Designing futures
is a practice.

We expand futures literacy through design-led practice, distributed across a global network of cities.

Timeline

  • 2015

    Speculative Futures launches in the Bay Area

  • 2017

    6 cities join. PRIMER conference debuts.

  • 2018

    60+ chapters across 4 continents

  • 2022

    • PRIMER final edition.

    • New leadership emerges.

    • 90 cities

    • 5 continents

  • 2026

    • Relaunch

    • 29 active cities

    • Expanding platform

The future isn’t a destination. It’s a practice we build together.

Speculative Futures started as a simple bet: that designers, in cities everywhere, were already thinking about the future — and needed a place to do it together.

What began in the Bay Area in 2015 grew into something we hadn’t fully planned for. Within two years, chapters had formed in six cities. Within three, the community had spread to four continents. The annual conference PRIMER brought it all together in a single room, once a year, to ask harder questions.

“The future isn’t a destination. It’s a practice we build together.”

Today, under new leadership, the community continues — distributed, open, and rooted in the belief that futures literacy is not a luxury. It’s a skill every designer, every organization, and every city needs.

What We Stand For

  • Design as Futures Practice

    Design is not just problem-solving. It is a form of futures-making. Every design decision is a hypothesis about the world we want to inhabit.

  • Plural Futures

    There is no single future. We work with multiple, competing, and contradictory futures to avoid monocultures of possibility.

  • Ethical Imagination

    Speculation without ethics is just fantasy. We hold ourselves accountable to the impact of the futures we imagine and the ones we enable.

  • Open Futures Literacy

    Futures thinking should not be gatekept. We work to make speculative practice accessible, understandable, and useful to everyone.

  • Local Agency, Global Alignment

    Each chapter operates in its own context. We share a practice, not a prescription. Local ownership is non-negotiable.

Our Commitments

  • Futures For All

    Keep the platform open, evolving, and community-owned

  • Distribute knowledge

    A design choice that shapes how an organization learns, adapts and shares.

  • Center equity

    Equity and plural participation are not optional features of future-making. Building futures that serve everyone requires shifting from a single-story approach to one that actively centers diverse voices, redistributes power, and designs systems that are responsive to difference.

  • Local Agency, Global Alignment

    Each chapter operates in its own context. We share a practice, not a prescription. Local ownership is non-negotiable.

  • Practice over theory

    We show up with tools, not only ideas

What We Do

  • Talks & Lectures

  • Exhibitions

  • Research

  • Workshops

  • Learning Programs

  • Community Experiments

  • Publishing

  • Speculative Projects