PRIMER was created to prepare you for the future. We are gathering designers, strategists, thought leaders, architects, and educators to share their work and processes to prime us for the challenges and the opportunities the future may hold.
PRIMER isn’t your typical design conference. It’s a conference focused solely on Speculative Design. Speculative Design may include many other categories such as design fiction, critical design, discursive design. You’re likely to hear presentations on emerging technologies such as autonomous cars, biotech, synthetic biology, emerging economies, social/cultural/environmental impact, design ethics, and business strategy and foresight.
PRIMER’s aim is to highlight important topics that provoke a design response but to also inspire thinkers and makers to use futures design thinking as a method to develop new agendas for communities, businesses, and governments to strategize and align themselves economically and sustainably for the future as it arrives.
PRIMER is a project by the Speculative Futures meetup group based in San Francisco, CA. The group serves as a platform for speculative design work and offers training workshops for futures design methods and strategies.
The theme for PRIMER is “Emergent Pathways.”
Emergent pathways can extend their tendrils through time, forge connections between fields, signal new approaches, or offer new conceptual frameworks that expand our thinking about the possible.
Emergent pathways form from incipient footsteps to suggest a potential-but-not-yet realized path. They invite us to encounter a familiar landscape anew. As vehicles for speculating about the future, such pathways can represent traces in the brush, weak signals that point us in unexpected directions. They provoke by entering our consciousness obliquely as tentative threads of unlikely connection. But they also suggest a scaffolding for us to imagine denser networks in their wake, like tributaries along which future cities may one day flourish.
For registration and full lineup of speakers and workshops go to:
primerconference.com/speakers
Or, jump right over to Eventbrite to register!
