2018 Program

In 2018, there was an even wider range of speakers from the design, strategy & futurist communities. We are still loyal to the core of our offering which is Speculative Design; so you can be sure to hear some amazing talks from Speculative & Critical Designers from around the world, as well as student work from top design schools in the US.

There were over 20 speakers on 2 separate stages. Talks traversed issues across the social, political, environmental and global impact of design.

At Primer there were such topics as:

Practical and critical frameworks for inspecting aspects of the future to cultivate innovation

How science fiction has and will shape the technology of tomorrow

Policies and implications around space/air transportation and other emerging technologies

New economic systems to combat an era facing climate change

And what humanity’s next chapter might look like…in the near and far future

Workshops will cover a variety of toolkits and methodologies for strategic foresight and futures thinking. Each facilitator will bring their own unique lens—from looking at the future through your grandchildren’s eyes to considering the urban and social landscape, these sessions and talks are here to pave your journey toward transformation and possibilities.

PRIMER is a project of the Design Futures Initiative,a 501c3 nonprofit which produces the Speculative Futures meetups and has established chapters in San Francisco, Austin, New York, Berlin, and London and has over a thousand members worldwide.

Where did the PRIMER conference come from?

PRIMER culminated out of the interest of the speculative design community we were building in San Francisco. We started our first meetup in April 2015 as an experiment to see if there were others in the Bay Area that were interested in Speculative & Critical Design (SCD). Interest grew quickly and we were thrilled by the feedback and reaction of people in the design community—many people had never heard of speculative design and wanted to know more. So we decided to organize a “glorified meetup” in Feb 2017. It was only meant to be a one day event where we would fly in some of our favorite designers. But the more we worked on it, the more it turned into a full-fledged conference.