The EU has been working in the last couple of years on a project of policy-making, not as a reactive activity, but rather as a planned process that facilitates the construction of a ‘preferred’ future for their communities (build through a collaborative process). As part of this project, the EU government has opened several Design Labs throughout the European countries, where designers, foresight professionals, and policy-makers meet up to produce new knowledge about the future. The FTA2018, Future-Oriented Technology Analysis Conference presents the advances on the last projects for systemic change in the EU. A great experience that shows that designers can be involved in a large scale systemic change!

Stan was invited to speak on “The Design of Preferred Futures” in Vancouver on Aug 12, 2018, as part of the first Business Symposium at the annual SIGGRAPH conference. SIGGRAPH is the largest conference held by the Association for Computing Machines (ACM), with over 17,000 participants. Its focus is on film, gaming, and emerging technologies.

From the abstract:
We have all heard from researchers and entrepreneurs that the future already exists but is just not evenly distributed yet. But entrepreneurs need to simplify things, because they have something to sell. In fact, there is never just one future, and the ones we have on the radar now will be vastly different once they are evenly distributed. What design offers is not one preferred future, but instead a choice among possible futures. Designers at their best will imagine these futures, visit them, and bring things back for the rest of us to compare. In this talk, we will examine three cases: the design of a multinational information ecosystem, design for post-conflict zones, and the design of an autonomous train.