Parque Explora is a science museum in Medellín, Colombia's second-largest city. Several "community engagement" programs aim to make their public more diverse and to lower the barriers that separate the museum from certain local communities. The "Creative Labs" (Laboratorios creativos) are born from this intention. Each year's lab is different from the previous ones, but they all share four components: targeting people with some kind of social vulnerability; active participation; experimentation; and mixing science and art.

In 2022-2023, the theme was "the Future".

How

While the initiative was not limited to young people, four of the groups were composed of youths: one from a school, one from the Afro-descendant community, one from Indigenous communities, and another made up of "young leaders" connected through a church. Some of these groups were already established, while others were self-formed in response to an open call transmitted through local community leaders. Each group typically included 15 to 20 participants, except for the school group, which had 30.

The museum's invitation was to think about the future with the help of an artistic technique, and an artists collective. According to Luz Helena Oviedo Villegas, Outreach and science engagement coordinator, "We are very interested in art as a vehicle to, not only convey messages, but as a form to spark conversations with and among people." Parque Explora worked with several artistic collectives using serigraphy, ceramics, photography, and video: Tricilab, Sensopía, Moravia City Rappers, and Tallerarte. Several preparatory sessions were held before the workshops in order to help the artists combine the future-focused methodologies developed by Parque Explora with their artistic techniques.

Each group met four times for close to three hours. Since each workshop was led by a different artist collective, all groups worked differently. However, in principle, the sessions were organized as follows: Session 1 introduced key concepts from futures studies, along with the artistic techniques participants would be using. Participants also discussed possible and preferred futures. Session 2 was more about new possibilities, and alternative futures. Sessions 3 and 4 focused more on what participants can do today to have a say about (or in) the future.

In practice, it proved challenging to both use the creative techniques that the art collectives came with, and think about the future. "The collectives are really good at getting people to express themselves, but they are not all that focused on the future", reflects Luz Helena.

At the end, all the participants gathered in the museum for an exhibition and a discussion with and among them.

What was learned

According to Luz Helena, "The first lesson I learned was that the participants' territory is very present in their answers. For participants from indigenous groups, in particular, their future projection is to go back to their territories and to do something for them."

Most of the participants said that they were able to develop or strengthen some capabilities, and that it gave them a rare opportunity to talk about their future.

However, the workshops uncovered a strong feeling, among the participants, that it's other people who decide the future, not them. Maybe this is related to the context of vulnerability, of people who are struggling with so many things. However, the participants clearly found value in being able to talk about the future, to imagine better futures and to understand that they might have a say in them.

Looking forward

"If we had to do it again", says Luz Helena, "there are several things we would change. One is to have more control over the sessions, so that the 'futures' aspect of them remains strong. Another, which we are already implementing, is to work with artistic collectives who are already an assembled group, and mostly work in their neighborhoods rather than asking the participants to come to Parque Explora."

The last challenge is to always be more relevant to people. In 2023-2024, Parque Explora didn't impose a topic, we asked the groups to come up with a question that was important to them. Four out of six chose an environmental issue such as solid waste, water quality, or changes in land use in connection with gentrification. In 2024-2025, the relationship with nature is the main, overarching topic for the whole of Parque Explora, including the Creative Labs.