Making Imagined Futures Stick: Practical Knowledge and Translation in Future-Making

Paper in proceeding, 2026

A key issue in future-making is how imagined futures become durable beyond the conversations in which they are articulated. Drawing on a two-phase qualitative study in the Swedish built environment sector, combining 38 interviews and observations from online scenario workshops involving 21 practitioners, we explain how this happens in practice. Our analysis focuses on two analytically related moments. One moment concerns how practitioners open up conversation and negotiation around future cues; another concerns how they narrow discussion into formulations that can be written down and reported as shared inscriptions. We theorize these as moments of translation. Across both moments, naming, templating, and warranting recur as heterogeneous pathways, each mobilizing a different form of practical knowledge that is both carried into and enacted in the situation. Naming works mainly through portable vocabularies, templating through representational formats, and warranting through practical judgments of legitimacy. The paper advances a practice-theoretic account of how future-making is translated across representational thresholds and shows that what gains durability is not the “best” imagined future itself, but an inscription made durable enough to travel.