In August the first Brasil Futures Forum took over Rio de Janeiro for three days: 144 sessions across cultural houses around the city, closing at the Museu do Amanhã. It brought together a community of futurists, designers, researchers and activists that had never been in one place before. The whole Envisioning team was there too, all five of us in the same city for the first time.
We came to do research. We ended up building the event's backbone.
The programme site
Two weeks before the forum, there was still no online programme. It lived in a spreadsheet with about fifty tabs. So I vibe-coded one: every session, speaker and venue, filterable by track, with a personal schedule you could save.
It became the site everyone used. Around 1,500 people opened it on the Monday and about 1,000 a day over the weekend.
What no one saw
A forum this size cannot be attended. With up to 16 sessions running at once in different buildings, every participant saw a slice of it. So after the event we read all 144 sessions as one text and distilled the arguments that only appear when you read across rooms.
The result is a cartography of 49 ideas in seven constellations, linked to the sessions that support them. Perception precedes prediction. Territory is the unit. Samba is infrastructure. 37 of the 49 ideas could not have been seen by any single person, because the sessions behind them ran at the same time.
Potência Brasil
The research we brought was about soft power: the people, works, movements and ideas that project Brazil onto the world. We mapped more than 170 of them, from Bossa Nova to Brasília, and built a small game that asks whether you recognise each one. 78 people played and gave over 7,000 answers. Brazilians and visitors recognised very different things, though with only 14 visitors in the sample that is a hint, not a finding.
On the Sunday I also ran a vibe coding workshop for people who had never written code, with five co-facilitators. The prompt was to build something that shows an aspect of Brazilian culture to the world.
After
The forum is now working on a printed publication, and we are adding a layer that collects what participants posted and shared, so the record holds more than the official programme. Everything is still online at bff.envisioning.com, in Portuguese and English.
