Name: Prototyping the Future
Uploaded: 2025-12-03
Duration: 17 min 20 s
Description: When we picture the future, what informs our vision? A futurist argues that literature and entertainment exert an overwhelming influence on how we think about what’s next. How can governments, companies, and brands learn from this insight? How can Sci-Fi world-building inspire or distort the way we design policies and products?

When we picture the future, what informs our vision? A futurist argues that literature and entertainment exert an overwhelming influence on how we think about what’s next. How can governments, companies, and brands learn from this insight? How can Sci-Fi world-building inspire or distort the way we design policies and products?

Prototyping the Future

Conferences

Many of our visions of the future with a capital F are inspired or influenced by stories and literature and entertainment. Our next speaker spent much of her youth immersed in science fiction. Starting as a creative director, she made a career in Hollywood which included futurist consultancy for Disney and Marvel, Black Panther, Wakanda Forever. And advisory work for other media companies such as the BBC, DreamWorks, Universal, as well as other Fortune 500 firms. Now the resident futurist at Nike, Monica Belska, will explore how governments, companies, and brands can apply sci-fi world building techniques to prototype our future and shape the world we want to inhabit. Please welcome Monica to the stage. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to join you here today. So we will be speaking how we could be utilizing techniques of sci-fi world building to shape real world impacts. But before we go to the depth of it, I have to share a disclaimer that all views are my own and should not be used to extrapolate future strategies of the companies that I work with or for. So, the real value of IPs such as Avatar and Black Panther is not merely in the narratives on the screen. It is in the universes they have created Pandora and Wakanda. Desire to belong and even more so to feel inspired to participate in a vision of the future creates loyalty and engagement that almost nothing outside of entertainment fandom has achieved. Story world design is a design framework I have been developing, inspired by the world building techniques of sci-fi entertainment, repurposed for real world challenges and opportunities. It is a method to prototype compelling future vision and consistent future strategy to flow out of it that is applicable again for the real world challenges for the brands and governments and hopefully to shape better impact. So now the reason why I wanted to move away from the term world building within sci-fi to story world design. Because world building, when applied to the real world, evokes projects such as Chandigarh or Brasilia. A genius architect descending upon the land and shaping everything in this very much top-down vision. Now story world design goes beyond that by taking into account the organic processes through which cities grow, encompassing the diverse communities, but also another great inspiration for me has been gardening, right? When you garden. It's not just about that first grand act of engineering. It's about adapting to the land because not all seeds grow in the same way and not everything that you first considered to be a weed is a weed. And so in this way, successful story world design sets the foundation for cohesive narratives, heroes, spaces, platforms, and experiences, and This success is not just measured by external engagement and the hype that it could create. It is also how do you communicate the future vision that you are creating, not just putting out products, right, but every product creating new opportunities in the world to the stakeholders of the brand and for the government to their own leaders. And it's not just about being reactive, but really proactive in how you shape the future. So sci-fi serves as a lot of inspiration for us. But we have this misconception that it predicts the future. More than anything, it prototypes, sometimes misdirecting us to think that something is futuristic, when really it is not. Many a time it has actually closed down our imagination. To what actually is interesting. And so much of today's misperceptions about the future have in fact been shaped by sci-fi bias, and it has rendered ground fertile for misinformation and especially a lot of misconceptions around science. We think of AI development leading to consciousness as some kind of natural fact, when really it is a sci-fi fantasy, not proven by science. We think that Mars colonialism is a real thing and it is a frontier of rocket engineering rather than biology. And in a way sci-fi is to blame for it. So if we acknowledge that it is those that control the fantasy. Control the future, how we would like them, us to wield that fantasy. Dystopia It is one of the two most popular ways to think about the future. But the issue with that is that it's not any more caution tale. Regurgitation of doom and gloom has become A reason to disengage. If we believe that the future is doomed and there's nothing we can do about it, well, then we do nothing about it, but also possibly worse. It becomes a product roadmap because there will always be those that will want to make money, not just as the world burns, but also by setting the world on fire. And so utopias oppositioned as the answer to dystopianism, but historically they have been deeply homogenous and exclusionary. In a way, if disabled or elderly people still exist? Is it even utopia? And what does it take? What kind of ends justify the means? Right? So it's not really a binary, it's two reverse sides of the same coin. Every historical utopia. Has been somebody else's dystopia, and today's techno utopian propositions are not really that different. Famous venture capitalists such as Marc Andreessen, I unironically quotes. Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, who was an author of Futurist manifesto, but also of fascist manifesto and an ideologue of Mussolini. So it's not that. We should not be critical, as again, Mark Andresen identifies tech ethicists and tech criticists as the enemies of progress in his techno optimist manifesto. I believe that to think that what we currently have is not the best thing that we can have is actually the most optimistic approach. So when we acknowledge the power of fiction, future fiction specifically. When we try to apply that world design strategy to real-world challenges, what are the traps we shouldn't fall into? And so, the first trap is really nostalgia. It's trying to return to the past rather than learn from it. Our capacity for memory, for remembering our past, did not evolve to remember the past, but really to make better future decisions. But in a way, we cannot succumb to techno solutionism, techno fetishism, or dare I say, even technocultism. In this battle today between scientists and Tedros, we must prioritize science, technology. is actually a material manifestation and outflow of scientific research. Without that fundamental science. Innovation stops happening, so always take the side of the scientists that are telling you inconvenient truths. Now, I find a very interesting real world example of these two different story world designs. Taken by the government, are the Project 2025 versus Made in China 2025. One tries to escape material reality, the other leans into it. And the emerging common point between religious extremists in the Western world and many of its tech cultists is that they both believe in the fantasy of end times coming. Bought brought by religious rapture or AI god slash demon A nerd rapture. The most striking difference for me between what the most powerful people in America versus China pronounce about the future is that in the former they want to escape the body in favor of matrix mind uploading. They want to escape the earth in favor of Mars colonialism, and in the other, it's about leaning in this contextual reality of the land. With the millennial lineage before and after, and I think it's so important to lean into that reality as inconvenient as it is and sure ecological civilization might seem like a distant dream. But surely it is more realistic than Mars as the Plan B. Now, over the long term control of delusional voices, Can really save us from that social fracturing. The answer to that is finding a way to awaken our genuine scientific curiosity and reinforced information literacy. The change we need is not going to happen overnight, but we start with identifying our shared yes visions and informed hope is key in that. Informed hope is not doing something because it's easy. But because I we understand the scope of the challenges and we embrace this amazing opportunity to learn. So what if the future could be everything we hope for. But not what we were told to expect. Narratives are not really enough anymore. There were beautiful narratives put out with the great reset of 15 Minute City. And what happens? These think tank manifestos got. Misinterpreted. And became a fodder to conspiracies that flooded YouTube. So putting out words, putting out manifestos, putting out narratives is not enough. We need to bring people into that world that we say we are designing or making policy to words. We need to flesh it out visually sensorly, and so we could really be learning from the best techniques of scifi world building to design future scenarios and world prototypes beyond these finite visions of utopia and dystopia and find insights in the edges that we have overlooked. And could the future actually be? What we hope for. But so very different to what sci-fi conditioned us to be, to believe. Maybe it's not about the flying cars. As replacement of the Uber for the uber rich, but about rewilding city skies. Now, that does not mean that we should be Ludite and abandon technological research or scientific development. It's about thinking how these technologies and these innovations serve real utilities. There will be plenty need for flying cars for emergency services, disaster leave, etc. etc. etc. So my proposition for the practical guides beyond utopianism and dystopianism is protopia. Now protopia differently than utopia and dystopia is more of a process than a destination. And instead of being this vague middle ground between the two, it is imagination beyond it, understanding status quo. But not resigning to it. It is meant to be expanded and questioned. It is not a better future built through magical tech, but upon evolved values assisted by the bleeding edge scientific research and technological development. And could we try and imagine this path to a future that is not made sustainable but actually regenerative. Sustainability is not exciting for the people, right? It just feels like. Another Lecture I need to to listen through, right? But when we propose something that is regenerative, that offers new way of doing things, when we lean into the embodiment, rather than disembodiment. We might find something joyful to strive for and joy and imagination is where it all begins. So this is a bit of a cheat sheet, the six principles that are not meant to be considered as some kind of hierarchical maos pyramids of needs, but really. As interlinked circles to be thought of as together plurality. What if instead of tolerance we fostered curiosity into dependence? What if we acknowledge that the real strength is not in not meeting others but about weaving these resilient systems, regeneration, what if we moved past. User centric, human centric into life centered design and recognize how biology is not this constraint which should transcend but infinite source for inspiration. Creative flourishing. What if we assume that Creativity is the beginning of a solution to all problems. Sensory embodiment, again, recognizing how future doesn't happen to technology because technology, but to our bodies and to our bodies and spiritual fulfillment, right? Because in the absence of that, conspiracies and cultism rises. So I know I threw a lot of big ideas at you, but I hope that protopian story well design could become this cheat sheet whenever you approach any project that you're working on. Not specifically something that requires immediate foresight practice because none of us in this room. Is doing technology or marketing or business with every action, no matter how big or small, we are shaping the future. But the future also gets shaped by our apathy. So this is an opportunity to get curious, to learn, to disentangle ourselves from a sci-fi biases we've been conditioned to, but also see the power of creatives and imagers. that have inspired us. That have inspired some of the world's most powerful people to design towards a particular future. And maybe we need new inspiration. Maybe all of us need to become future story world designers. Thank you.