Join us for this special event where we will talk about participation and collective dreaming.

Our speakers will share some creative participatory practices from their work engaging communities to help shape more sustainable and inclusive futures.

Chris Jackson

Chris Jackson is founder and partner of We Create Futures, a practice that works at the intersection of futures, strategy, insight and design. We Create Futures supports organisations to think critically about the future, improve decision-making and realise their agency to take action in the present, by design. Based in Aotearoa, New Zealand, they work with clients in New Zealand and across the globe.

Participation is essential in creating diverse and inclusive futures, but can often be burdensome to the communities and organisations we aspire to work with. Chris will use the example of Te Rau Matomato (translated to "of small seeds") a co-design project with Māori communities and organisations in Taranaki, on the north island of New Zealand.

He will share some practical examples of approaches used to foster participation within the project and some reflections on the broader importance of participation in supporting people to realise their agency to create preferred futures.

About Chris

For the last 18 years Chris has worked across industrial, service and strategic design in the UK and New Zealand. He has trained in the Cynefin framework and Anthrocomplexity with Dave Snowden, Co-Design with Liz Sanders, International Fieldwork Studies with Jan Chipchase and as a Strategic Foresight Practitioner with Institute of the Future (IFTF) in Palo Alto, California and brings all these influences into his work. He has won 23 individual and team awards across a variety of design and research projects. His work has featured in several publications and he has delivered talks, lectures and workshops internationally.

Niki Wallace

Niki Wallace, founder of Net Zero Lab (Living Lab based in Adelaide) and co-design researcher at the University of South Australia will share research about participation in a socially distanced world. The Food Futures case study is a low-contact co-design experiment using boardgames and transmedia approaches to engage with communities, build their adaptive capacity and reimagine a food system with transparent relationships and local participation.

About Niki

Dr Niki Wallace is a researcher/designer/facilitator/writer whose work spans a living lab, a design studio and a university using a pracademic approach that consciously intertwines radical and rigorous research with real-world experimental action. Niki’s work embraces complexity and uncertainty to engage in systems change through co-creation, focussing on the consumption and waste problem, participatory food systems and critical design education.

Mel Rumble (will join us for the panel discussion)

Mel Rumble is a Sydney-based futures designer and UX/digital producer. She’s a 2020 NextGen Foresight Practitioner Fellow and holds a Master of Strategic Foresight from Swinburne. Mel is a futures designer at Action Foresight and co-curator of the latest Museum of Futures exhibition, Pandemic Pivots. Mel is also a casual academic for several futures subjects in the Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation at UTS.