A workshop set in 2030, where participants design with future tech, life-centred design, and a non-human persona to speculate a future life-centred version of an everyday product. In four teams, we explored a future where the world prioritises repairing and reusing over making new things by designing a future, life-centred version of mattresses, a ubiquitous product that uses a lot of resources and creates a lot of landfill.

A discussion about futuring in real life across the academic, writing, and consulting fields with myself, Sussie Pratt, Murray Stubbs, and Clare Cooper covering a range of topics such as:

• The paths to practicing futuring
• How to use futures in a project and what they look like
• Where futuring can be best used

Hosted by the amazing Tina Fung and Speculative Futures Sydney

Hosted by the Innovation Hub, the Student Innovation Awards recognise University of Sydney students’ innovative solutions for real-world impact.

I had the honour of helping judge the Planetary Impact submissions, projects that blew my mind with the potential to help the planet and society!

The Responsible Design for Innovation course with Phil Gough introduces students to design strategies and techniques to foster inclusion and participation in iterative design innovation to tackle complex problems and drive responsible innovation for products, services and processes.

As a Guest Lecturer, I introduced the students to life-centred design thinking and approaches, and shared customised tools for their project.

I was invited to speak to Business Innovation students, who had just completed a human-centred module, to introduce them to how life-centred design expands human-centred design, with a focus on ESG commitments and digital strategies.

Global and local issues are forcing design to embrace wider views, from user experience to lifecycle thinking, from short term rewards to stewarding futures. In this talk, I shared the benefits of speculative design and foresight for designing futures, then zoomed out to see foresight as part of 11 practices combining in life-centred design, then zoomed back in to the practical application by digital designers at the micro-level.

In a follow up session, I took the designers through two life-centred thinking activities.

Everyone is searching for innovation but there are many things that can be pushing back against new and experimental ideas. In this UXDX panel, we explore the different challenges facing governments, startups and large enterprises and what teams can do to foster innovation in their organisations.

Consumers and business are getting more serious about sustainability and design for good. But how do we get there. I was asked to share my research for The Life-centred Design Guide with the awesome innovation team and business stakehodlers at ING.

I had the honour of guest lecturing a class for the ECHOs Designing Futures course, taking students through my Future Scouting Rapid Future Product Design method to design future values-driven products based on advanced technology.

In 2021 I was invited to facilitate Future Scouting® for the Speculative Futures Sydney Meetup with players from around the world. Future Scouting has since been played in the Netherlands, Pakistan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Australia, and it received a Notable Design Education Initiative Award in the Core 77 Design Awards 2021