Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Imagining Better Futures

Gold
Wednesday, March 9, 2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Share the love for this talk
Imagining Better Futures
Speakers: Devon Powers
Link:

Summary

Whenever we make changes, we affect the lives of people in the future -- and that responsibility can feel enormous. In this talk, Devon Powers will share some of her research into people who forecast the future for a living, revealing their strategies as well as their pitfalls. She will also discuss how you can engage in research with a sense of responsibility for tomorrow.

Key Insights

  • Technological innovation rarely solves social problems; it often replicates them in new spaces, as seen with harassment incidents in the metaverse.

  • Excessive optimism in futures thinking risks ignoring real challenges, whereas excessive pessimism leads to hopelessness.

  • Trend forecasting is both predictive and culture-producing, shaping how society imagines and pursues futures.

  • Many trend forecasters distance themselves from accountability by focusing on futures they and their clients will not personally inhabit.

  • Futures visions dominated by wealthy, white, cosmopolitan men tend to overlook systemic inequalities and sustain existing power structures.

  • Afrofuturism offers a critical framework that centers Black experiences, addressing history and ongoing struggles rather than erasing them in future imaginaries.

  • Globality in futures work requires deep, meaningful engagement with diverse cultures, not superficial collection of exotic ideas.

  • The obsession with cutting-edge technology in envisioning futures can distract from critical, everyday needs like clean water, food security, and freedom from violence.

  • Sober or tragic optimism allows for hope and progress while acknowledging struggle, unintended consequences, and complexity in the future.

  • Democratic futures require transparency in methods and accountability in outcomes, focusing on equity and inclusion for those the futures are imagined for.

Notable Quotes

"The metaverse has not summoned those angels; instead, it has brought in all the good and the bad from the real world."

"We can’t just think technology or innovation will solve our problems; we have to embrace and work with those problems."

"If I do a project today on 2025, you’re not going to be in that chair in 2025 and neither am I."

"Too often, futures imaginaries want to erase or align difference rather than reckon with it."

"Trend forecasting is a culture industry—it produces culture as much as it predicts it."

"Naming things like the 'vibe shift' is powerful in shaping the narratives around future developments."

"The future will be struggle; we need to face that forward, not deny it."

"Afrofuturism shows us the future must reckon with the past and center difference and diversity."

"Obsession with gadgetry and cool tech ignores the fact that most critical future changes are mundane and essential, like clean water."

"The future is not a toy. Accountability matters deeply in how we construct futures."

Ask the Rosenbot
Mujtaba Hameed
The new horizon of ethnography: using AI to unlock the full potential of in-person research
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Andy Warr
Under My (Research) Umbrella: The Benefits and Challenges of Building a Unified Insights Function
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Brigette Metzler
Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Matt Duignan
Atomizing Research: Trend or Trap
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Denise Jacobs
Interactive Keynote: Social Change by Design
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Steve Portigal
Discussion
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Amy Marquez
INVEST: Discussion
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Christian Crumlish
The Pygmalion Effect: In Which a Vibe Coding Experiment Becomes a Million Lines…
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Dana Bishop
2022: The Year UX Demonstrates its Business Impact
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Jennifer Kanyamibwa
Creating the Blueprint: Growing and Building Design Teams
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
John Paul de Guzman
10k Screens Later: How We Became a Data-Driven Design Organization
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Jen Cardello
Standardizing Product Merits for Leaders, Designers, and Everyone
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Stephen Anderson
Puzzled? How to Coordinate Humans for Complex Challenges
2021 • Enterprise Community
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Sarah Auslander
Insights Panel
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Sarit Geertjes
People, not Petri Dishes: Stories from a Research Recruiter
2019 • DesignOps Community

More Videos

Kate Towsey

"No matter what your contract says, once your data is in the cloud connected to an LLM, you have to accept the risk it could be exposed."

Kate Towsey Basel Fakhoury Oren Friedman Graham Gardner

Participant Recruitment and Management Tools

March 12, 2026

Jennifer Kong

"People are the plot twist in this journey — despite promising AI, only human connection reveals new problems and solutions."

Jennifer Kong

Journeying toward AI-assisted documentation in healthcare

June 5, 2024

Kevin M. Hoffman

"Having a business background is almost the oldest form of product management, but great product requires balancing design and tech too."

Kevin M. Hoffman

Theme 2: Enterprise Team Journey

June 3, 2019

Amy Marquez

"Find your senior executive ally who understands design and go talk to them first — it works."

Amy Marquez

INVEST: Discussion

June 15, 2018

Gretchen Anderson

"Pair design is about two perspectives coming together as peers to quickly try and evaluate ideas."

Gretchen Anderson

Scaling the Human Center

June 8, 2017

April Reagan

"AI can be a great partner to humans if trained with fair and complete data, but we must be careful not to ship biased systems."

April Reagan

Look, Think, Act: The Futures-Smart Design Organization

October 1, 2021

Dante Guintu

"Employees with exceptional onboarding are 2.6 times more likely to be extremely satisfied with their workplace."

Dante Guintu

How to Crush the Talent Crunch

September 8, 2022

Jaime Creixems

"Document your design decisions and architecture visually so new team members can quickly understand your system."

Jaime Creixems

Best Practices when Creating and Maintaining a Design System

June 7, 2023

Billy Carlson

"If you had to visualize what you thought you agreed to in a meeting, a lot of times there’s misalignment."

Billy Carlson

Principles of Team Wireframing

October 2, 2023