DesignOps Global Conference 2022

Presenter Profile: Phil is a design leader based in San Francisco, CA and has been a practicing designer for over 20 years. He has experience designing across a variety of devices and platforms within non-profit, retail, advertising, and enterprise software organizations. He recently served as an Experience Design Director at McKinsey & Company working across industries to transform and enhance their digital businesses and strategies. He is also the president and founder of the Design Futures Initiative, a nonprofit which organizes the international Speculative Futures meetups and the PRIMER conference. An educator and futurist, his events and workshops bring together designers and futurists from around the world to teach and share strategies for designing for the future and the ethical challenges around emerging technologies.

Presentation Title: The Design of Future Worlds – Metaverse, emerging technologies, policy, and how to prepare for what’s to come

Outline: As the craft of design continues to evolve and require more strategic thinking, we need new tools to address today’s greatest political, social, environmental, and cultural challenges. Futures Thinking fuses Strategic Foresight, Speculative Design and Design Fiction to address these challenges so that we can better assess the promise and peril of emerging technologies, climate change, and the implications we face with dynamically shifting political structures. As new platforms such as the Metaverse begin to arrive we must continue to speculate on both the opportunities and threats this world could bring, not to mention the policies and governance structures that must be installed to reduce harm in the virtual and real world. Phil will walk through a number of examples spanning the history of design futuring providing a platform for us to begin shaping these conversations for the businesses and governments that are ultimately defining the fate of our societies.