INTERNATIONAL PANEL: NOW WHAT?

Day01. Wednesday, July 07, 10:45-11:30 EDT

This international panel will tackle our 2021 theme of Now What? The past year has been a radical departure from what many consider 'normal', causing us to pause and reflect on what comes next. As a global community, we have questioned what it means to be part of a human family with diverse views and experiences and examined the work we need to do to reconcile our past, so that together, we can co-create preferable futures. In this panel, members of our global community will discuss some of the unique changes, challenges, and opportunities they have faced doing future work over the last year, and their vision for moving forward. Together, they will examine how we might envision preferable futures for ourselves, our communities, and for humanity, and ways in which we might navigate to these futures together.

Nonso Jideofor is the founder and strategic lead at Present Lab, an organization that amplifies alternative and new forms of power. He is a human-centered designer, participatory designer, and futures and foresight practitioner with extensive experience designing, curating, and facilitating projects and programs in international development. This has included supporting others to identify and articulate needs, opportunities, theories of change and appropriately consider people and context when using or delivering innovations. He has extensive experience providing strategic support to civil society organizations, coalitions, and networks in the global south, particularly in Sub Saharan Africa, using mixed methods including design, systems and futures thinking, design research, and ethnographic methods. As a systems thinker and human-centered designer, he has worked with government agencies, civil society organizations, and coalitions, and media on diverse projects and programs, ranging from public health systems, service delivery, public procurement, open data, open government, media development, and civic technology. In the last 10 years, he has played diverse roles in global development that involved social and digital innovations, project management, and team coordination with multi-stakeholders. His work spans transparency, accountability, open government, open data, civic technology, emerging technologies, data analytics, media development, and digital rights. As the Sub-Saharan Regional lead at The Engine Room, he supported many transparency and anti-corruption organizations across the region to leverage data and tech for their advocacy and engagement goals, from Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Botswana, Ethiopia, South Africa, United States, United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, South East Asia, and Latin America. At the social impact firm, Reboot, he led program management in West Africa, for media development, open government, and open data. Prior to working in international development, his background was in business administration, and has built small businesses and social enterprise’s.

Multidisciplinary designer, co-founder, and director of an animation and post-production studio based in San José, Costa Rica. For the past years, Ana has also worked in education in a government program that looks for social inclusion through technology, culture, and arts. Holds a master degree's in Interaction design at CIID. She encourages diversity in the work environment to generate more inclusive products and believes in the power of play and exploration to get to creative solutions for positive impact.

Pouyan is a futurist, multimedia science fiction storyteller, and research and education enthusiast whose works undergo the confluences of emerging digital technologies, sociopolitical trends, and fictional storytelling, addressing different issues from the influences of technology on criminal punishment to the social utility of apocalyptic storytelling. He received a Master of Architecture in Situated Technologies from the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo (2016). He is a co-founder of Scenariative Collective and a member of the Iranian Elite Foundation. From 2017 he started tutoring in different speculative design workshops and seminars at Future City Innovation Lab, CAAI School of Architecture, and Tehran Urban Innovation Center (TUIC), where he was also a researcher for a short tenure. He worked as the research and development manager at the renowned architecture studio, Nextoffice, where his collaborations in storytelling resulted in several international awards. He is the founder of Design Futures Initiative chapter in Tehran (Speculative Futures Tehran) and an associate member of the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF). He is currently the futurist at Future City Innovation Lab in Tehran, focusing mainly on scenario development and branding for startups and non-profits.