Creating futures images for sustainable cruise ships: Insights on collaborative foresight for sustainability enhancement

•A broad futures-focused perspective to sustainability enhancement supports setting far-reaching goals.•A critical-transformative approach to collaborative foresight enables reflection of the underlying assumptions.•The workshop method is enhanced by combining video footage with observations, notes, and transcripts.•The study links the concepts of futures images and sustainability to describe collaborative foresight actions. The aim of the study was to explore futures images of collaborative sustainability enhancement within a cruise ship building network. Addressing collaborative sustainability at the organizational level rather than at the macro (regional or planetary) level, the paper explores socially constructed and shared futures images, which are less widely studied than individual-level images of the future. We advance an analytical model for constructing and evaluating collectively held futures images based on the structure and content of those images. From our data, we identified four futures images: Money rules; The customer is always right; Local economy focus; and The most sustainable ships in the world. From the perspective of collaborative sustainability enhancement, we contend that futures images can provide a basis for target-setting and a frame for sustainability enhancement actions.