I facilitated a workshop and gave the closing Keynote at the 2025 edition of the annual LA Design Week. This year the focus of the LA Design Week was ‘Futurism’ — and I wanted to bring some of the more creative and ludic approaches to futuring and introduce it to a wider audience.
The workshop was designed to give participants the opportunity to explore and create speculative Design Fictions for the future. Specifically for an engaged intergenerational public, the workshop's goal was to provide a glimpse at the power of futures-oriented collaboration and imagination.
Of course workshop means ‘work’, and so I deliberately oriented things towards a hands-on approach, encouraging participants to actively engage with materials and concepts to envision their futures. Using Near Future Laboratory's approach of rapid creation of ‘podcasts from the future’ using Google's powerful NotebookLM, participants were able to quickly prototype and share their ideas.
Participants left with a deeper understanding of the potential of Design Fiction as a tool for exploring and shaping the future.
If you or your organization is interested in exploring Design Fiction and futures thinking, please reach out to us for more information on future workshops and collaborations.