Anja Melander

Futures thinker, designer & author


ABOUT 

I am a futures thinker, designer and author based in Stockholm, working at the intersection of strategic foresight, storytelling and systems change. With over a decade of experience across cultural institutions, innovation labs and the public sector, I’m currently writing a book on the imagination crisis and how speculative design can help us reclaim agency in the face of collapsing systems.

My work is rooted in the belief that we cannot build what we cannot imagine – and that imagination is a collective act. I create experiences, host workshops and build narratives that help people think and feel more confident in their ability to shape the future.

Imagination Crisis

Imagination Crisis

My book “The Imagination Crisis: The Art of Shaping the Future” will be published by Fri Tanke in January 2027 (first in Swedish).

The book — half manifesto, half handbook — explores imagination as power and society as a dream machine; non-doing as resistance and imagination as infrastructure. A book about what keeps us stuck—and how we break free.

Gather Festival

MY PHILOSOPHY

The future is a collective act of imagination

A muscle that needs practice

A force that cannot be predicted, but shaped.

A story we choose to believe in

Too important to be left to the futurists

Alive, open and ours to build

Dream a little before you think

Dream a little before you think