time travel
Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, Powys PSB, and the Bwyd Powys Partnership needed a way to bring communities into genuine conversation about the future of food. They wanted an experience that makes the abstract visceral and the distant feel urgent.
Clients: Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, Powys PSB, Bwyd Powys Partnership, National Infrastructure Commission for Wales, Esmée Fairbairn
Immersive experience design
creative scriptwriting
community engagement
facilitation
environmental communication
What we did
We built a time machine. A planetarium dome transformed into a solar-punk interior became the vessel; a character called Mrs Brychan, a Crickhowell resident from 1939, became the guide. Participants moved through three moments in time (the pre-industrial past, the uncomfortable present, and a future they designed themselves) before presenting their vision to local decision-makers in the same space.
The experience opened in the past, where archive footage of seasonal farming, community harvest, and living soil made the pre-green-revolution era feel not nostalgic but instructive. The time machine then lurched into the present (deforestation, ultra-processed food, farmers under financial pressure). From there, participants worked with creative professionals to make a short documentary set in 2035: regenerative farms, restored soil, local food networks, policy that had actually caught up with reality. The final act brought local leaders and decision-makers back into the dome to watch what the community had made, and then to talk about what it would take to get there. When the Bwyd Powys Partnership needed to replicate the approach without planetarium infrastructure, we distilled it into a portable toolkit: a magical mystery box, community facilitators trained as time-travel guides, the same imaginative logic in a suitcase. The methodology then travelled further still, to the Pierhead in Cardiff Bay, where Governing with Nature used the same temporal framework to move Wales's infrastructure commissioners from institutional review into something more like genuine ecological reckoning.
We will be recreating the format in 2028 for the Llifo project. More on that here.
The difference it made
The Future Generations Commissioner named the original experience one of the defining creative projects of the last decade. More concretely, it demonstrated that communities don't need to be consulted about the future, but need to be invited to imagine it.