Scaffolding Futures Making: Facilitating a More Democratizing Futuring Practice

In this article, we develop a conceptual framework for democratizing futures making, a practice often dominated by corporate and professional elites. We argue that more inclusive participation requires a deeper engagement with the pedagogical dimensions of how people come to imagine, explore, and shape the future together. To this end, we introduce scaffolding as a structured approach to futures making through embedded, embodied, and emergent processes. In the first section, we critically examine futures literacy as an approach to democratizing futures making and show why its cognitivist and linguistic focus is limited. Drawing on design theory and organizational theory, we outline how a new materialist perspective offers a more viable alternative. In the second section, we revisit scaffolding as a pedagogical metaphor used to organize learning, reframing it through materialist perspectives to avoid prescriptive interpretations. In the final section, we describe how scaffolding can be put into practice as part of futures making. • A clearer conceptualization of how pedagogy can support the democratization of futures making. • Although futures literacy offers useful insights for teaching futures making, it relies too heavily on cognitive and linguistic models that overlook the material and grounded aspects of collective aspiration. • The traditional pedagogical metaphor of scaffolding often emphasizes instructor control and learner passivity, despite its learner-centered origins. • Drawing on new materialist interpretations, the article advances a socio-material understanding of scaffolding in which futures making involves learning that is embedded, embodied, and emergent.