Stuart Candy

Associate Professor Carnegie Mellon University

  • Pittsburgh PA

Stuart Candy is an advisor, facilitator, educator, artist and designer with more than twenty years of experience in the futures field.

Contact

Carnegie Mellon University

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Biography

Stuart Candy is an associate professor in the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. An award-winning foresight practitioner, designer, artist and educator, his work aims to augment our capacity for navigating alternative futures by any means necessary. Candy has been involved in and identified with hybrid design/futures currents such as “design fiction” and “speculative design” dating back to their early appearances in the 2000s. He has been instrumental in bringing these idioms to wider attention and application through presenting, teaching and writing, as well as expanding their boundaries through collaborative projects using transmedia storytelling, participatory design events, games, installations and guerrilla interventions. His experiential futures work has featured worldwide in museums, festivals, conferences and city streets, on the Discovery Channel, and in the pages of The Economist and Wired.

Areas of Expertise

Speculative Design
Future of Work
Design Fiction
Foresight
Transmedia Storytelling

Media Appearances

Design Education Needs a Dose of Radical Imagination

Architect Magazine  online

2023-02-03

The book Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (MIT Press, 2013), has helped me grapple with teaching imagination. According to an accompanying diagram by futurist Stuart Candy, preferable scenarios are: first, grounded in the probable; second, take into account what is plausible; and third, encompassed by what is possible.

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‘Futures studies’ is the key to controlling our uncertain and rapidly changing world

The Print  online

2021-11-01

As we welcome Dr. Candy into the Forum Expert Network, we discuss his motivations to explore this domain, what developments have him most excited, what he wishes people knew about his work, and how we could make the concept of the future more inclusive and accountable.

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From the Futures: experiments in collaborative art & collective wayfinding in a time of ambiguity

Medium  online

2020-04-13

When the “Connect” exercise was finished the session moved to a talk by Dr. Stuart Candy, an Associate Professor at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. The talk was designed to setup the exercise that would follow as well as foreshadow things that we will explore over the course of the From the Futures project.

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Industry Expertise

Education/Learning
Design

Accomplishments

APF IF Award, Association of Professional Futurists

(2022) for Most Significant Futures Works - The Futures Bazaar

Speculative Design Award, Core77

(2022) for the project “Imagination is a Commons” in the Speculative Design category

Most Significant Futures Work Award

(2017) for Designing an Experiential Scenario: The People Who Vanished from The Association of Professional Futurists

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Education

University of Hawaii at Manoa

M.A. / Ph.D.

Political Science / Futures Studies

University of Melbourne:

B.A. / LLB

History and Phillosophy of Science

Affiliations

  • World Futures Studies Federation : Fellow
  • The Long Now Foundation : Research Fellow
  • International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies : Founding Advisor and Contributor
  • NASA JPL : Advisor

Languages

  • English

Articles

The Futures Bazaar: A Public Imagination Toolkit

British Broadcasting Corporation & Situation Lab

2022

Thinking concretely about times to come is harder and rarer than it should be. This public imagination toolkit, published by Situation Lab and the British Broadcasting Corporation, was designed help make such thinking a bit easier and more common. The Futures Bazaar is a set of instructions and resources to help organisers stage a design jam where people transform everyday objects into unique “artifacts from the future” to provoke, amuse, and inspire one another. Every participant helps imagine and produce these future artifacts, and every artifact tells a story. The toolkit consists of three parts: Manual, Slides, and Printouts.

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Futuring: A Conversation

LA+ Speculation

2022

"In this moment of seemingly compounding global crises and existential concerns about the future of the planet, LA+ pauses to consider the values and implications of speculation." This conversation between foresight practitioner & design professor Stuart Candy (Carnegie Mellon University) and transdisciplinary practitioner & architecture professor Aroussiak Gabrielian (University of Southern California) appears in LA+ SPECULATION, edited by Christopher Marcinkoski. SPECULATION is the 16th issue of LA+, the Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture published by the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design.

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Letters from the Future: Exploring Ethical Dilemmas in the Design of Social Agents

CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22)

2022

We present a case-study of using Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) to surface underlying divergences, tensions and dilemmas implicit in views of the futures of "social agents" among professional researchers familiar with the state of the art. Based on expert interviews, we designed three "letters from the future," research probes that were mailed to 15 participants working in the field, to encounter and respond to. We lay out the elements and design choices that shaped these probes, present our remote and asynchronous study design, and discuss lessons learned about the use of EXF.

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