Category: futures
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Futures Through Design – 2026
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I am delighted to announce that Futures Through Design, the three-day course I designed and led with with Rob Phillips and Gem Barton at the Royal College of Art in London this summer, is returning in late February 2026. There are lots of reasons I’m really pleased we’re able to run it again, but right…
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The Malkovich Principle
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A few weeks back, I was invited to be a critical friend on a futures project by Paul Graham Raven & Keri Facer. The artefact in the centre, the central vehicle to invite people into this world, was a newspaper. Newspapers are, of course, a brilliant container for giving people just enough context of a…
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Assemblage Space
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I had to share the Assemblage Space concept today with some speakers in preparation for the forthcoming IED Innovation & Future Thinking course in Barcelona next month. And I realised that I had meant to get around to clipping a shorter video out of the Stories4Policy session which Scott Smith of Changeist and I delivered…
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Reflections on Innovation & Future Thinking
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Toban Shadlyn and John V Willshire Introduction We are approaching the tenth anniversary year of the Innovation and Future Thinking course at IED Barcelona. In the summer of 2024, it will run from Monday 9th July for two weeks. Usually, around this time, we write an explanation of what the theme will be for the…
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Revisiting Metadesign for Murph
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I’m going to be opening up the second day of UX London 2024, 18th-20th June. As part of that talk, I’ll be revisiting a talk called Metadesign for Murph which I gave at dConstruct in 2015. It might be one of my favourite talks that I’ve ever given. There’s something very fitting about this, given…
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Punk Participative Principles
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Yesterday was the third edition of The Steps Collective, which Lizzie Shupak and I took up the speaking reins for. I brought two things together; my experience at Future Days in Lisbon during the last week, and a talk on Participative Futures I explored earlier this year. I’ve uploaded the slides below too, if you…
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Future Days – City Scanning
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As part of the first day at Future Days in Lisbon this week, I was invited to conduct a city scanning exercise Futures Days is a festival for futures and systemic thinkers, innovation-seekers, creatives, purpose-driven organizations and policy-makers to collectively create the futures of urban lives, equitable societies through and beyond technology. Working with the…
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Futures: The Unit of Delivery is Action
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I remember this from the early days of GDS permeating its way across the UK digital culture and beyond; The Team is the Unit of Delivery. Getting a group of good people well working together towards well considered outcomes. In the last week or so, after a conversation with Samantha Culp, who’s writing a book…
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It helps open things out
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We launched Where The Light Gets In, a regenerative design field kit, last week in the Artefact Shop. It’s gone really well, driven in a good part by a LinkedIn post. Once upon a time, that would have been Twitter, but blog posts on a radically different social media landscape are for another day. We…
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Taking Care of Water: IEDIFT 2023
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📢 Calling all futurists, changemakers, change-seekers, innovators 📢 . Come spend two weeks this summer at IED in Barcelona attending the Innovation and Future Thinking course. We will be bringing together a group of inspirational local and international lecturers, immersing ourselves in the local and regional context through a series of site visits, and applying…
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How to use the Community Power Compass
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A practical walk through on how to use the Community Power Compass to evaluate and analyse communities in spaces like Web3.
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Introducing the Community Power Compass
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The background context for a beta version of a tool for investigating and evaluating different types of community, particularly those in the Web3 space.