If an image is worth a thousand words, then an experience could well be worth a thousand images. Being immersed in a situation allows us to learn using all our senses and faculties while at the same time integrating what we learn into an image of both ourselves and the world. Reading a book, seeing a documentary or handling a souvenir from a foreign land can never replace the richness of actually being there ourselves. We might think we know what it would be like, but our assumptions often fail us. Why would it be any different with (predicting) the future? If we are already creating scripts and videos about possible futures (as in design fiction), we could extend them to create experiences in which we might 'rehearse' what it might be like to live in these futures.

The emerging field of experiential futures offers various techniques to design immersive, site-specific and 'in-the-wild' experiences of possible futures. These techniques build on theatre improvisation, disaster drills, guerilla interventions, experience design, gaming and vision quests to create direct experiences of what life in a proposed future might be like.

• Prehearsal
• Guerilla futures
• LARP / Role playing
• Transmedia stories
• Context aware narrative/locative media
• Action foresight
• Red team
• Ambient foresight
• Experience prototyping
• Tactical media
• Design ethnography
• Culture-jamming
• ARGs
• Improv and theatre games
• Disaster drills
• Experience design
• MMORPGS