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.
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
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