The Neological Institute is a workshop-performance hybrid focused on the role language can play in inspiring future realities. It is an immersive format designed to show the power of new words — neologisms — to evoke new worlds, and to engage participants in futures thinking through the physical, playful act of coining language together.

The format originated in 2015, when Pantopicon co-founder Nik Baerten created “napkin future NF036, The Neological Institute”. The fictional narrative fragment was inspired by science fiction writers who use language — especially neologisms — as an evocative instrument to mould futures into being, with particular reference to the work of Polish author Stanisław Lem. The napkin inspired the design of a workshop-performance that would immerse participants in the on-boarding experience of new employees of this fictional institute on their first day of work.

A first public edition ran in June 2016 at the Design Research Society’s 50th anniversary conference Future-Focused Thinking in Brighton (UK), in a four-hour format. Participants walked into a room styled as a slightly bureaucratic, laboratory-like setting, were welcomed by the Institute’s president (Nik Baerten) and vice-president (Virginia Tassinari), received a lab coat, nametag and function description, and were initiated into the Institute’s core procedures. The ritual unfolds in four steps: deconstruction of the today (cutting key terms from newspapers into components), lexicogenesis (combining components with pre- and suffixes to form new words, since at the Institute new meaning is born from the word and not the reverse), praxis (embedding the new word in a sentence so meaning can be deduced from context), and constellography (combining new terms into constellations that give rise to plausible future scenarios with their own underlying logic). As a closing act, each neologian picks a favourite neologism and sends it — with its new meaning — by postcard to a friend, politician or business leader, as a solution stimulus to open a third way of thinking beyond today’s dichotomies.

The Neological Institute is available as an in-company or organisational format and can be framed thematically around the specific futures a client wants to explore.