Future Lab & Co-Creation

The question

How do we imagine models of sustainable tourism for the Colli Tortonesi?

That was the question put to 33 people at the Vinili e Vinelli festival in September 2024 — a group from ten countries, spread across every age from 21 to 70 and up. Nobody came to reach agreement. They came to imagine together. This was Horizon 001, cocoex's first community-led campaign and its first Future Lab.

The Future Lab

A Future Lab isn't a normal workshop. It uses Robert Jungk's Zukunftswerkstatt method, where a community works through three phases — critique, utopia, and implementation — less about consensus than about what people come up with when given time, structure, and room to speculate. Horizon 001's ran during Vinili e Vinelli, the annual music-and-wine festival in the Colli Tortonesi hills, with Memose Vithana taking part as an embedded artist — inside the process, not leading it.

What the community proposed

The group worked on sustainable tourism: the kind that serves the territory instead of using it up. They proposed slow-tourism routes linking local producers, built around exchange between generations — younger visitors and older residents learning from each other. At the end of the Lab, the community voted on which NGO the campaign should support, and chose Slow Food Tortona.

The report

cocoex wrote up a formal report on the Future Lab and delivered it to Slow Food Tortona, who built the community's ideas into their own plans. For a participatory process, that's a rare result: the report was actually used.

What came after

About half the group met again at a cocoex event at Cantine Volpi the next summer, in 2025 — the community kept going after the festival ended, which was the whole idea.

Impact

The community's proposals reached Slow Food Tortona through a formal report, and the organisation built the vision into its planning — imagination turned into something a real organisation could act on.