Festival

The versions of the futures in popular culture are bleak. It often looks like a gloomy, always raining, version of Hong Kong with staggering inequality and humanities in decline; or like a lifeless post-apocalyptic desert.

To increase the odds of a better future for everyone, we are inviting you to imagine it. How does a positive, inclusive, exciting future look like? Not a simplistic and naive, but a believable, compelling, seriously good one. What is a vision worth working hard towards?

If we learn anything designing and building innovative products, is that you have to have a vision to deliver an outcome. We have to have a vision for the future if we want to have a good one.

A lot happened at the intersection of Design and Tech, Humanities and Computing in the last few decades. We got connected, we got social, we got addicted to and confused by the new media. Big ideas from Xerox Park, Stanford Institute, MIT developed in the 60s and 70s shaped us. What is next?

What will be the mother of all demos 50 years from now?

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This introduction was written in the summer of 2019; the world did change since. There is no “the” future. There is always a possibility, and there is hope. And hope is a powerful tool.

Let’s choose love over hate.

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When?

2nd & 3rd of April 2021, Good Friday and Not A Bad Saturday!

Where?

It is where you are while you have a good connection, mic, and video on. We take FromAFuture fully remote in 2021 and compliment with a few private gatherings in Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, and where you want to see your friends.

Who?

This is an event about you first of all. We build experience around the participants, not the stage or the sponsors. No exclusive lounges, not elitist self-affirmations, no “tell me that story of your success that everyone heard from you already.”

We do not have corporate sponsors, we do not have any hidden agenda.

We invite designers, leaders, facilitators, researchers, enterpreneurs, engineer, activists with different perspectives to share genuine insights and personal experience.

What is it all about?

We invite you to focus on protopias. Not utopias. Not dystopias. 

Protopias are realistic, positive, prototypes or a future. Something worth to work towards. Nor too idealistic, nor too depressing. Doable, practical, and exciting.

A future is not defined. Having a protopia in your mind means you have a vision. You have a way to measure your progress. Making progress towards a desirable and achievable outcome is a nice source of happiness. Why don’t make yourself a bit happier?

FromAFuture is a unique gathering to do precisely that.

Some of the event themes:

  • Voice. Our voices are unique and powerful. We hear before we see, and the voices is how we connected even before we born. Nevertheless, we often lose our voices or fail to hear others. How might we facilitate the connections?

  • Knowledge.. 70% of the information today is not on the Internet and we are losing intrinsic knowledge at dramatic speed. Insightful and practical wisdom is dying with the people who gathered it. How might we save our cultures?

  • Third culture. Many of us were born in one culture but matured in another or in-between. As a third-culture you may not fit well anywhere, or you may fit well no matter where you are. How might we make the world our home?

  • Urban evolution. We build beautiful cities, but are they sustainable? We probably cannot keep rebuilding it all with concrete, metal, and glass every 100 years. How might we grow sustainable cities?

  • Trust. The glue of a community. The backbone of collaboration and efficiency. How might we facilitate trust?

  • Gatherings. We might do more together and many of us hate the time we waste in the meetings. When we need collaborators the most we often fail to meet. How might we meet meaningfully and co-create?

  • Metrics. How do you measure a success? GDP is a good bad example. Would you measure your life outcomes by how much stuff you pumped out in $ value? Is mother carrying for a child really does not have any useful output for economy? How might we measure what matters?

  • Creative confidence. What blocking good ideas from becoming a reality? What makes an idea a good one? How might we we shorten the Idea → Reality arrow for good ideas?

  • Death. It is part of the human experience. We do not want to face it, and yet we face it every day. It could give us a purpose or render all our endeavors empty of meaning. How might we create while facing death?

  • Education. The process of education seems to be structurally the same as the process of innovation. A good educator is an innovator. How might we facilitate learning?

We do not restrict event to only these themes. We invite you to participate and share your first-hand experiences. We believe in power of accepting plurality and facing ambiguity.

We found that short, focused, ~12 min talks followed by in-depth conversations for 40 min in small groups is a good format.

Be present, listen, disagree with respect, learn. Enjoy all of it!

More than conversations

First day is about sharing, learning, and finding inspiration.

The second day of the conference is the building day. We have whole day to help you build your protopia and plant the seeds of sustainable innovations in your life for the whole year.

Join at FromAFuture website: FromAFuture.com.