EMOTIONAL FORESIGHT
I've always had one foot in the future.
Long before I knew the word foresight, I learned to sense what was coming next — in markets, culture, spaces, and human needs.
My background is in architecture, economics, psychology, virtual reality, and visual storytelling. Each of these disciplines taught me a different way to read systems, feel environments, and recognize patterns before they become obvious.
Today, I work at the intersection of all of them.
The world has more technology than ever to show possible futures — and less ability to actually feel them. We can map scenarios, model trends, and generate visions at unprecedented speed. But many futures still remain abstract: intellectually understood, yet emotionally distant.
I work with foresight researchers, futures teams, and leadership teams to close that gap — turning brilliant scenario work into something people can enter, sense, discuss, decide from, and remember.
This is emotional foresight.
It is also the foundation of the Resonant Future Self Framework: an experimental foresight process that combines scenario thinking, AI-supported personalization, immersive storytelling, and embodied reflection to help people and teams experience possible futures not only as ideas, but as felt realities.
The framework began with individual future-self scenarios and is now expanding toward team and organizational applications — helping groups sense which futures create clarity, resistance, alignment, or transformation before they become strategic commitments.
iuliana adina apostol
WHAT CAME BEFORE
Before HeliosTree, my work crossed disciplines that look unrelated until you see what they share. As an interior architect, I began using virtual reality with clients so they could walk through a space before it existed and decide from inside it, not from a floor plan. That's where the core conviction took root: people don't decide from drawings. They decide from felt experience.
In project management, I delivered retail and hospitality build-outs for C&A, adidas, and Marriott — environments where every square meter has to do specific work for the brand and the body moving through it.
In 2018, I co-founded Tantiveta, part of the first cohort of social start-ups at Region Hannover's Social Innovation Center at Hafven, covered in the local press. We used virtual reality to bring older people in care homes into shared experiences with younger generations, independent of place and time. It was the first time I saw a technology I had used commercially become a tool for human contact at scale.
The proof of concept goes back further. As co-founder of Poteca Studio in Bucharest, I designed event environments for Mercedes-Benz Romania and Romanian Design Week — built from grass, moss, and natural materials to shift the state of a room. The same year, my diploma project at Ion Mincu University of Architecture, Cenușa, became a multi-sensory transformation architecture — an embodied journey rather than a building to look at.
Twelve years before the framework had a name, the principle was already there: a future state has to be felt before it can be integrated.
RECOGNITION
Recent work has been presented at the AIMEDIA Innovation Conference, Venice (2025), and the Futures4Europe Conference, Vienna (2025), where the Resonant Future Self Framework contributed to the experiential foresight track.
In July 2026, I will pilot a team adaptation of the framework at the AIMEDIA Innovation Conference in Nice.
I co-chair the International Women's Association Hannover IWAH.
Based in Hannover. Working everywhere.
FROM LISTENING TO ARTIFACT -EMOTIONAL FORESIGHT IN FOUR PHASES
The work moves through four phases — from listening to artifact. The architecture stays the same across individual, room, and team scales. What changes is the depth of the listening and the size of the resonance map.
LISTENING
Individual conversations, in private. What each person knows but has not yet named. What the room is carrying but no one has put on the table. The first phase is the foundation everything else is built on — and the phase most strategy work skips.
MAPPING
Convergences, divergences, silences. The patterns underneath the official conversation, surfaced and made visible. For an individual, this is the shape of the future self; for a room, it is the emotional ground the discussion will happen on.
SHAPING
The vision, co-constructed. Present-tense narration, tested against each person's body until it is shared. This is where the felt becomes form — where what was carried internally becomes something a person, a team, or a room can stand inside together.
artifact
A two-to-three-minute vision film, produced with AI-assisted visual and sound design. The artifact you can return to, share, and use as the vision is being built out in reality. The film does not replace the work. It carries the work forward.
values
- In service of a future worth building. The vision has to be real. Alignment first — everything else follows.
- Foundation before structure. Site, people, context, history — first. Deliverable after.
- The truth lives underneath. It surfaces sideways — in the pause, the off-agenda thing. Go there.