Doors Open Day 2025 at Edinburgh Futures Institute
27th September 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM BST
Edinburgh Futures Institute is home to a vibrant community of futures-focused students, researchers, organisations and businesses working together to tackle the world’s increasingly complex challenges.
Visit us in our new home in Edinburgh’s former Royal Infirmary to discover how the Institute creatively brings together people, disciplines and perspectives under one roof to develop innovative and data-driven solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges.
Meet our staff, students and partners and discover how they are shaping better futures for all. Explore the building, delve into our history, browse displays and stalls and get hands on with drop-in activities for all ages.
Programme
Marketplace stalls | open all day
Pop in and meet some of the organisations, staff and students who make up our vibrant community and find out more about what we do here with displays and hands-on activities.
Bilingualism Matters is a social enterprise and University of Edinburgh spin-out, leading an international network of over 30 BM branches worldwide. We connect research on bilingualism and language learning with the people and organisations who can put it into practice — from schools and community groups to policymakers and businesses. Our mission is to share reliable, research-based information on the cognitive, social, and cultural implications of using more than one language.
On the day, our team will offer a series of table-based displays showcasing key facts, research highlights, and real-world stories from our global network. Visitors can explore evidence on how bilingualism works in the brain, discover examples of successful multilingual initiatives, and take away practical resources for supporting language learning in different settings. Our friendly team will be available to answer questions, share insights, and connect you with opportunities to get involved locally and internationally.
Ever wondered how the immersive soundscapes in your favourite films and games are created? Edinburgh-based [and EFI Resident] tech company Black Goblin is pulling back the curtain with Thol, our revolutionary AI assistant for creative professionals.
Thol is designed to eliminate one of the most time-consuming tasks in media production: sound spotting. Our smart technology watches video footage and creates a detailed list of sounds needed, freeing sound designers and editors from hours of tedious manual logging. This allows them to focus on what truly matters: crafting the perfect audio experience.
Visit our stall at the Doors Open EFI Day to see a demonstration of Thol in action! We’ll be showcasing how AI is shaping the future of creativity and offering exclusive promos to all attendees. Come say hello and discover the next generation of sound design, built right here in Edinburgh.
Bookster is a marketing software company specialising in tools for holiday rental professionals. We’ll be covering our journey from start-up to established software provider, sharing the key milestones, challenges, and successes that shaped our growth. You’ll get an inside look at how our platform helps property managers attract more guests, streamline their operations, and grow their businesses.
Our team will be on hand to talk about the technology behind Bookster, how we collaborate with clients, and what’s next for our software. Whether you’re interested in tech, tourism, or entrepreneurship, we look forward to welcoming you and giving you a glimpse into the world of holiday rental innovation.
The Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society explores social and ethical aspects of medicine and health. We examine many different issues, from AI, robotics and health, how data are used, what the future of medicine might be, mental health, sexual and reproductive health, medical history and so much more. We work across disciplines, sectors and communities and really enjoy engaging widely. Come and join us to hear more. You can learn how to make a zine and discuss how these are used in communities or come away with a ‘Tattoo My Research’ temporary henna tattoo and hear first-hand from some of our researchers during the process!
https://usher.ed.ac.uk/biomedicine-self-society
The Centre for Investing Innovation is a strategic partnership between the University of Edinburgh and abrdn, an Edinburgh-based global asset management company. Its mission is to transform the future of investing through pioneering research in sustainability, thematic investing, and technological innovation. By combining academic excellence with industry expertise, the Centre develops responsible, data-driven approaches that deliver long-term benefits for investors and society. Key initiatives include the creation of advanced AI tools to enhance investment decision-making. Members of the Centre’s research team will be available to discuss their work and its real-world impact.
Centre for Investing Innovation – Edinburgh Futures Institute
The Centre for Technomoral Futures at Edinburgh Futures Institute will be hosting an ‘ask me anything about generative AI’ booth for Doors Open Days 2025. Come along to meet some of our researchers and ask them anything about generative AI! Could AI chatbots really take your job? How much trust should you place in ChatGPT? Should you worry about the environmental impact of the images you create with Midjourney or DALL-E? Will generative AI create a generation of people who can’t write essays or code? What about copyright? Come enjoy an engaging conversation on these questions and more. Learn about the Centre for Technomoral Futures and sign up to our mailing list at https://technomoralfutures.uk.
The Data Civics Observatory is about the representation of people and communities through mixed, experimental, digital methods using a range of media, platforms and data. We are a research collective dedicated to exploring and representing the character of places and the people, institutions and infrastructures that make them. Our approach prioritises the technological, material, historical, institutional, and sentimental qualities of places, how they are made and how they are experienced. Taking our lead from Edinburgh’s pioneering planner, landscape architect and sociologist, Patrick Geddes, we designed the Data Civics Observatory to use innovative data and platforms, methods and media to research space and place in new ways. Our aim is to work with people, communities and organisations to research and represent their diversity and expertise particularly in vibrant and challenged areas. We focus on how data-driven innovations can shape the way we see and govern cities, regions and nations.
Data Civics Observatory – Edinburgh Futures Institute
Visit the Data Education in Schools stall and play interactive activities on data and AI! We are a UK and Scottish Government funded project within the Data-Driven Innovation initiative, which addresses criticalities in the Scottish education system, particularly challenges in ensuring that inclusive growth is at the basis of Scotland’s digital futures.
Our learning materials and activities are designed for primary and secondary learners in Scotland, but everyone can try them! Can you train AI to distinguish rubber ducks from dice? Can AI figure out whether you’re dancing the Macarena or the Locomotion? Try Duck or Die, Micro:bits Dance, and other interactive activities.
https://dataschools.education/
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an area of AI underpinning technologies we use every day, including personalisation systems, voice assistants, translation tools and generative AI, such as ChatGPT. But how do we make these systems work best for humans, and ensure they are fair, accountable and transparent?
At the Designing NLP Centre for Doctoral Training, we are training the next generation of researchers and innovators to design and build a more responsible future. Come along and meet some of our current PhD students, and get hands on with their work, including research into gender bias in Large Language Models (the technology behind ChatGPT), and research exploring children’s understanding of AI. You can also chat to members of the team and find out more about the wider training programme, upcoming PhD opportunities, how we are working with over 70 industry partners, and other ways to connect to our work.
https://www.responsiblenlp.org/
How do your brain and thinking skills change as you age? How much is down to your genes—and how much depends on how you live? Join the Lothian Birth Cohorts team to explore how brain and cognitive functions develop over the course of life, and why some brains appear to age better than others. Discover what science is revealing about lifelong brain health and take part in hands-on activities that demonstrate how we collect and analyse our data. Try interactive materials that show how the brain changes over time and learn about the methods we use in our research. Use Augmented Reality glasses to visualise brain ageing and compare 3D-printed models of healthy and less healthy brains—based on real participant data. Our team will be on hand to discuss how lifestyle may shape brain health, and what we can do to protect our thinking skills as we grow older.
https://lothian-birth-cohorts.ed.ac.uk/
Our mission is to establish New Economic Enlightenment spearheaded by the Market Mind Hypothesis (MMH), a heterodox economic theory. New Economic Enlightenment is about correcting and revitalising economics by reigniting—via teaching, research, and practical applications—the intellectual curiosity and innovative spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment, personified by Adam Smith, that reshaped society’s economic thinking. It aligns with EFI’s ethos of pioneering research and education that is challenge-led, future-facing, and interdisciplinary. The challenges of our modern world are interconnected because they have a common cause, namely mainstream economics based on flawed mechanical worldview. By honouring the intellectual legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment while embracing MMH’s conceptual tools, MMC promises to usher in a new era of economic thought and practices to tackle those challenges. MMC is supported by the Market Mind Foundation, a Scottish educational charity.
When we go to hospital, receive treatment, or take exams, data is collected. Researchers can access this data to help improve lives! You can never be identified… but how? Play with LEGO®, match data together, and talk to our team to learn more.
The SCPHRP was established to promote collaboration across all sectors of the public health community in Scotland, aiming to improve population health and reduce inequalities through evidence-informed action.
Our core objectives are:
- To identify key opportunities for developing innovative interventions that address major health challenges in Scotland.
- Foster collaboration among government, researchers, and public health professionals to support national programmes of intervention development, implementation, and evaluation.
- Build capacity for high-quality, collaborative research that informs policy, programmes, and practice.
As part of our commitment to research and evidence-based practice, we want to actively engage with the wider public to disseminate key outputs from our core activities—whether research- or teaching-based. This outreach supports informed decision-making and helps build public awareness of the health benefits of Urban Green and Blue Spaces, and how these environments can be better used to improve the overall health of Scotland’s population.
We work with public health and community organisations to tackle tricky health and wellbeing challenges – the kinds of problems that can’t be solved by quick fixes. Our approach looks beyond individual choices to understand the habits, surroundings, and systems that shape how we live. By working step-by-step, we can pinpoint what’s really going on, co-create practical ideas, test them, and make sure the changes last. This process is called 6SQuID, short for Six Steps in Quality Intervention Development. 6SQuID has been used to make progress on everything from healthier workplaces to climate action.
At our stall, you’ll explore the 6SQuID process in a fun, hands-on way. Our activities invite children, adults and families to help solve realistic dilemmas – learning to identify problems, understand causes, and choose solutions. It’s a playful introduction to problem-solving that reflects the same principles we use to deliver lasting, evidence-based change in public health.
https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/scphrp/interventiondevelopmentraining
A co-directed national partnership between Public Health Scotland, Police Scotland, and the Edinburgh Futures Institute at Edinburgh University, that takes a whole-system public health approach focused on primary prevention, to support the reduction of health and wellbeing inequalities in Scotland. We do this by bringing together research, policy, evidence and practice.
Together we aim to:
- Utilise data, evidence and insights to promote and deliver a collective approach
- Build a data collaboration
- Build capability and capacity for complex collaboration
- Transform learning experiences through sharing, inspiring and empowering
As well as being a hub of activity and ideas, we are also a physical hub, with our base at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. This connects policing and public health practice, public health science, and academia. This creates the conditions required for effective collaboration, challenging silo working across our organisations by efficiently galvanising our collective assets, skills, and resources.
Scottish Prevention Hub – Edinburgh Futures Institute
East corridor | exhibition | open all day
Photographer Gintare Kulyte has worked with local residents and former members of staff to produce this series of photographic portraits, taken within the spaces of the former hospital. Presented alongside poems and prose written by the group, the series reflects on the mark that the hospital has left in the minds, bodies and life stories of the people of Edinburgh and beyond.
Kulyte’s portrait series is an outcome of a wider interdisciplinary community arts project of the same name which aims to honour memories of the former hospital building on Lauriston Place, now the new home of Edinburgh Futures Institute, part of the University of Edinburgh.
The personal connections, stories and memories documented by the series are diverse – from those who trained and worked as medical staff, to those who drew first breath in the city’s maternity hospital, to those descended from individuals impacted by the hospital’s activities in the 19th century.
Reflecting the scale of the former hospital site and its connections to the wider city, the locations chosen for the portraits are symbolic and extend beyond the walls of the building into the wider Quartermile area and the Old Town.
As the building looks to the future, these marks of the past should not be forgotten.
About Gintare Kulyte
Gintarė Kulytė is an emerging visual artist from Vilnius, Lithuania. Having gained much of her inspiration from documentary photography and film, in her creative practice she is now particularly interested in exploring the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Gintarė also holds a Sociology and Psychology degree from the University of Edinburgh and is currently pursuing her Masters in Psychological Research here. This photography series was produced as part of her internship at Edinburgh Futures Institute’s Culture and Communities team. This is her first solo exhibition.
Anthea Bond Exhibition Room | exhibition | open all day
In 2024 the Edinburgh International Book Festival asked the people of Edinburgh to share stories about the former Royal Infirmary, to honour the experiences and memories that people connect with the building’s previous life. Following the success of the Words from the Wards project, festival staff worked with Edinburgh College of Art students to illustrate the collected stories.
Room 2.20 | drop-in activity | open all day
Join us for a delve into the past of the Edinburgh Futures Institute and explore life as a patient or member of staff at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh through a display of material from our archive and collection of digital photographs.
What did the building used to look like? What was it like to be a patient or train as a nurse at the hospital? What was the food like?
Lothian Health Services Archive holds the historically important local (Edinburgh and the Lothians) records of NHS hospitals and other health-related material. We collect, preserve and catalogue these records and promote them to increase understanding of the history of health and for the benefit of all. For more information contact lhsa@ed.ac.uk and visit our website https://www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk/
Room 2.35 | film screening | drop-in | open all day
See a fascinating pair of documentary films exploring questions about city development, our past and possible futures created by Liz McFall with artist filmmaker Sapphire Goss and the team at the Data Civics Observatory.
Closes and Opens: a History of Edinburgh’s Futures explores the history and connections between the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s new building and its former life as the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh; two buildings formed to address problems facing the city. Both were designed to be open to everyone but while the building itself was designed to isolate one kind of contagion, its restoration as the home of EFI is meant to promote another, a contagion of ideas to help us live with the future. But how do you see the future or, for that matter, the past?
These questions were followed up in the film’s sequel Opens and Closes: the Future of Edinburgh’s Histories that premiered at EFI earlier this year. The new film centres around seldom seen Edinburgh – think gasholders, shale bings and quarries – and pans out, all the way to New York and beyond. It closes on the technodystopias we could all end up with without the new, radically interdisciplinary methods and the pragmatic, collective and organised action of concerned actors being developed at futures institutes all over the world.
Please note this is an informal film screening and visitors are welcome to drop-in and watch for as long as you wish. Total running time 75 minutes. Most suitable for visitors 12+ (does not contain any content likely to offend or unsuitable for children). With audio soundtrack and subtitles.
Data Civics Observatory – Edinburgh Futures Institute
Room 2.55 | film screening | drop-in | open all day
Room 2.55 | Screening and discussion sessions with Media Education directors Kate Deacon and Iain Shaw | 11am and 2pm (1 hour)
Drop in and see a beautiful selection of films created by individuals and communities from across Scotland about the issues they face in their daily lives.
Media Education is an award winning, socially engaged filmmaking organisation with a permanent team of skilled artists and creative facilitators working across Scotland and the UK. Our main purpose is to use creativity and non-hierarchical approaches to build trust and collaboration so that people furthest from power can have the supportive space and the time to form their own arguments and apply their lived experiences for the changes they want to see for themselves and others. The films we create together help to set the agenda and are great conversation starters. Pop in to view the films, come along to a Q&A session to meet the directors or stop by their stand in the marketplace for a chat.
Please note this is an informal film screening and visitors are welcome to drop-in and watch for as long as you wish. Total running time 40 minutes in length. Most suitable for visitors 12+ (does not contain any content likely to offend or unsuitable for children). With audio soundtrack and subtitles.
https://www.mediaeducation.co.uk
Guided tours | departing from outside the main door overlooking Lauriston Place | 10:30am, 12pm, 1:30pm, 3pm (45 minutes)
Please note places are limited and must be pre-booked via Eventbrite.
Join staff for an expert tour of Edinburgh Futures Institute. Discover how the transformation project to create Edinburgh Futures Institute breathed new life into the former Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.
Tours will last 45 minutes – suitable for all ages. Places are limited and must be booked in advance.
Book nowRoom 3.55 | drop-in activity | 10:30am, 11:45am, 1:30pm and 2.45pm
(1 hour)
Please note places are limited and must be pre-booked via Eventbrite.
Step into tomorrow at Edinburgh Futures Institute! Our new Futures and Design team is pioneering innovative approaches to tackle real-world challenges through the powerful combination of futures thinking and design methodologies. Join us for this exciting family workshop where imagination meets innovation!
Parents, carers and children are invited to embark on a creative journey exploring how emerging technologies might transform our world. This hands-on experience offers:
- A fun introduction to futures thinking for all ages
- Creative exploration through play
- Insight into EFI’s Innovation Services
No prior experience needed – bring your curiosity and creativity! Discover how futures thinking helps us navigate uncertainty and shape the world we want to live in.
Places are limited and must be booked in advance.
Please note children must be accompanied by an adult. Most suitable for children aged 6+.
Book nowhttps://efi.ed.ac.uk/ecosystem/data-design-lab
seating area opposite 3.55 | drop-in activity | open all day
Take a break in our family area and enjoy some games, books and colouring activities.
Exhibition on screens throughout the building | open all day
View this inspiring showcase of bold ideas and visionary thinking! Students from the Building Near Futures course at Edinburgh Futures Institute present their future prototypes in a digital exhibition, exploring how humans and AI can collaborate to tackle pressing societal and environmental challenges.
Short form videos guide audiences through near-future scenarios and inspire conversation on AI co-creation. Will these ideas spark real-world change? Come see for yourself and be part of the discussion.
