Phil Balagtas - Driving speculative futures
In episode 48 I had the absolute pleasure to catch up and learn from Phil Balagtas.
Phil Balagtas is an Experience Design Director at McKinsey & Co. in San Francisco,CA. He is also the founder of The Design Futures Initiative (DFI) that focuses on speculative design.
An educator and futurist.
His Design Futures events bring together designers, futurists, and strategists from all over the world to teach and speak about designing for the future and the ethical challenges around emerging technologies. Speculative Futures are a new field and his initiatives enable people around the world to access frameworks, methods, and knowledge to apply it and use it to solve major global challenges.
Speculative futures can drive strategic business visions.
During the episode, Phil shares inspiring learnings about how speculative futures can be used to make strategic business decisions. By understanding preferred, probable, and potential futures businesses can understand the long-term consequences of a market and designers support in aggregating knowledge from experts into a visualized and tangible future story that helps everyone to make the right decisions and be aware of consequences.
Public policies and ethics around technology.
Further, Speculative Design can be used to make people aware of how frameworks and innovations around data, technology, privacy, business models, and design concepts will lead to certain behavior and societal outcomes. This can be used to raise awareness and act early for policymakers and technology regulators to create the right frameworks that balance the needs of humans and businesses.
Phil Balagtas
Phil has been a Visual & UX Designer since 2001 and has experience designing across a variety of devices and platforms within non-profit, retail, advertising, and enterprise software organizations. He is currently an Experience Design Director at McKinsey & Co. in San Francisco, CA. He is also the founder of The Design Futures Initiative (DFI), a nonprofit that organizes the international Speculative Futures meetups and PRIMER conferences in the US and Europe. An educator and futurist, his events bring together designers, futurists, and strategists from all over the world to teach and speak about designing for the future and the ethical challenges around emerging technologies.
Phil is also an avid public speaker—he has presented and taught workshops around the world on various topics including Design Facilitation, Digital Transformation, and Speculative Design. Delivering powerful statements around the importance of design and strategy to shape the future of society and businesses, he shares an amalgamation of experience from working across sectors and focuses on how to empower designers for social impact.
More about Phil:
Phil currently contributes to a small chapter of a book coming out later this year led by Gem Bartond called: Experimental Realism
He runs a frequent Twitch show called ztopia.show about speculative futures.
Books Phil recommends:
Future Shock by Alvin Toffler
How to Future by Scott Smith and Madeline Ashby
Future Scouting by Damien Lutz
Speculative Everything by Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby
Extrapolation Factory Operator's Manual by Elliott Montgomery & Chris Woebken
Discursive Design by Bruce Tharp
Homo Deus, Sapiens, & 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
The Signals are Talking by Amy Webb
