Phil Balagtas
Founder of The Design Futures Initiative


About
Phil has been a Visual & 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 an Experience Design Director at McKinsey & Co. in San Francisco,CA. He is also the founder of The Design Futures Initiative (DFI), a nonprofit that organizes the international Speculative Futures meetups and PRIMER conferences in the US and Europe. An educator and futurist, his events bring together designers, futurists, and strategists from all over the world to teach and speak about designing for the future and the ethical challenges around emerging technologies.
Phil is also an avid public speaker—he has presented and taught workshops around the world on various topics including Design Facilitation, Digital Transformation, and Speculative Design. Delivering powerful statements around the importance of design and strategy to shape the future of society and businesses, he shares an amalgamation of experience from working across sectors and focuses on how to empower designers for social impact.
Social Media
Twitter: @neshacom1 @futures_design
Instagram: @futures_design
Facebook: Facebook.com/SpeculativeFutures
Websites: www.futures.design, www.primerconference.us, www.primerconference.eu
Speculative Design, Strategic Foresight & Futurism: A New Toolkit for Responding to the Future
16.50 – 17.15
Main Stage
Phil will cover seminal works that span the range of projects and frameworks that are being used to understand the implications of the future and the impact of emerging technologies on culture, society, and humankind.
Also, as the founder of the nonprofit, The Design Futures Initiative, he’ll share work on programs they’ve created to address challenges of youth and how to bring design methodologies to improving their social pathways.