NY2044 is built on a simple premise: that the people most deeply embedded in the challenges of the present are also the most qualified to imagine the future. Rather than commissioning predictions from generalists or from algorithms, we seek out practitioners — workers, researchers, administrators, artists, students, organizers—those close to power, and those far from it. The articles are shaped from scenarios “reported from the imagination” of these correspondents, and grounded in the rich contradictions of real life.
What follows is the process by which those scenarios come to life.
1. Finding the Right People
We look for people who are deeply involved with the issue at hand, not necessarily those with the most prestigious titles. For an issue on education, that might mean a CUNY administrator, a high school teacher, a researcher studying incarcerated youth, or a student navigating a changing institution. The criterion is depth of engagement, not credential.
Interviewees are identified through a combination of research, cold outreach, and — more often — networking and personal referral. A good lead from someone already in the project is usually worth more than a cold contact list though we also send out plenty of those.
2. Preparing for the Interview
Before each conversation, we try to understand the interviewee’s work, context, and perspective. This means reading their writing, reviewing their professional history, and following the institutions or issues they’re connected to. The goal is to arrive with specific questions to work out the scenarios from their way of thinking and from their experience — not generic prompts about “the future of X” but questions that emerge from knowing what they’ve actually been working on and thinking about.
3. The Interview Itself
Interviews are scheduled for a minimum of one hour, and often run longer. The tone is conversational rather than formal. We are not looking for polished soundbites — we are looking for the moment when someone starts thinking out loud, when their imagination engages with the question of what their field, their city, their community might look like about twenty years from now. Usually this moment unfolds as a collaboration between interviewee and correspondent. The right series of questions can help to unlock a creative flow. The interviewee might also propose specific scenarios that make certain future trajectories possible.
Interviews are conducted on video or audio and recorded for the internal archive. Interviewees are informed at the outset that recordings will not be made public. Notes are scribbled on paper throughout.
4. Writing the Scenario
The interview becomes the raw material for a NY2044 news article — written as if published in the future, reporting on conditions and events that have not yet occurred. This is the core creative act of the project: translating an interviewee’s expertise, concerns, and hopes into a plausible, specific, humanly grounded vision of 2044.
The scenario is not fiction for its own sake. Every significant element should be traceable back to something the interviewee actually knows, believes, or fears. The writer’s job is to make that knowledge vivid and concrete, to find the story inside the expertise, and to shape it as a news article, meaning that events of some general interest have prompted the article. In other words, simply reporting on the existence of a future system is not enough, because it wouldn’t be news.
The draft is developed from notes and refined until it holds together as both journalism and imagination.
5. Illustration
Each article is accompanied by one to three images that extend or complement the scenario visually. The hand drawn illustrations are not decorative — they are part of the world-building, helping readers inhabit the future the article describes.
6. Review and Approval
Before publication, the complete article — text, illustrations, author bio, and profile image — is shared with the interviewee for review. They may edit, clarify, or push back on anything in the piece. This step is not a formality. The interviewee is a collaborator, and the final article should reflect something they genuinely recognize as emerging from their own thinking, even if it goes further than they might have gone alone.
Publication proceeds only with their approval.
7. Additional assets such as ads are added for additional world-building to the articles.
NY2044 is a project about the city’s future, made with the people who are already building it. The process of seeking out correspondents is meant to create a community of imagination.