2026-07-13 · 10 min read · Raw Drafts / Estonia / Foresight
Estonia Is Rehearsing the Future
How Estonia uses strategic foresight in public policy, and why its work with signals, scenarios, and preparedness feels familiar inside Raw Drafts.
Estonia is usually discussed through the things it has already built. Digital identity, online public services, internet voting, startup infrastructure, and a state that learned to operate with limited resources have become part of the country’s international image.
That image makes Estonia look unusually future-oriented, although most of the examples belong to the past by now. The first digital signatures were introduced more than two decades ago. Online tax declarations and national databases are no longer experiments. They are ordinary infrastructure.
What interests me now is the less visible work behind the next set of decisions. How does a country prepare for things that have not happened yet, especially when it cannot control most of the forces shaping its future?
The Estonian State Chancellery describes strategic foresight as the systematic exploration of possible futures and the use of that work in present-day policymaking. The purpose is not to identify one correct future. It is to consider several ways the situation could develop, including possibilities that appear unlikely or inconvenient from the perspective of the present.
The distinction between forecasting and foresight is useful here. Forecasting extends existing information forward. Population figures, tax receipts, energy demand, or healthcare costs can be modelled according to what is already happening. That gives governments something concrete to plan around, but it also carries the assumptions of the current system into the future.
Foresight creates space for the assumptions themselves to be questioned.
What happens if the relationship between work and taxation changes? What happens if a public service remains technically available but becomes practically inaccessible outside major cities? What happens if energy security, migration, demographic decline, artificial intelligence, and military risk begin to affect one another rather than arriving as separate policy problems?
A small country has particular reasons to think this way. Estonia cannot set global technology standards, determine the behaviour of larger states, or decide how fast climate and demographic pressures develop. It can notice change, compare interpretations, and prepare more than one route through it.
This work has an institutional place in Estonia. The Foresight Centre at the Riigikogu studies long-term social and economic developments and builds scenarios around questions such as healthcare, regional services, energy, competitiveness, young people, culture, and the future of the state. The State Chancellery presents foresight as one of the tools available for developing strategies and public policy. The Estonian Institute for Futures Studies has also spent years developing the field and teaching people to think about futures in the plural.
The plural matters.
Public discussion tends to compress the future into one dramatic claim. Artificial intelligence will eliminate a profession. Rural Estonia will empty out. Public healthcare will become unaffordable. A technology will change everything. A crisis will permanently reorganise society.
These statements may contain something worth taking seriously, but they also close the discussion too early. Once a future is presented as inevitable, people are left choosing between belief and disbelief. The more useful questions have not yet been asked. Under what conditions would this happen? Which parts of the system would change first? Who would gain power? Who would absorb the cost? What evidence would suggest that a different future was becoming more plausible?
This is where Estonia’s foresight practice connects closely to material already developing inside Raw Drafts.
The foresight page begins with the line, “The future is not predicted. It is rehearsed.” The wording is more dramatic than most government language, but the underlying method is similar. A frightening prediction is opened up into several possible futures, observable signals, assumptions, and decisions that can be tested while there is still room to move.
The method on the page starts by changing the question. “Will AI take my job?” is too closed to produce much useful action. “How could AI change the ways I create value and earn during the next three years?” creates several directions for investigation. It makes room for changes in roles, workflows, pricing, trust, regulation, ownership, and expectations.
From there, the process moves into horizon scanning. Signals are gathered from products, job descriptions, policy, research, prices, communities, physical places, and conversations. They are then separated from trends and uncertainties.
That distinction is easy to lose in ordinary discussion.
A new job title is a signal. Several companies creating similar roles may indicate a trend. Whether those roles become permanent professions, temporary responses, or responsibilities absorbed into existing work remains uncertain.
The signal does not explain the future by itself. It becomes useful when it is connected to other evidence.
Raw Drafts already does this through HAAM Signals. The page brings together developments across artificial intelligence, media, trust, accessibility, discovery, growth, systems, delivery, and public value. Each entry moves from an observation to an interpretation and then to a possible response.
For example, one entry argues that trust is becoming a product capability. Accessibility, privacy, provenance, understandable language, and human accountability are beginning to overlap. They are often managed by different teams and treated as separate requirements, although the person using a digital service experiences them together.
Another entry suggests that design systems are expanding into behaviour systems. A visual component library can keep buttons and spacing consistent, but it cannot define how an AI should expose uncertainty, how a product should behave when data is missing, or what happens after a consequential error. The more interfaces are generated or assembled automatically, the more important these behavioural rules become.
These are not predictions in the sense of declaring what will happen. They are interpretations of movement. Their value depends on whether they help someone make a better decision before the change is fully established.
My own connection to foresight began during my master’s studies at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. In a three-day workshop, we worked with around 150 reports about innovations and unusual developments. We grouped the material into clusters, compared interpretations across disciplines, created scenarios about social change, storyboarded future services, and placed them on a timeline extending to 2040.
Some of the results now feel dated in the way speculative technology often does. We imagined homes becoming complete service environments, new forms of remote presence, places whose atmosphere was more valuable than their original function, and memories becoming digital material.
The individual ideas were less important than the way we reached them.
Our group included perspectives from industrial design, biomedical engineering, and creative industries design. The same report could be interpreted as a device, a change in the body, a new service, a social ritual, an urban condition, or a business model. We did not eliminate those disagreements to reach one official reading. The differences expanded what we were able to see.
That has stayed with me more than any of the speculative scenarios.
A news item rarely contains its own meaning. A technology announcement does not explain how the technology will be governed, adopted, resisted, or combined with existing systems. A new behaviour may be a temporary workaround, the beginning of a larger shift, or evidence that an old institution has stopped meeting a need.
Reading signals in clusters encourages a different relationship with the present. The question becomes less about whether a headline is important and more about what it connects to.
That way of thinking appears throughout Raw Drafts, including in essays that were not written as foresight pieces.
Human-Centered Design Is Not Enough widens the frame of design beyond the person directly using an interface. It asks what happens to workers, communities, infrastructure, ecosystems, other species, and people who inherit the consequences later. A food-delivery app can be easy for the customer while moving heat, waiting, traffic danger, and financial risk onto couriers. A cheap device can offer immediate value while concealing extraction, labour, repair, and disposal. A recommendation system can satisfy the current user while weakening the larger cultural environment around them.
These are also foresight questions because they require the designer to look beyond the immediate interaction and current measurement period. They ask what the system makes more likely over time.
The Canvas Kept Expanding follows the same movement through my own work. The object of design grew from pages to screens, transitions, journeys, services, systems, organisations, cultures, data, infrastructure, and the people left with the consequences. That expansion was partly educational, but it also came from repeatedly seeing how a narrow design decision depended on something outside the frame.
A payment interface depends on identity systems, regulation, cultural expectations, and trust. A sustainable shopping tool depends on product information, supply chains, repairability, marketing claims, and the economic conditions under which someone makes a purchase. An AI interface depends on training data, permissions, organisational policy, human review, and a decision about who remains responsible when the system is wrong.
The interface remains important. It is where many of these systems become visible to a person. It is also where political and organisational decisions are translated into ordinary experience.
This is one reason Estonia’s foresight work feels relevant to interaction design. Government policy and product design operate at very different scales, but both eventually become arrangements of choices, restrictions, defaults, explanations, waiting times, and responsibilities.
A strategy document may describe the personalised state. A resident encounters it through the form that already knows their information, the service that shares data between agencies, the notification that arrives at the right moment, or the decision they cannot understand or appeal.
A national scenario about healthcare sustainability eventually reaches someone as an appointment, a queue, a digital consultation, a payment, or a journey to a service that has moved farther away.
The future is rarely encountered as a scenario. It arrives as infrastructure.
This also explains why foresight has to lead back into experiments and decisions.
Scenario work can become a comfortable intellectual activity. People collect unusual signals, create imaginative worlds, cover a wall with paper, and leave the current plan untouched. The future becomes a creative theme rather than something capable of challenging budgets, responsibilities, and priorities.
The more demanding question is what the scenario changes now.
Suppose one possible future is that competent digital production becomes abundant because AI can generate interfaces, code, images, and text quickly. It would be easy to respond by trying to produce even more. Another response would be to look at what becomes scarce in that world: judgment, verification, trust, situated knowledge, accountability, and the ability to recognise when a plausible result is wrong.
That scenario would suggest experiments around accessibility review, provenance, product assurance, human oversight, or the inspection of AI-assisted work. The scenario remains uncertain, but the capabilities being developed could prove useful across several futures.
The same applies to work becoming more fragmented. A person does not need to assume that permanent employment will disappear. They can still notice the growth of project work, specialist networks, independent studios, and temporary collaborations. That may justify building a body of portable proof, relationships outside one employer, and more than one route to income.
The purpose is not to live permanently inside speculative possibilities. It is to find actions that remain sensible even when the exact future is unclear.
This may be the strongest connection between Estonia’s use of foresight and the existing Raw Drafts material. Both treat preparedness as something more active than prediction.
Estonia’s policy institutions are asking how public services, economic structures, communities, and the state itself might remain capable under different conditions. Raw Drafts has been circling similar questions through design, technology, work, sustainability, and culture.
I had not previously thought of all these pieces as belonging to one practice. Some began as product research. Some came from travel, academic work, website projects, technology news, or anxiety about where design was going. Some became articles, prototypes, or service ideas before they had a clear category.
Foresight gives those activities a useful relationship.
The signals are observations about change. The essays examine the systems around them. The scenarios test how those systems might develop. Prototypes give uncertain ideas contact with reality. Writing makes the assumptions visible enough to argue with.
Seen from Estonia, foresight is part of the work of keeping a small country capable in a world it cannot control.
Seen from Raw Drafts, it is a way of keeping design connected to what may happen after the screen is finished.
AI authorship note
This essay began with Kris Haamer’s request to connect Estonia’s public-sector foresight practice with the existing Raw Drafts material. AI helped compare the source material, organise the argument, and edit several drafts. Kris rejected the versions that sounded too polished, redirected the essay toward his NCKU workshop and existing writing, and chose the final text and publication.