Aperture Venture Capital
Service: Creative Futures Lab
Sector: Venture Capital, Founders, Media, Sports, and Entertainment
Challenge
In late 2024, Aperture Venture Capital, a purpose-driven firm investing in diverse founders shaping culture through innovation, launched its first Sparks Ideas Festival in Atlanta. The goal was to convene a community of creators, founders, and investors reimagining the future of sports, media, and entertainment.
The cultural landscape was shifting rapidly. Audiences were fatigued by constant connectivity. Creators were caught between autonomy and algorithms. Investors were questioning how to back innovation without reproducing extractive systems.
Aperture wanted the festival to be more than a showcase of ideas. It needed to catalyze a conversation about cultural transformation — to explore how creativity, equity, and technology could coexist in a regenerative creative economy.
Love & Order was invited to design and facilitate a Protopian Futures Workshop that would help participants imagine the next chapter of culture, moving beyond disruption and hype toward community, purpose, and agency.
Approach
Love & Order designed a Creative Futures Lab titled Reimagining the Future of Sports, Media, and Entertainment. The 150-minute foresight session and 120-minute breakout lab drew from Love & Order’s Protopian Foresight Methodology — an approach that replaces dystopian narratives with grounded optimism and shared imagination.
Participants entered a space that blended analysis and emotion, data and daydream. Using tools such as the Alternative Futures Cone, the Protopian Imagination Framework, AstroFuturism, and trend cards from the Future Today Institute, the lab invited founders and creative leaders to look beyond the current hype cycle and consider futures guided by care and collaboration.
The workshop opened with Turn Back the Clock, a reflective exercise where participants recalled formative experiences that shaped their relationship to culture — a song, a community, a moment of belonging. These stories revealed shared emotional roots and established trust for deeper exploration.
From there, the group explored cultural and astrological trend markers, including Pluto in Aquarius and Neptune in Aries, as metaphors for transformation: a move from hierarchical to networked systems, and from passive consumption to collective creation.
Participants examined five emerging drivers: decentralization of media, AI-enhanced creativity, the revolution of fame, the rise of digital communities in sports, and inclusivity in storytelling. They used the Alternative Futures Cone to explore dystopian, utopian, and Protopian scenarios — locating the space “within reach” where imagination and action meet.
The session then transitioned to collaborative creation. Participants broke into groups representing media, sports, and entertainment sectors. Each team addressed one of Love & Order’s foresight prompts:
How do we navigate the “always-on” reality of digital life?
What does freedom look like beyond monetization?
How can creators design for sustainability without losing soul?
Each group used trend cards to guide discussion and the hand-to-heart reflection ritual, a Love & Order practice for grounding insight in empathy and presence.
The breakout conversations were generative and candid. Participants debated algorithmic influence, shared vulnerability around creative burnout, and envisioned regenerative futures where creators could thrive at human pace.
Attendees included Bem Joiner (Atlanta Influences Everything), Sayeed Mehrjerdian (iAccess Life), Deborah Riley Draper (filmmaker and author), Shawn Hamilton (E&H Originals in Wood), Micha Cooper-Edwards (Soleil Space), Emily Best (Seed&Spark), Ayden Syal (MOGL), Yancey Sukoshi, Kunbi Tinuoye (UrbanGeekz), and guest speaker Ann W. Elliott author of From Mainstream to Mystical — a cross-section of creative and entrepreneurial voices shaping cultural futures from multiple angles.
Outcome
Three key themes crystallized across the day’s dialogues:
From Always On to Always Human
Participants recognized the fatigue of constant connectivity and imagined media ecosystems that restore serendipity and presence. In this future, digital tools amplify community rather than replace it.
Rebuilding Shared Experience
In an era where everyone is a publisher, the joy of discovery has fractured. The group envisioned “community-first” ecosystems and physical spaces that reconnect people offline — symbolized by the image of a red kickball, representing collective play and shared rhythm.
Freedom Beyond the Algorithm
Attendees redefined freedom as sustainability through community ownership. They drew inspiration from historic cooperative networks such as the Chitlin Circuit, envisioning models of shared governance, values-aligned capital, and ethical design.
These insights became a blueprint for regenerative creativity — proof that the future of media and entertainment lies not in scale alone, but in coherence, care, and creativity.
The workshop positioned Aperture Venture Capital as a convener of visionary dialogue at the intersection of culture and capital. Participants carried the insights forward into their ventures, influencing projects in production, storytelling, and social innovation.
Reflection
The Sparks Ideas Festival demonstrated how foresight can serve as cultural infrastructure. By bringing imagination into the heart of venture dialogue, the Creative Futures Lab bridged innovation and integrity — showing that the next era of cultural enterprise will be built not only on technology, but on trust.
The Aperture session remains a touchstone for how foresight can move creative leaders from prediction to participation — from imagining the future to building it together. It demonstrated that Protopia is not a distant ideal but a practice that takes shape through imagination, structure, and the right rooms.