Nick Foster
Nick Foster RDI is a Futures Designer based in Oakland, California. He has spent his career exploring the future for globally renowned technology companies including Google, Nokia, Sony and Dyson. As Head of Design at Google X, Nick led a team of designers, researchers and prototypers developing nascent technologies. Such include: brain-controlled computer interfaces, intelligent robotics, stratospheric internet balloons and neighborhood-scale nuclear fusion.
Despite the ambitious nature of much of Nick’s work, he’s well known for his down-to-earth and occasionally irreverent approach to the future. In 2013, he coined the term Future Mundane. Fortune magazine described him as “one of the world’s foremost leaders in speculative design” in 2018. And in 2021, he received the title Royal Designer for Industry—the highest accolade for a British designer—in recognition of his significant contributions to the discipline. An accomplished writer and public speaker, Nick has produced multiple books and shares his thinking about the future with audiences across the globe.
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. He designs his talks to challenge assumptions and inspire people to truly reconsider how they think about the future.
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. He empowers them to become more discerning consumers and critics of the endless stream of future propositions being presented to us all.
Nick Foster was born in Derby—the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and a city once synonymous with innovation, manufacturing and technology. In 2001, he earned his masters degree from the Royal College of Art. In 2018, he became a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has lived in California since 2012 with his wife, Jayne.
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Hardcover
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An invaluable guide to how to think—and not to think—about the future, by one of the premier futurists of our time.
You may not know the name Nick Foster. But after just a moment of googling you’ll realize that he’s been shaping the missions of some of the companies that have surely been shaping the world you live in —Sony; Nokia; Dyso...Read More
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The Future, Emerging Technologies, AI, Design, Creativity, & Speculative Design
Whenever a futurist is on stage, there’s an expectation that their talk will consist of wide-eyed tales of incredible new technologies, fearful extrapolations of present day data or some sort of manifesto for a ‘better’ world. Nick’s talks do not do this. Instead he offers a moment of deep reflection, a provocation to pause and rebuild the very process of thinking about the future.
Our ability to think about what’s next with depth, detail and rigor is critically underdeveloped, and in our world of relentless, large-scale change, this is leaving us underprepared for the challenges we all face. Nick isn’t interested in telling you what the future holds. He’s here to help you build the skills you need to think about it for yourself.
Through decades of experience guiding some of the world’s most influential organizations, Nick has positioned himself at the forefront of this field. With a mix of provocative ideas and real-world examples, his talks leave audiences not just reflective and inspired, but truly empowered to think about what might be coming next.
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“You’re Probably Thinking About the Future All Wrong”
“Nick Foster: ‘Predictions are mostly nonsense’”
“Why the future won’t look like a sci-fi movie”
Praise for Could Should Might Don’t
“This is the book on the future we’d been waiting for—an impassioned argument for replacing lazy certainties and fearful fantasies with a rigorous, rationally optimistic, and ultimately empowering stance toward what might be coming next.”
— OLIVER BURKEMAN, author of Meditations for Mortals and Four Thousand Weeks
“Where are we going? Who will we be when we get there? These are the big questions, and we need to know that we don’t know enough to answer them. Nick Foster’s book is a light bulb over your head that never goes off, a song about the future that strikes not just technological but conceptual notes. This book is innervisionary, a travel guide for our mind’s eye.”
— QUESTLOVE, author of Hip-Hop Is History
“Nick Foster started out tracing Garfield cartoons at his kitchen table. I started out tracing Garfield cartoons at my kitchen table! Nick Foster is a genius who helps companies like Dyson, Apple, and Google envision the future. I’m still hoping for flying DeLoreans. That’s why I listen to Nick tell me how to imagine and create what’s next for ourselves. Remember, you don’t have to outrun somebody if you can outsmart them.”
— BOBBY HUNDREDS, author of NFTs Are a Scam/NFTs Are the Future
“It’s a wondrous thing to read someone who can bring potential futures to life without being stuck in retreads of yet more takes on AI and robotics. Nick Foster’s Could Should Might Don’t blows a draft
of fresh and thrilling air through a genre that has lately become stale, repetitive, and unproductive. It’s the kind of book you keep dropping down to your lap as you look up and wonder.”
— STEPHEN FRY
“A book about futures work written so thoughtfully, by someone who’s practiced it at such a high level and yet can ground it beautifully in stories of everyday life and the possible futures they
hold. This is both Nick Foster’s method and his particular skill, and this warm, insightful, and ultimately generative book balances critique, care, love, and hope for this kind of work.”
— DAN HILL, author of Dark Matter
“I couldn’t put down this brilliant, eye-opening work—it’s just the kind we need at the moment. Foster has spent a lifetime exploring tomorrows, and his message is clear: serious thinking about the future is essential if we hope to shape it rather than be blindsided by it.”
— DAVID EAGLEMAN, author of Incognito
“I’m thrilled about Nick’s book. Rather than more forecasts and projections, Nick brings us the importance of thinking about the future today, in the most accessible and engaging way possible”
— ANAB JAIN, designer, filmmaker and futurist
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