What is the Future of Connection?

Connection isn’t static. It shifts with how we live, what we value, and what we notice.

We connect constantly—to people, ideas, screens, spaces, and rhythms—often without even realising it. That’s what makes it powerful, and also easy to overlook.

Today, many of our habits and systems are built around connection, but that doesn’t mean we feel it. Screens, signals, rituals, and routines shape how we relate to each other, to ourselves, and to the world around us. Some connections are loud and intentional, others barely visible yet deeply shaping.

The Future of Connection is an ongoing curatorial exploration into these layers. It looks at how connection is felt, formed, or forgotten, and what that reveals about the cultural moment we are living through.

Rather than reducing connection to communication or technology, it opens different entry points:

a moment of pause – a shared flavour – a strange encounter – a gesture repeated – a digital trace – a silence that stays with you

This approach invites reflection across disciplines. It draws from art, foresight, technology, business, nature, food, and emotion. The aim is not to simplify, but to stretch the ways we understand connection.

Vivian White approaches the theme as a living framework that brings together cultural signals, speculative concepts, and sensory experiences. Not everything needs to be solved. Some things need to be sensed first.

This is an invitation to pay closer attention—to what connects, what lingers, and what might be asking to emerge.

How the Theme Comes to Life

The Future of Connection is a curated exploration by Vivian White. It brings together two approaches to sensing and shaping what might come next: immersive formats that invite experience, and tools that help make sense of change.

This is part of a broader practice of futures curation—an approach that treats the future not as something to predict, but as something to notice, explore, and feel. It involves selecting signals, shaping interpretations, and creating spaces where people can reflect with all their senses. Rather than offering clear answers, it opens subtle prompts that invite deeper attention.

Each format offers a different way in. Some are shared through physical presence, others through structured tools and conceptual framing. Together, they reflect a moment of inquiry into the cultural and emotional shape of connection today.

– Soirée of Serendipity

A future-facing gathering that blends conversation, sensory experience, and unexpected encounters. Art, food, sound, and rhythm come together to create a space where ideas are not just discussed but felt.

The Soirée is grounded in the belief that knowledge does not only pass through information. It moves through scent, taste, movement, and emotion. It is designed for those who want to experience ideas with their full attention—through the body as much as the mind.

View past edition

– Fibres Futures Radar

A curated foresight radar mapping signals and shifts around how we connect—physically, digitally, socially, and emotionally. It supports reflection and strategy in organisations that want to look forward with clarity and nuance.

The Radar reflects a more structured but equally curated approach: gathering fragments, identifying patterns, and translating them into directional insight.

Coming soon / Request a preview

– It Starts Within – Digital Curation within EXTRALIVE

A curated digital selection exploring the internal landscapes of connection. Presented within the virtual art exhibition EXTRALIVE, this edition invites reflection on emotion, memory, identity, and the quiet patterns that shape how we reach toward others.

It explores connection not as interaction, but as inner sensing—a shift toward presence, perception, and emotional architecture.

Experience EXTRALIVE

How We Connect – Paired Reflections

We invited artists and business thinkers to answer the same set of questions about connection.

These two worlds often approach complexity differently — one through intuition and material, the other through systems and structure. By placing their reflections side by side, we explored how connection is felt, understood, and expressed across disciplines.

The same words - presence, rhythm, attention - can carry very different meanings. These pairings invite us to notice not only the responses, but the space between them.

By holding difference gently, new perspectives open. Each exchange becomes a small bridge — between ways of sensing, making, and relating.

Sometimes, connection begins there.

Read selected pairings
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Expanding the Theme

These formats offer a glimpse into one way of approaching the future—through presence, through texture, through curated attention. They are designed to be experienced, not just understood.

The theme can also be translated into other formats: salon nights, city interventions, audio conversations, or something more bespoke. Each can be adapted for organisational contexts—whether as a curated experience, a strategic conversation, or a starting point for deeper inquiry.

This is an invitation to shape it further together.