SEASON 3
June 6 11aPST/2pEST/4pUK
Season 3 Closer - with DFI Friends and Family
As usual, our season finale will bring back a fun group of DFI friends and family for a whacky 90min of unadulterated hijinks and shenanigans.
May 20 7pPST/10pEST
Isamu Taguchi - Senior Designer, McKinsey Design
Isamu Taguchi is passionate about modest epiphanies, cleverly-placed humor, and tasty factoids; within the realm of design or otherwise. He is currently tasting factoids at McKinsey Design. Isamu doesn’t have socials. He is a rock climbing giraffe.
Charlie Hartzell - Associate Design Director, McKinsey Design
Charlie has more than 10 years of experience designing products and services across a spectrum of industries within the consumer space. He has a particular passion for bringing holistic solutions across user experiences for both physical and digital touchpoints. Charlie is currently an associate design director at Mckinsey & Co. where he drives impact at the intersection of design and business through a relentless focus on consumer centricity and creative problem solving. Charlie currently lives in the bay area with his wife, where they enjoy their way through the states amazing food and wine culture. He also cannot wait to travel internationally again… like almost everyone at this point.
April 13 4pPST/7pEST
Stuart Candy - Associate Professor, School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University
Stuart Candy is an Associate Professor in the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. An award-winning foresight practitioner, designer, artist and educator, his work aims to augment our capacity for navigating alternative futures by any means necessary. At CMU he is responsible for integrating foresight / futures practice throughout the design curriculum.
Professor Candy has been involved in and identified with hybrid design / futures currents such as “design fiction” and “speculative design” dating back to their early appearances in the 2000s, and has been instrumental in bringing these idioms to wider attention and application through presenting, teaching and writing, as well as expanding their boundaries through collaborative projects using transmedia storytelling, participatory design events, games, installations, and guerrilla interventions. His experiential futures work has featured worldwide in museums, festivals, conferences, and city streets, on the Discovery Channel, and in the pages of The Economist and Wired.
Kelly Kornet - Design Lead at Watershed Partners
As a participatory futurist and designer, Kelly finds meaning in creating the conditions for individuals to step out of their day-to-day and collaborate in highly diverse teams to perceive and affect change. Using the tools of collaborative design, systems thinking and strategic foresight, she helps organizations build capacity to navigate and transform in uncertain times.
Over the past 7 years, she has facilitated transformation journeys for private and public sector clients in Germany, Japan, USA and Canada. Kelly holds a Master’s of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation and is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists.
Prior to Watershed, she led the Strategic Foresight practice at Kalypso, a professional services firm focused on end-to-end product development.
April 8 7pPST
Carmen Aguilar y Wedge - Co-founder // Creative Director // Experience Designer at Hyphen-Labs
Carmen is a Mexican/American experience designer with a background in civil engineering and interaction design. In 2014 Carmen started co-captaining Hyphen-Labs merging research, education, digital fabrication, physical computing, robotics, digital tooling, and documentation. She has been hitchhiking around the galaxy looking to collaborate and create with various people from multiple disciplines-to make the human experience more meaningful, fun, engaging, and beautiful.
Dorothy Santos - Writer // Artist // Educator // Executive Director at Processing Foundation
Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society.
Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation.
Mar 14 @2pPST
Alisha Bhagat - Futurist and Senior Strategist, Forum for the Future
Alisha is a Senior Futurist at @Forum4theFuture, part-time faculty @TheNewSchool, and board president @bitchmedia, a feminist media organization. She is passionate about the creative use of futures tools and immersions to drive long-term, positive change, particularly around social justice and equality.
Ana Tiquia - Founder, Director All Tomorrow’s Futures, PHD candidate at RMIT
Ana is a transdisciplinary artist, cultural producer, curator and future strategist. Ana’s practice is one of inclusion that aims to ‘future’ with other humans, creatures and things – to generate diverse, plural, and transformative future imaginaries. She is the founder of All Tomorrow’s Futures – a post-normal consultancy that brings arts and strategic practices into dialogue. Ana is researching the interplay of creative practices and transformational futures as a PhD researcher with the EU 2020 Horizon CreaTures project and @rmituniversity's School of Design.
Wayne Pan - Futurist and Transformative Strategy Consultant, Institute for the Future
Wayne is a Research Director at @InstituteForTheFuture. He is a firm believer in the power of futures thinking to unlock longer-term, more sustainable decision-making by envisioning futures that we want.
Feb 28 @11aPST
Nick Foster - Partner/Co-Founder Near Future Laboratory
Nick Foster is a designer, creative leader and futurist based in Oakland, California.
He has made his career working at the overlap of technology and design for manufacturers such as Dyson, Sony, Nokia and Google, helping to shape new products for emerging needs and exploring the human impact of emerging technologies. Throughout this career, he has been at the forefront of academic approaches to design and their successful integration into industrial and commercial practice.
Nick is currently the Head of Design at X (formerly known as Google X), where he leads a multi-disciplinary team of researchers and designers in developing world-changing, technology driven projects. Nick is also a partner at the Near Future Laboratory, where he works in the pioneering field of Design Fiction. These roles both focus on creating detailed depictions of the future to aid in present day reflection and decision making.
Nick was born in Derby in the UK, a city most notable as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and the home of the jet engine. His father (a railway draughtsman) taught him about technology and engineering, and his mother (an occupational therapy professor) taught him empathy and ingenuity. As a young man he was twice named the ‘Young Engineer for Britain’ by the British Engineering Council, in 2001 he received his Masters from the Royal College of Art and in 2018 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Matt Ward - Designer, Author, Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths Univ of London
Matt Ward is an educator, designer and writer. He’s worked in the Design Department at Goldsmiths, University of London for 20 years, where he ran one of the world’s most successful design programmes for a decade. He’s held numerous academic roles across the world, including: External Examiner at the RCA, Visiting Research Fellow at the Designed Realities Lab at Parsons, and Academic Advisor at Lasalle School of Art and Design in Singapore.
He’s currently one of the principles investigators for Speculative Edu; a two-year project that seeks to strengthen speculative design education by collecting and exchanging existing knowledge and experiences whilst developing new methods.
His practice engages in a wide range of topics from speculative design to radical pedagogy. He was founding member of DWFE; a post-disciplinary, semi-fictional design syndicate. More recently his work with Jimmy Loizeau, ‘The Illegal Town Plan’, explores inclusive strategies for local engagement and education through critical, spatial speculation. The project provides a platform to mediate community engagement with local government in the re-imagining of a coastal future.
Matt holds international patents on the work he did at NCR’s Advanced Research Lab on the emerging contexts of the Internet of Things and Urban Computing. He has been a research affiliate to MIT Media Lab and Computer Related Design at The RCA and has consulted for a wide range of organizations, including; Google, BBC, Nokia and the Design Council. He lectures internationally about design, technology and education, writes a blog and takes a lot of photographs .
Feb 14 @11aPST
Jorge Camacho - Strategic Designer & Foresight Strategist / Co-Founder at Diagonal Estudio
Wendy Schultz - Director, Infinite Futures
Jan 17 @11aPST - Season Opener
Agi Haines - Rhode Island School of Design / Royal College of Art
Agi Haines’ work is focused on the design of the human body. How might people respond to the possibilities of our body as another everyday material and how far can we push our malleable bodies while still being accepted by society?
Emilia Tikka - Designer / Artist / Researcher
Emilia Tikka is an artist, designer and researcher currently based in Berlin and Helsinki. Her work explores philosophical dimensions and cultural implications of novel biotechnologies such as genome editing technology CRISPR. Her practice combines critical storytelling, lab experiments, and speculative design methods - aiming to generate alternative modes of knowledge production in technoscientific cultures. Her current research project Xeno-Genealogies is funded by the Kone Foundation.
Highlighted Articles:
- Squid-bacteria symbiosis could yield insight to human microbiome
- Peeking inside ‘mini-brains’ could boost understanding of the human brain in health and disease
- High-altitude living has changed more than just the genes of some Peruvians
- The Amazing Story of the Cold War Space-Egg Race
- Sleeping Their Way to Mars