Stuart Candy

Stuart Candy is an Associate Professor in the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. An award-winning foresight practitioner, designer, artist and educator, his work aims to augment our capacity for navigating alternative futures by any means necessary. At CMU he is responsible for integrating foresight / futures practice throughout the design curriculum.

Professor Candy has been involved in and identified with hybrid design / futures currents such as “design fiction” and “speculative design” dating back to their early appearances in the 2000s, and has been instrumental in bringing these idioms to wider attention and application through presenting, teaching and writing, as well as expanding their boundaries through collaborative projects using transmedia storytelling, participatory design events, games, installations, and guerrilla interventions. His experiential futures work has featured worldwide in museums, festivals, conferences, and city streets, on the Discovery Channel, and in the pages of The Economist and Wired.

As a strategic facilitator and advisor, recent partners include organisations ranging from UNESCO to Oxford University and Dubai’s Museum of the Future, and from IDEO to the Sydney Opera House, Burning Man, and the National Film Board of Canada. Prior to entering academia full-time, he was an in-house futurist at global engineering firm Arup, leading the Foresight and Innovation function across the company’s Australasia region. He is especially interested in amplifying the future-shaping capacities of under-served communities and organisations with an ethics-driven mission, including recent engagements with Interface Inc, Cook Inlet Tribal Council, and the United States Conference of Mayors.

He is currently director of CMU Situation Lab (publishers of The Thing From The Future card game), and Affiliated Faculty in the School of Architecture and the Entertainment Technology Center. He is Chair of the Academic Task Force of the Association of Professional Futurists, a founding member of the Foresight Advisory Board at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (Switzerland), and is the first Fellow of both The Long Now Foundation (USA) and the Museum of Tomorrow (Brazil).