“Nick Foster is one of the world’s foremost leaders in speculative design”
/ FORTUNE MAGAZINE /
Nick is an accomplished public speaker who has delivered keynote addresses to audiences both large and small, in locations all over the world.
While his presentations often focus on the future, they reject the allure of predictions and forecasts, the formulaic comforts of methods and frameworks and the hollow pomposity of buzzy, corporate jargon. Instead, Nick’s talks are intentionally provocative, designed to challenge assumptions and inspire people to truly reconsider how they think about the future.
He questions the allure of science-fiction fantasies and our reliance on reassuring - yet frequently unreliable - data projections. He asks us to question the internal dogmas which distort our ability to imagine, and he challenges us to reconsider where ideas about the future come from, who made them, and why.
He proposes ways of thinking about the future as an extension of the present - a world shaped by human hands and inhabited by people much like ourselves. Nick encourages audiences to approach the future with greater rigor, tenacity, imagination and care, and empowers them to become more discerning consumers and critics of the endless stream of future propositions being presented to us all.
Please feel free to get in touch if you would like to discuss a future engagement. Nick is currently represented by Deborah Rey-Burns at Propela in London.
Selected appearances
Dutch Digital Day, keynote address - Amsterdam 2024 - LINK
Rabobank, The Future Mundane - Utrecht 2024
NextM, keynote address - Stockholm 2024
Stanford University, Graduate School of Business - California, 2024
Universidad de Diseño y Tecnología - Madrid, 2024
Gitex, keynote address - Dubai, 2023
California College of the Arts - San Francisco, 2023
The Next Web, keynote address - Amsterdam, 2023 - LINK
Nike Digital Futures Summit - Oregon, 2023
University of Applied Arts - Vienna, 2023
Harvard + Stanford MBA Climate Summit - California, 2023
Edmond de Rothschild Foundation - Tel Aviv, 2022
In conversation with Aldo Cibic - Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic - Shanghai, 2022
MDES commencement speech, Berkeley University - California, 2022
BMW Designworks - Los Angeles, 2022
Z/Topia, Podcast appearance with Matt Ward - 2021
IKEA Digital Days, keynote address - Copenhagen (remote), 2021 - LINK
Google - San Francisco, 2020 - LINK
Emerging Practices Conference - Shanghai, 2019
Pan-Tongji Design Week - Shanghai, 2019
Worldz, Cultural Masters - Los Angeles, 2019
FUTURES working group, Smithsonian Museum - Washington DC, 2019
Really Interesting Speaker series, Casper - San Francisco, 2019
Worldz, Cultural Masters - Los Angeles, 2018
Primer Conference, keynote speaker - Berkeley, 2018
PTTOW summit - Los Angeles, 2018
Mercedes Benz - Frankfurt Motor Show - Germany, 2017
PTTOW summit - Los Angeles, 2017
IDSA awards - Detroit, 2017
Partly Broken Spaces - San Francisco, 2016
Interaction 15 - San Francisco, 2015
dConstruct - Brighton, 2015
‘It’s Grim up North’, IDSA - Silicon Valley, 2014
An Evening of Design & Fiction - IDEO SF, 2013
Emerge conference - Arizona State University, 2013
Interesting North - Sheffield, 2010