unsung, it’s only one aspect — and it’s just the beginning. The world, and the crises that exist within it, are constantly changing, which means UNHCR must continually imagine new ways to respond and be proactive about reinventing itself for the future.
“At the core of this project is culture change, behavioral change, worldbuilding, and promoting creative thinking in the organization,” Parater says. “The work around Project Unsung will continue to be slow, because that change is slow, and we need to have as many visions as possible to operate in so we can ultimately make decisions and take actions that help us best build the worlds we’re working toward — and can bring solidarity alongside displaced communities. One thing I especially like about this project is that we’re talking about imagination instead of innovation, and that difference in framing alone opens up many new windows of ways we can work at UNHCR.”
This page is part of UNHCR’s Project Unsung portfolio. Project Unsung is a speculative storytelling project that brings together creative collaborators from around the world to help reimagine the humanitarian sector. To discover more about the initiative and other contributions in the collection, you can go to the project website here.
