Phil Balagtas

Phil has been a Visual and 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 a Senior Designer and Researcher for Digital Solutions within GE Aviation working with airlines to use big data to improve operational and fuel efficiency. He is also founder and organizer of the San Francisco Critical Design and Speculative Futures meetup group where he hosts speakers and educators as well as conducts workshops to develop methods and frameworks for designing for the future.

For more, keep up with Phil on Twitter as @neshacom1.

Presentations

UX Camp 2016

Shaping Signals: Preparing for the Future through Speculative Design

What methods can we use to stimulate creativity while considering future ecosystems and challenges? Speculative and Critical Design are approaches that operate within Design Thinking that can be used as tools to surface and address social, cultural, and ethical issues that design for the future can bring. While it’s been labeled alarmist and sensational, it enables versatile thinking and serves as a platform for discovery, conversation, and awareness that can help fuel different perspectives of the future…alternate futures, potential futures, some desirable…some not. It’s up to us to use these exercises and inspiration to craft the right future built with imagination and responsibility.

This talk will walk through selected projects that play in the realm of Speculative Design and make the case for how it can be used to understand different challenges the future may hold. Dancing between dystopic futures that address famine and overpopulation to more light-­hearted Design Fiction, we’ll introduce design lenses that will allow participants to investigate signals in the present, project them into a point in the future, and manifest a product or service with considerations of the state of the future environment.