WorldMakers
Courses
Resources
Newsletter
We're building an alternative community of practice that transforms creativity from the limited potential of individual ideation to collective worldmaking, preparing people and organizations to thrive creatively through emergence, complexity, and collaboration.
Emergent Futures Lab exists to answer two fundamental questions:
These questions guide everything we do—from building the WorldMakers community to developing workshops, consulting with organizations, and creating transformative educational experiences. We serve innovation facilitators, business leaders, academics, consultants, organizations, individuals and educators who recognize that traditional creative methods have reached their limits.
If you've ever felt that traditional brainstorming sessions, design thinking workshops, or the double diamond method produce predictable results rather than breakthrough innovations, you've found the right place.
Our work emerges from a simple but profound empirical realization: conventional methods of creativity that focus on ideation and individual insight are fundamentally limited. From this awareness, we've researched and developed a powerful alternative approach that reveals how creativity actually emerges—through carefully designed processes of dynamic interactions between people, tools, materials, environments, and emergent novel possibilities. Engaging from within a total creative ecosystem forms the foundation of everything we teach, build, and facilitate.
As professionals and professors, we have spent decades researching, developing, testing, implementing, and teaching all aspects of creativity – from early childhood education to working on the creative transformation of state-wide transportation systems. Over the last decade at Montclair State University, we founded and continue to direct the award-winning MIX Lab—an innovation research center and experimental makerspace. Here, our team has developed and refined both student-centered approaches to creativity and agency that foster autonomy, agency, and creative confidence – and frameworks to activate creativity across multiple fields, businesses, and situations.
In highly diverse settings from schools to governmental organizations to businesses to arts organizations to community groups and individuals our proven innovation framework has transformed how innovation challenges are approached, how educators teach 21st century literacy, and how thousands of people have become confident creators and innovative problem-solvers. This deep and ongoing experience in innovation research, combined with our expertise in complexity and emergence, uniquely positions us to deliver transformative engagements that prepare people for our ever-more dynamic and uncertain futures.
Rather than treating creativity as something that happens inside individual minds, we help you discover how creativity emerges from relational assemblages—the dynamic interactions between people, tools, materials, environments, and possibilities. You'll learn that true innovation happens not through ideation, but through making and doing in the midst of complex systems. Our approach reveals creativity as a fundamentally collaborative, distributed process where breakthrough insights emerge from hands-on engagement with your challenges.
We privilege engaged making and doing over removed thinking and ideating. We refer to this as "making is thinking"—understanding emerges through engagement, not abstract planning. Our experience in developing curriculum for K-12 and higher education, to developing workshops or delivering presentations and keynote speeches on what creativity is and how do you do it, isn't just philosophical, it’s a practice. Our hands-on engagements unlock possibilities that pure conceptualization cannot reach. Through our proven Innovation Design Approach, every making activity becomes an exploration of emergence and agency.
In a world of unprecedented change, we prefer to work with complexity rather than against it. Our frameworks help others recognize that trying to control complex systems backfires and instead help them develop ways to sense and respond to emergent patterns that can create new possibilities. This approach to worldmaking—understanding how your daily actions in specific environments with specific tools continuously reshape reality—gives you tools for thriving in uncertainty.
As artificial intelligence transforms the landscape of work and learning, we are deeply engaged in developing techniques for how to maintain creative agency in an increasingly automated and algorithmic world. Rather than viewing AI in black and white terms, our frameworks help one invent ways to work with it as a relational partner in complex creative processes. This prepares people to teach and lead in contexts where traditional approaches become obsolete, focusing on developing new forms of creative autonomy and agency.
Discover how to build creative capacities and confidence through an emergent and worldly framework that transforms abstract concepts into tangible outcomes – whether in the classroom or in the boardroom.
In classrooms, this is particularly powerful: Our student-centered methodology models fostering a self-directed problem-solving and creative collaboration—the essential skills for thriving in uncertain futures. Through hands-on digital design and fabrication experiences, develop capabilities that transfer across tools and contexts, preparing you to navigate whatever technological changes emerge next.
Join a community of innovation facilitators, academics, consultants, and educators who are seeking alternatives to traditional approaches. Our WorldMakers community creates space for meaningful conversations that would be impossible elsewhere, connecting you with people who sense that creativity involves more than individual brainstorming but haven't yet found language for what they've always known. You'll discover collaborators for your work and build relationships that extend far beyond any single program.
We don't just teach about emergent creativity—we embody it in every interaction. Whether through workshops, newsletters, or community building, we consistently model the experiences and approaches we advocate. We teach and facilitate the way you want others to learn, always modeling emergent, open-ended challenges that empower agency rather than prescribed solutions.
Our weekly newsletter, Emerging Futures, and extensive resources provide frameworks that help you articulate what you've intuited about creativity but couldn't express. You'll receive content that challenges conventional approaches while providing practical frameworks for working with creative processes. Each piece is designed not just to inform, but to activate new ways of engaging with innovation challenges.
Gain access to a comprehensive toolkit of practices, visualizations, and exercises that help you directly experience how creativity emerges from relational assemblages. These aren't abstract concepts but embodied practices that can be immediately applied to real challenges. Our approach always emphasizes experimentation and discovery over predetermined outcomes.
From our university makerspace to professional development workshops, we create engaging environments where understanding emerges through hands-on experience. Our expertise with 3D printing, digital design, and fabrication technologies serves a larger philosophical purpose: demonstrating that the most profound insights often come not from analyzing problems, but from making and doing with them.
Rather than individual ideation.
Our deepest strength lies in creating conditions where diverse communities can discover new possibilities together. Unlike traditional consulting that delivers predetermined solutions, you'll participate in emergent processes where insights arise from the dynamic interactions between participants, tools, and environments.
This community-centered approach reflects our core insight: meaningful innovation rarely comes from isolated individuals but emerges from networks of relationships and practices. Whether you're joining the WorldMakers community, participating in professional development, or working with our innovation frameworks, you'll become a co-creator of new approaches rather than a passive recipient of expert knowledge.
That work with complexity rather than against it:
Many organizations know their current innovation methods aren't working for the complex challenges they face, but they're not sure how to move beyond brainstorming and ideation toward more effective approaches. We provide the frameworks, community, and hands-on experience needed to make this transition successfully.
Our clients and community members consistently discover that creativity is far more collaborative, ecological, distributed, and materially grounded than they previously understood. This isn't just a theoretical insight—it leads to fundamentally different practices that generate qualitatively different results.
If you're new to our work, consider subscribing to our newsletter or getting our book. If you're seeking a community of changemakers exploring alternatives to individualistic ideation models, WorldMakers might be your home. Want to chat? Drop us a line...
And if you'd like to get to know us better as individuals, explore our bios below.
