Manifesto Zine Making
Speculative Utopias
A guided imagination method for surfacing what your community truly wants — and why it matters.
Phase 0: Logic Model & Topic Mapping
This method fills the “aspiration gap” in evaluation — the space between what participants currently experience and what they genuinely hope for. It is best suited for projects where people feel stuck or unheard, and for evaluators who want to understand the depth of what change would mean, not just whether targets were met.
Primary Objective
To use guided imagination to unlock honest, unguarded reflections on what participants actually value — and what “success” would genuinely feel like to them.
Key Stakeholders
Any community of participants: service users, young people, volunteers, staff, residents — anyone whose vision for the future your project should be accountable to.
Reflective Planning Questions — Ask Yourself Before You Begin:
- “If this project worked perfectly, what would a participant’s life feel like — not just look like?”
- “What do participants want that they might not feel safe saying out loud in a formal evaluation?”
- “What does ‘good’ look like for them — not for our funders?”
Part 1: The DIY Step-by-Step Method
Prepare Your Speculative Prompt
Before the session, design a single open question rooted in your project’s goals. This is the “portal” participants will walk through in the meditation. It should be hopeful, not evaluative — focused on feeling and experience, not outcomes or metrics.
The Details:
- Action: Write your prompt using this structure: “Imagine it is [a future time]. Your project worked. You are living in a world where [your core goal] is real. Describe what you notice.”
- Tip: Keep it sensory and open. Avoid words like “improved,” “increased,” or “achieved” — these feel like evaluation. Use words like “feel,” “see,” “hear,” and “notice” instead.
- Examples by context: For a food poverty project — “You’re never worried about your next meal. What does a Tuesday morning feel like?” For a youth programme — “You feel completely at home in your city. Where do you go first?”
The Guided Meditation (The Spark)
Lead the group through a short, gentle visualisation using your prepared prompt. This is the heart of the method. The goal is to help participants access what they genuinely want, bypassing the self-censorship that often shapes survey answers and focus groups.
The Details:
- Action: Read the script slowly, with pauses. Allow at least 2–3 minutes of silence before asking people to open their eyes and write.
- Tip: Play very quiet ambient sound if the space allows. Silence alone can feel exposing — a low background hum creates safety.
- After: Have each person write one “Vision Statement” — a single sentence about what they imagined. These become the raw material for Step 3.
Make It Visible — The Zine or Artefact
Participants translate their Vision Statement into something they can hold. The making process is not decorative — it is evaluative. The act of choosing images, words, and shapes forces participants to clarify and commit to what they imagined.
The Details:
- Action: Provide magazines, scissors, glue sticks, markers, and A4 paper folded into a simple 8-page booklet. Ask participants to fill it with images, words, and drawings that represent their imagined future.
- Tip: Frame this as a “personal document, not a presentation.” It is not for the wall — it is for them. This removes performance anxiety and increases honesty.
- Variation: For groups short on time, skip the booklet and offer a single postcard — one image on the front, one sentence on the back.
Surface the Themes — The Collective Reading
Once artefacts are made, the evaluator’s job begins. This step draws the individual visions into a collective picture — what does this community, as a whole, imagine as “good”? This is your qualitative finding.
The Details:
- Action: Invite (never require) participants to share one word or image from their zine with the group. Record these on a shared surface — a wall, a whiteboard, or a large sheet of paper.
- Tip: Look for clusters. Recurring words, images, and themes are your data. These clusters represent what your community genuinely values — not what they think you want to hear.
- The Archive: Photograph or scan all artefacts with consent. This collection becomes your Evaluation Record — a living, visual map of community aspiration that can be revisited at the end of the project to measure the distance travelled.
Part 2: The Realist Pathway
Evidence Manifest
This method generates three types of evidence, all of which can be used in evaluation reports, funding applications, and impact stories.
| Evidence Type | What it Proves | Data Source |
|---|---|---|
| Artefact Zines & Visual Pieces |
Evidence of genuine aspiration. The handmade artefacts show what participants value in their own visual language — unmediated by survey scales or facilitator prompts. | Photographed or scanned collection of participant zines, postcards, or collages made during the session. |
| Qualitative Vision Statements |
Evidence of baseline hopes. The one-sentence Vision Statements written immediately after the meditation capture unguarded, first-instinct responses — high-quality qualitative data. | Written cards collected at the end of the meditation, before the making activity begins. |
| Thematic Cluster Map |
Evidence of collective values. The shared words and images gathered in Step 4 reveal community-wide patterns — what the group, not just individuals, imagines as “good.” | Photographed wall or whiteboard from the collective sharing moment; facilitator’s thematic notes. |
Don’t just write a boring report. Use what participants actually made.
The Vision Gallery
Photograph the zines and include them as a visual appendix in your report. A page of handmade artefacts communicates depth of feeling faster than any paragraph of text.
The Before & After
Return to the zines and Vision Statements at the end of your project. Ask participants to look at what they imagined — and describe how close reality came.
The Cluster Quote
Pull the three most common words from your cluster map and build your impact summary around them. These are your community’s own words — not yours.
The “One-Sentence” Report
“Because we used Speculative Utopias, participants in [your community] felt safe enough to tell us what they actually wanted — and we built our evaluation around that.”