Podcast Episodes

Marina Gorbis is executive director of the Institute for the Future, a place where business executives, policymakers, nonprofits, and others use foresight and futuring techniques to make better long-term decisions. For example, you might work with the Institute for the Future to anticipate and be able to plan for a worldwide pandemic.

In fact, Marina worked on just such a project years before COVID hit. Now that the pandemic is real, interest in futuring has spiked. Marina talks about what futuring is and the trends she’s seeing—in particular, how our relationship with work is changing. She also talks about how she defines value creation, that project that anticipated the pandemic, and her current project, the Equitable Enterprise Initiative.

Jon Veal is co-founder of alt_, an organization that focuses on the power of community. The alt_ market is the organization’s flagship program. Their first market transformed an abandoned space into a communal free market, encouraging community members to give, take, and take care of one another.

Jon talks about how serving his community and making art come together for him, the importance of faith in his work, and the planning he and his co-founder, Jordan Campbell, have done to help secure their organization’s longevity.

Kenneth Bailey, co-founder of the Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI), and co-author of Ideas, Arrangements, Effects, talks about his approach to building a better possible world. Talking about specific projects like Public Kitchen, as well as the thinking and pragmatism shared in his book, Kenneth presents an approach to building that new world.

As he sees it, one must go beyond the problems we see and experience every day to understand the systems, infrastructures, or “arrangements” that underpin them.

Michela Magas has had a nonlinear career path driven by a focus on bringing people together to make deliberate decisions that enable long-term creativity and innovation. Those decisions may reside in the realm of intellectual property, as in the Industry Commons, or music technology, as in the case of MTF (Music Tech Fest).

Michela talks about how to foster innovation by bringing people from disparate fields together, why nonlinear career paths are the way forward, and the kind of skills people need for navigating our changing world.

Ruth Reichstein is part of the European Commission’s Presidential Advisory Board on the New European Bauhaus, or NEB, an initiative developed to help the EU achieve the goals set forth in its Europe Green Deal.

The NEB aims to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. In this episode, Ruth talks about the initiative’s goals, how design will help them realize those goals, and what the NEB means by “beautiful.”