Hello Design Futures Community

What a year.

We realize we haven’t communicated much this year. We, like many of you, were occupied with personal, professional and political issues.

What DFI accomplished in 2021:

We grew our Speculative Futures community, bringing our total chapters to 78!

After a successful beta test in 2020, we kicked off our Futures x Design workshop in collaboration with The Futures School. We hosted 3 sessions in April, July, and October 2021 and had wonderful feedback from participants such as:

“The FxD course is a great introduction to using futures within the design process. It is unique in that it takes you through a design futures project, start to finish, all the way from research through to strategy and actionable outcomes.”

In order to spread the learnings from the class to our broader community, we created a free downloadable Futures x Design guide that anyone can use to learn about the FxD Framework and the tools and activities we use.

We hosted our second virtual PRIMER, bringing together people from around the globe to share their speculative ideas and projects.

This year we took an intentionally global approach, with programming sourced from our chapters across the world, and occurring in all time zones, without a single central host city.

Looking forward to 2022:

In our recent DFI Board off-site, we decided to simplify our offerings in the coming year to better focus on our mission and operational sustainability.

We acknowledged that we have not done a satisfactory job of supporting our growing global community, which is the reason our organization exists today, while putting time and energy towards standing up and managing multiple projects and programs; Futures x Design included.

The DFI Board voted to recommit to and refine our focus solely on Community Leadership and producing one PRIMER conference per year.

This coming January, we’ll send detailed information on leadership opportunities in both DFI leadership and PRIMER.

We the Board, gratefully thank you for your interest and participation in our growing global community of Speculative Futures chapters and PRIMER.

We wish you and your loved ones a healthy, restful and happy holiday season.