PROGRAM & SCHEDULE

09:00 EDT JULY 07, 2021

🔑 HOW TO HACK DYSTOPIA IN OUR CURRENT GLOBAL MESS

Keynote

In the face of our dystopian reality, innovative approaches to peacemaking, preventing and mediating conflict & peace-building are essential more than ever before. COVID-19 has made direct interaction, with conflict parties & peace constituencies difficult. This puts new tech for secure dialogue at the forefront. Learn about the UNDPPA's approach to 'futuring peace', an invitation for a conversation about the new possibilities of innovating radically to end wars.

*Presented in English

🔑FROM ALGORITHMS OF OPPRESSION TO AFRO-RITHMS OF LIBERATION

Keynote

Afro-Rithms from the Future is both an approach to speculative futures design and a story-telling game built on the principle of shifting from a center of Western cultural views to alternative future worlds where Black and BIPOC cultural perspectives are at the forefront. This talk will explore "What Now?" by imagining worlds that transform Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a thousand faces" with an Afro-Rithm that imagines "the faces of a thousand heroes.

*Presented in English

INTERNATIONAL PANEL:

NOW WHAT?

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 futures work over the last year and their vision for moving forward.

*Presented in English

PLAYING WITH OUR FUTURES:

Enabling Play As an Essential Design Tool

Designers can harness the power of play to change our mindsets, collaborations and processes when envisioning solutions to serious problems. This talk will illustrate how designers can borrow techniques from the worlds of game design and other creative endeavors to design playful envisioning experiences, deepening attendees' understanding of the transformative and restorative power of play when designing for serious problems.

*Presented in English

RETHINKING EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE

The team at DOT & The Future Game has been working for years in disruptive training environments, developing skills that are essential for future generations. This talk will discuss ways to rethink education systems and design learning experiences to better establish futures literacy, using the emerging future to innovate the present, and integrating complexity into our understanding of what it means to be human.

*Presented in English

NO TIME LIKE NOW: DESIRABLE FUTURES FOR (POST-PANDEMIC) TOURISM

This talk discusses the intersection of futures thinking and tourism, exploring the Futures of Tourism project as a way to (re)discover the potential of a different kind of (non)tourism, rethinking existing structures and developing alternative visions by imagining and visualizing different futures. Using futures thinking, storytelling, and participatory design can bring stakeholders together and help them critically examine dominant futures and how they can put their own narratives under scrutiny.

*Presented in English

ECODESIGN & ENVIRONMENTAL CORPORATE STRATEGIES

Eco-design has a long history, but its impact in markets today is not keenly felt. Systemic work, requiring both organization-based environmental strategies and sustainable operational resources, is still needed to achieve measurable goals for actionable eco-design and more broadly, circular economies. This talk will explore what skills are necessary to guide environmentally strategic actions, and discuss tools and methods that can be leveraged to help develop this learning.

*Presented in Spanish

(Cancelled) ABUNDANCE IS A MINDSET

COVID-19 and working from home showed us another pandemic: Generosity. This talk explores the need for self-love in business settings, and how adopting these types of mindsets can help create sustainable abundance.

*Presented in Spanish

Unfortunately, Paula Mandraccio was unable to join us Wednesday, July 7th to present her talk, “Abundance is a Mindset”. You can connect with her via LinkedIn or her website

SOWING ELECTRIC SEEDS:

Teaching Scifi, Pop Culture, & Our Future in Brazil

This talk explores a methodology for teaching design fiction, science fiction, decolonial futures, and the future of politics in the digital world. Sharing these subjects with design students early on in their education can provide critical thinking tools for accessing visions of other futures that are overshadowed by the mainstream, and drive a sense of responsibility for our real and present world.

*Presented in English

FUTURES x DESIGN INFO SESSION & AMA

In this talk, Instructors Jack Wilkinson and Doc Martens will describe our new Futures x Design framework (FxD), a methodology for moving through modalities and mindsets to extrapolate, create, and experience the implications of speculative future products, services, systems, and technologies.

*Presented in English

AGILE FUTURES:

Creating a Virtuous Cycle Between Speculative Design & Agile Product Development

Agile product designers often leverage emergent design, incrementally designing small pieces of a product, feature-by-feature, but are challenged when creating flexible visions of the future that still allow for learning. This talk explores how to combine speculative design methods for designing preferable futures with emergent design methods for ongoing learning, and provides practical tips for creating a cycle of ongoing discovery and futures exploration using the build, test, and learn cycles of agile product development.

*Presented in English

THE HOME OF THE 2020s MAKING OUR HOMES MORE RESILIENT

The pandemic has redesigned our home landscape, transforming our everyday environment and accentuating changes that were already underway. This talk explores how the home of the 2020s is experiencing crucial mutations caused by several factors: the pandemic, the transposition of of exterior activities into the home, the mental health crisis often described as ‘a pandemic within a pandemic’ and broader environmental concerns, as well as exploring possibilities offered by technological advancement.

*Presented in English

SPECULATIVE DESIGN THROUGH CROSS-CULTURAL LENSES

Living abroad means getting to know a brand new culture and seeing the world from a different point of view. This talk shares how cross-cultural perspectives can inform speculative design work, opening up new opportunities and conversations that can better connect people and cultures. Addressing regional and global unseen issues, it aims to inspire and engage reflections as well as promote more desirable and inclusive future decisions.

*Presented in English

WAYNE PAN

Research Director, Institute for the Future

MANSI PARIKH

Founder, Foresight & Innovation Strategy, Future Tense Inc.

NOUR BATYNE

Facilitator, Cultural Producer & Educator, Disruptivist

🔑 Speculating with Care in Synthetic Biology: Designing Pluriversal Futures in the Arctic

Keynote

Technoscientific ‘fixes’ promise to tackle ecological cruises by engineering plants & animals to adapt to changing climate conditions. What if, instead of this anthropocentric approach, humans use genetic modifications to adapt to their changing environment? In this talk, Emilia introduces a collaborative and decolonial approach to speculative design, challenging us to reimagine a new kind of human condition & provoking new notions of synthetic biology driven by more-than-human ontologies and ethics of care.

*Presented in English

CO-CREATING FARMING FUTURES

This talk explores speculative methods for developing future narratives about the use of emerging technologies for farming in Melghat, a region of approximately 300 villages in Maharashtra, India. This was the first time that a speculative design approach has been taken with NGOs and people in this region, and demonstrates how co-creation can be used for provocation, through the development of prototypes for alternative novel agricultural futures as an aid for creating actionable transition plans.

*Presented in English

ANONYMOUSOCIETY:

Another Escape From Social Surveillance

Anonymousociety is a social critique design project using a mockumentary perspective to document the existence of a world that is overly exposed to social media, reality TV shows, and YouTube. This talk will discuss the design process and story behind the project, how to build imaginary worlds through the lens of a mockumentary, and how to leverage design as a tool to better understand one’s internal universe.

*Presented in English

(Cancelled) THE FUTURE OF SELF

As the world evolves faster and faster, the present and future become highly uncertain & we need more than ever to design our own individual futures. This talk explores how we can shape the future of our identities, exploring different psychological models and frameworks for personal evolution that we can leverage to step into the future and prepare for what is coming.

*Presented in English

Unfortunately, Domi Sea & Alan Leviton will not be able to join us on Thursday, July 8th to present their talk “The Future of Self”. You can connect with Domi via LinkedIn and Alan via LinkedIn

THE MUSEUM OF ENDANGERED FOODS

The museum of endangered foods is a platform to think about one of the most underestimated consequences of climate crisis: the extinction of foods. These problems are not isolated but complex, entangled realities, so our approach at solving them has to be comprehensive. The exhibition aims to put the focus on the ecological vulnerabilities threatening each of these foods in the hope that food will be a more palpable and approachable take on climate crisis.

*Presented in English

IVICA MITROVIC

Assistant Professor

INGI HELGASON

Senior Research Fellow

VERA FEARNS

DFI Global Chapters Lead, Doctoral Researcher, Visiting Scholar

PRE-DECOLONIZING SPACE:

Reclaiming Narratives of Sustainable Human Inhabitation of Space

Today’s visions of space represent the current ethos of first-to-planet-makes-the-rules, driven by billionaires with rocket ship companies. We must claim our solar system for an epoch of decolonization, rejecting ideologies that would see space as yet another domain for power consolidations and resource extraction. But what would this entail? This talk outlines what new philosophies would look like, visions with no money, no flags, and ships designed not just to leave earth but to thrive in space.

*Presented in English

FIRST ENCOUNTERS

Anticipatory Ecology meets Speculative Design

We are currently experiencing a global redistribution of life on Earth with species shifting their distributions in response to recent and ongoing climate change. This is creating novel species interactions, as species that have evolved in isolation from one another come into contact for the first time. This talk discusses how speculative design projects can foster visions of planetary inter-species dependencies, and speculate about the possible impacts in ecosystems and the global biosphere.

*Presented in English

UNTANGLING ALTERNATIVES:

Rethinking the Design Question

We often encounter the term sustainability within an ecological context. But if we were to push the idea beyond that boundary, how might we reinterpret sustainable living? This rapid-fire talk critiques the ‘design-problem’, that which defines the scope, trajectory & nature of what we call ‘solutions’ in order to examine to what extent these solutions perpetuate the problems they are meant to solve for, and what research and practical work have been undertaken to address this.

*Presented in English

MYCELIUM THREADS

(Can fungi save the world?)

Mushrooms may be the best weapon against climate change. Mycelium has several applications from 'eating' plastic, to absorbing carbon dioxide, & even cleaning up nuclear spillages. Many brands are already using mushrooms for compostable packaging, & if this becomes mainstream, it could have the potential to reduce global carbon emissions. This talk will explore fungi-related design innovations & Jane's speculative design work on the topic.

*Presented in English

WHEN DESIGN FICTION MEETS GEOSPATIAL SCIENCES TO CREATE A MORE INCLUSIVE SMART CITY

This talk highlights the contributions of design fiction to the improvement of the spatial capability of hearing-impaired people. They review the findings of 2 workshops, representing interdisciplinary and intersectoral compositions of arts & sciences, that demonstrated considering the singularity of the human being as an actual acoustic material is an innovative opportunity to improve the role of universal design in smart cities projects.

*Presented in English

WHY FUTURIST SHOULD LEARN FROM VIRUSES:

How Might We Infect People with "Futures Thinking?"

COVID-19 gave a new meaning to what the word ‘viral’ means. At its core, a virus is information that wants to spread itself, packaged in protein. Futures are alternative narratives that want to spread themselves packaged in communications. Given this similarity, how might we infect people with Futures Thinking? This talk will explore the idea of Social-Media-Centered Design, a mutated variant of storytelling that is highly infectious and how it can be useful when designing futures for all.

*Presented in English

BEYOND JUSTICE-REINTERPRETING JUSTICE THROUGH JAIN LENS

An exploration of how Jainism challenges dominant notions of justice, rooted in fairness and retribution, & helps critique a system of crime and punishment where violence has become an inherent attribute. By assessing the boundaries & possibilities of the NYPD complaint report to register criminal activities, this talk considers how we might leverage Jainism to reimagine & reconsider how the criminal justice system works in the US & how we define justice as a society.

*Presented in English

FARAOYSC:

Building Alternative Worlds Through Joy

Faraoyść (faw-row-she-tchi) is a portmanteau neologism that describes the moment when oppression appears to be coming to an end and a liberated world feels within reach. This talk will discuss the possible uses and limitations of faraoyść as a method to expand our capacity to build new liberated worlds for ourselves, laying the groundwork for systemic change, resisting damage-centered narratives, and contributing to the global decolonial project.

*Presented in English

PROVOCATIVE FUTURES:

Speculation, Human Body, Medical Science & Education

This talk explores the relationship between medicine, humans, and society. Showcasing projects that explore the influence of medicine on the human body, and those that demonstrate the impact of medical technology on society and the natural environment, it helps unpack how future human societies may be affected by medical technology, and how speculative thinking informs design education in Taiwan.

*Presented in English

🔑 Scenario Based Planning: The Future Is Not What It Used To Be!

*Presented in English

GIULIANA MAZZETTA

Speculative Futures London

‘INTELLIGENT EARTH’

Exploring a Future of Interspecies Collaboration & Innovation

What is the real separation between nature, animals & the human species? How might we harness the principles, methods & wisdom of nature into the way we design culture, businesses, cities & more? How could plants, animals & humans collaborate together to ensure the thriveability of our shared planet?

In this luncheon talk, Speculative Futures London will host a conversation about how to innovate with & through nature & share their latest work and insights on interspecies design, general ecology, climate resilience and more.

*Presented in English