Nick Foster (designer)
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Nick Foster (designer) | |
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| Born | 1976 (age 47–48) |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Royal College of Art |
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Nick Foster RDI MA(RCA) BSc. FRSA (born 1976) is a British designer, and futurist. He has worked in design and leadership roles for Dyson, Sony, Nokia and Google, and between 2016-2023 was the Head of Design at X (formerly known as Google X). Foster received his Masters degree in Design Products from the Royal College of Art in 2001[1]. Foster is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and in 2021 was awarded the title ‘Royal Designer for Industry’ for his services to Futures Design[2]. He was a partner at The Near Future Laboratory between 2012 and 2023, working in the field of Design Fiction[3]
The Future Mundane
In 2013, writing in the Industrial Design Journal Core77, he introduced ‘The Future Mundane’, his approach to design futures which encompasses three core tenets:
- The future is filled with background talent.
- The future is accretive
- The future is broken
This manifesto was first presented publicly in 2015 at the dConstuct conference in Brighton[4], England. Foster continues to advocate for grounded, ordinary and everyday visions of the future, and has presented the concept around the world[5] [6] [7]
The Selfish Ledger
In 2016, Foster led a speculative design project within Google entitled ‘The Selfish Ledger’, which explored parallels between Lamarckian evolution and the emergent possibilities of aggregated user data. This project was created as a provocation for use within Google, but was subsequently leaked by the technology journal ‘The Verge’[8]. The project was widely misread as a future vision, leading to critical coverage from multiple news outlets.[9][10][11]
Publications
- Nick Foster, Warren Hutchinson, This is Not an Atlas, Mark Batty Publisher, 2004, ISBN 0-9725636-4-4
- Near Future Laboratory, TBD Catalog, Near Future Laboratory LLC, 2014, ISBN 978-0-9905633-0-3
References
- ↑ "Royal College of Art Interview - Nick Foster".
- ↑ "Royal Designers for Industry - Nick Foster".
- ↑ "What is Design Fiction".
- ↑ "Vimeo - The Future Mundane - dConstruct Brighton 2015".
- ↑ "'Everyday Futures' - IKEA Digital Days 2021".
- ↑ "'Design is Messy', Google Design, San Francisco 2019".
- ↑ "'The Future Mundane' - The Next Web, Amsterdam 2023".
- ↑ Savov, Vlad (May 17, 2018). "'Google's Selfish Ledger is an unsettling vision of Silicon Valley social engineering'".
- ↑ Reisinger, Don (May 17, 2018). "Google's Hypothetical 'Selfish Ledger' Imagines Collecting All Your Data to Push You to Change Society".
- ↑ Kanter, Jake (May 18, 2018). "A leaked internal Google video shows a creepy vision of how data could be used to direct human decision-making".
- ↑ Rogers, James (May 18, 2018). "Google 'Selfish Ledger' vid reveals creepy concept to use data like 'genetic code' to program future".
External links
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