2030: Envisaging the future of young people from 10 to 17 years in Lahti, Finland

2030: Envisaging the future of young people from 10 to 17 years in Lahti, Finland

Since the history of man, change has remained constant. Future is the harbinger of change; it has always come with surprises and disruption to man and her environment. In the past thirty years, we have observed a great disruption in Finland and other advanced countries. We have witnessed a profound revolution from industrial to information societies; we have seen that knowledge has replaced mass production as the basis of wealth, power, and social interaction (innovationwatch.com, 2005).

The environment has endured massive changes due to human action. It has been predicted that more and more changes are due to come in future and some of them may be entirely new and disruptive to us while others may be just minor or incremental changes. Some changes are desirable while others are undesirable. Most advanced countries have long started to develop new strategy and policies to help understand the future and pattern of changes that come with it, to be able to plan on how to manage or deal with it.

Since it has been confirmed that Governmental policies, innovative ideas and human actions can affect the kind of change, we will see in the future. The city of Lahti, Finland likewise is conscious of the facts that human actions and innovative ideas can help shape the future of their city. For this reason, they have therefore started to pull talents and resources together to plan for the future of Lahti.

In this article, therefore, we have been given a task to select any relevant aspect of this future of Lahti to discuss and highlight some salient future possible scenarios. The author, therefore, will be looking at the future of youngsters between 10 to 17 years in Lahti to imagine what their lifestyle will be like in the next 10 to 20 years.

In an attempt to produce this report, we will be looking at different key variables to help us shape up research questions of what will be expected and why. We will be answering questions like what will the youngsters probably like to see happening in 15 years and what will possible be trending in those periods. We will be developing different scenarios cases and finally, we will report these scenarios and present the possible best scenario of the kind of future that is possible and highlight the reasons why the author thinks so.

We used the FAR Future table tool to organize our variables and construct our future table. We then decided to list out possible key variables that we would like to work on. We choose Education, Health care, Leisure activities, Social communications, technology and the environment. We also decided on the values of the variables and determine their dependencies between the variables. Once we established the dependencies, we created a future path and made an image of the future and then tabulated for reporting. The variables we constructed will be explained below.

This study is very important because it informs the Lahti government of the possibilities of changes that might occur in 15 to 20 years to enable them to pull human and capital resources to support the most desirable changes. Our created scenarios are not forecasts but rather possible worlds. With them, they can prepare for the future and seize opportunities.