This talk will explore ideas to help us navigate the future. The future impacts every aspect of our lives, and to prepare for the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous natures of the future, we must get accustomed to thinking, learning, and playing in the future. In this talk, we will examine how what we can learn from the future from speculative design, storytelling, and system thinking. Speculative design shows that the future isn't just about humans, the future is fair, and so should we when we think about it. Stories remind us that the future isn't only logical; our emotions and dreams also color our vision. System thinking helps us anticipate the future based on patterns and our experience of the systems around us. But the most important quality we need is optimism - a skill we can develop by engaging with the future. By doing so, we increase our future literacy and democratise the future, and the future becomes what we make it to be.
Alicia Shao, senior service designer at The LEGO Group, external lecturer at Köln International School of Design, mentor at Amazing Design People List, and most importantly, a Futurist at heart. As a zealous advocator, Alicia has trained over 1000+ people in design thinking and service design, and now she is teaching in the area of future thinking and system thinking at KISD. She has also taught a...