Speculative Futures Zurich

About

What Is Speculative Futures Zurich?

Speculative Futures Zürich is for everyone interested in speculative design, critical design, design fiction, strategic foresight, science fiction, and futurism. We invite people to discuss and ideate on how the future might look like and form prototypes of alternative worlds.

The mission of our talks and workshops is to make the future tangible. Speculative Futures Zurich was founded in 2020 by Zeix, agency for User-Centered Design. The local chapter is a member of the international «Design Futures Initiative» with chapters all over the world. Talks are held in English and/or German.

How to participate?

  • Become a member of our Meetup Group
  • Follow us on LinkedIn and get curated news about Futures
  • Send us the name of that speaker, who changed your life (or your thoughts at least ;-)

Next Events

Meetup

Our events are announced via our Meetup website. We have an event every 2 or 3 month. Become a member of our meetup group to never miss an announcement.

Past Events

  • Meetup #5The Future of Education

    "The future doesn't have to be something that happens to us." says Lisa Kay Solomon. Lisa inspired and enlightened us with her insights, experience and passion on how to design inclusive futures especially in K-12 education.

  • Meetup #4Futures Literacy

    Anna De Mezzo (UNESCO) showed us why Future Literacy is an essential skill to imagine the future in our Meetup on October 25, 2021. Anna, as a member of the UNESCO futures literacy team, introduced us to the work that UNESCO is doing to disseminate futures literacy across organizations, communities, and countries all over the world.

  • Meetup #3Climate as a driver for change

    We are very excited that joining us is Chris Luebkeman, leader of the Strategic Foresight Hub in the Office of the President at ETH Zurich and the former global director for foresight, research, and innovation at Arup. He is an inspiring speaker with many insights on the drivers of contemporary global change in our cities and societies.

  • Meetup #2Envisioning new normals and post pandemic futures

    What will it be like to live in Switzerland in 10, 20 or 50 years? Speculative Design helps us to envision plausible futures to explore what we have to do today to make our preferred future more likely. In an interactive online workshop, we will discuss several aspects of possible futures after the pandemic.

All events on our Meetup website

Deep Dive

Design Is [Speculative] Futures Design Thinking - a new toolkit for preemptive design

Speculative Design is an approach that considers alternate futures for technology and society. Through prototyping and/or defining scenarios, important discussions about ethics or the impact of design on the environment and culture can be brought to the forefront of the design process.

Designing new normals with speculative futures

Have you ever seen a science fiction movie depicting a future you absolutely want to avoid or feel especially drawn to? Welcome to speculative futures. In this episode X and Y from Z will explain to us that speculating about potential futures goes well beyond entertaining thought experiments, but actually fulfill an essential role in designing today's systems to ensure we eventually reach those future scenarios we prefer.

Quote

«By speculating more, at all levels of society, and exploring alternative scenarios, reality will become more malleable.»
Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby

Gallery

Organizers