Stuart Candy
Associate Professor | Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, UNITED STATES
Stuart Candy is an advisor, facilitator, educator, artist and designer with more than twenty years of experience in the futures field.
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 (5)
Speculative Design
Future of Work
Design Fiction
Foresight
Transmedia Storytelling
Media Appearances (5)
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.
‘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.
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.
Speculative Futures at PRIMER 18
Core77 online
2018-04-16
This year's keynote speakers are futurist and Carnegie Mellon professor, Stuart Candy, and multi-platform designer, [...] Twenty speakers from industry, academia, and independent practice will speak and run workshops involving present-day project opportunities and challenges, practical and critical frameworks, the sociopolitical implications of design, and no less than the future of humanity itself (which includes speculative practice).
At South by Southwest, Pragmatist Mayors Learn to Think Like Futurists
Governing Magazine online
2018-03-12
“Foresight is a leadership competency,” says Stuart Candy, director of the Situation Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the futurist trainers at the summit. “Every leader in every organization needs to be thinking ahead, but not everybody is trained in that or experienced in it.”
Media
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Industry Expertise (2)
Education/Learning
Design
Accomplishments (6)
APF IF Award, Association of Professional Futurists (professional)
(2022) for Most Significant Futures Works - The Futures Bazaar
Speculative Design Award, Core77 (professional)
(2022) for the project “Imagination is a Commons” in the Speculative Design category
Most Significant Futures Work Award (professional)
(2017) for Designing an Experiential Scenario: The People Who Vanished from The Association of Professional Futurists
Most Significant Futures Work Award (professional)
(2015) for the card game The Thing From the Future from The Association of Professional Futurists
Official Selection, IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games (professional)
(2014) for the card game The Thing From The Future
Norman Meller Award (professional)
(2009) for his academic achievements as a recent graduate, awarded by the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa
Education (2)
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 (4)
- 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
Links (5)
Languages (1)
- English
Articles (7)
The Futures Bazaar: A Public Imagination Toolkit
British Broadcasting Corporation & Situation Lab2022 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.
Futuring: A Conversation
LA+ Speculation2022 "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.
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.
The School of Worldbuilding
Bauhaus Futures2019 Founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany in 1919, the Bauhaus was an interdisciplinary and international school of design, described as an "experimental laboratory for the building of the future." What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today? "The School of Worldbuilding" is a forward-looking contribution to this edited collection, published to mark the 100th anniversary of a short lived but profoundly influential institution.
Turning Foresight Inside Out: An Introduction to Ethnographic Experiential Futures
Journal of Futures Studies2019 This article contributes to emerging hybrid design/futures practices by offering an orienting framework making images of the future more legible and concrete. The Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) Cycle provides, practically, a way of inviting engagement with diverse participants, and methodologically, a generic process drawing on two traditions of foresight (ethnographic and experiential futures), with a view to promoting a more diverse and deeper array of scenarios for public consideration. The structure of the EXF Cycle is derived from hybrid efforts carried out by design/futures practitioners over some years, abstracted as scaffolding to serve future projects in a wide range of contexts.
Design and Futures
Tamkang University Press2019 Design and Futures is a major collection of essays, manifestos, interviews and peer-reviewed articles, edited by Stuart Candy (Carnegie Mellon University) and Cher Potter (Victoria and Albert Museum), documenting 'design futures' discourse and practice around the world. First published as back-to-back volumes in the open access Journal of Futures Studies, the present compilation preserves the original formatting while unifying all 30 pieces between covers for the first time. Forty-nine contributors from 16 countries write on topics ranging from worldbuilding and curriculum design to temporality and decolonisation, as well as new methods and processes that build on over a decade of experiential futures, speculative design and related practices.
Change the Model
Journal of Futures Studies2019 Dan Hill is Director of Strategic Design at Vinnova, the Swedish government's innovation agency. He has previously held design leadership roles at Arup Digital Studio, Future Cities Catapult, Fabrica, Sitra, and the BBC.
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