Stuart Candy is an experiential futurist whose critical and creative practice spans education, production, and activist intervention. He is currently Director of Situation Lab in Los Angeles and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico City, and was previously the inaugural Associate Professor of Social Foresight at Parsons School of Design in New York. Stuart’s work at the intersection of design and futures is recognized for changing the landscape of both fields. It includes the edited collection Design and Futures; acclaimed storytelling game The Thing From The Future; and an award-winning toolkit for public imagination, The Futures Bazaar.
He has worked with organisations around the world including the BBC, Smithsonian Institution, UNESCO, The New York Times, Niantic, Snap, Dubai’s Museum of the Future, the National Film Board of Canada, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and Cook Inlet Tribal Council. He was the first artist in residence at both Immersive Denver (Colorado) and the Museum of Tomorrow (Rio de Janeiro), as well as the first fellow of The Long Now Foundation (San Francisco).
Stuart Candy is visiting the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, through the support of the Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professorship programme at the University of Bristol and in collaboration with the Pervasive Media Studio and the Centre for Creative Technologies. Stuart is a futures practitioner, educator, and artist dedicated to the development of social foresight; humanity’s collective capacity for thinking and feeling into times to come. Stuart is known as a leading figure in the rise of experiential futures over the past two decades, helping to seed, spread, and grow practices now variously labelled speculative design, design fiction, design futures, and discursive design.
Experiential futures (XF) practices use design, media and the arts to ground ideas about futures in everyday life. So instead of just describing or modelling possible, probable, and preferable futures, using the intellectual and scholarly approaches traditionally best represented in academia, we can also try to experience and investigate times to come using other ways of knowing; embodied, narrative, participatory, emotional, and so on.
There will be masterclasses, drop ins and most importantly, Bristol’s first Immersive Futures Jam, a hands-on experiment in experiential futures. (31 May, 1 June, 2 June)
This is an opportunity for futures-minded makers, performers and artists from across Bristol to spend a weekend learning and collaborating around the rapid co-creation of “Time Machines” –– immersive experiences of possible futures for the city. Participants will explore how Bristol could look decades from today, working and playing in small groups over a weekend (from Friday 31/5 evening until Sunday 2/6 afternoon) to bring these futures to life as a place-based experimental activation, for each other as well as a wider pool of participants. Experiential futurist Stuart Candy will lead the process (bio below). Places are limited, but imaginations won’t be.