Phil Balagtas
President & Founder
The Design Futures Initiative
Phil has been a practicing visual & interaction designer since 2001 and has experience designing across a variety of devices and platforms within non-profit, retail, advertising, and enterprise software organizations. He is currently an Experience Design Director at McKinsey & Company working with a variety of industries to transform and enhance their digital businesses and strategies. He is also the founder and organizer of the Design Futures Initiative which organizes the international Speculative Futures meetups and the PRIMER conference in the US and Europe. An educator and futurist, his events bring together designers and futurists from all over the world to teach and share strategies for designing for the future and the ethical challenges around emerging technologies.
Talks
Futures Design Thinking: Speculative Design, Strategic Foresight and other ways to respond to the future
As the craft of Design continues to evolve and require more strategic thinking, we need additional tools and frameworks to address today’s greatest political, ethical, environmental and cultural challenges. What does the world look like 7-10 years from now? How can we properly assess the challenges we will eventually face? And what role will Design and Designers play in that future? As both a Design Director at McKinsey & Co. and the founder of the Design Futures Initiative, a not-for-profit organization with over 40 chapters worldwide, Phil will discuss examples of how to apply Speculative Design & Foresight as strategic principles for understanding the future and beyond.
