​🌷 About the Event

​Need a break from the AI optimists vs. doomers debate? Looking for a little existential hope?

​What if prototyping better futures could be as fun as game night?

​Join us for an evening of play (have you tried Bodystorming or One-Word Story?), creative conversation, and collaborative imagination as we explore what it means to thrive as humans—and as part of the living world—in an age of rapid technological change.

​Together we'll play some of our favorite futures games—some we'll bring, and maybe even invent a few together—to explore questions like:

​✨ What kind of future do we actually want to create?

​✨ What might learning, work, community, and everyday life look like in 2126?

​✨ How can technology better support people, communities, and our living planet?

​✨ How can each of us have more agency in shaping what's next?

​Along the way, you'll discover practical design tools—from speculative futures and systems mapping to participatory design methods—that you can take back to your work, your community, and everyday life. Together, we'll explore how to design not just for what's probable, but for what's possible.

​Whether you're a designer, technologist, educator, founder, policymaker, artist, philosopher—or simply a curious human—there's something here for you.

​🎲 Come learn a few new games, or bring a favorite game or facilitation method to share! We'd love this series to become a playground where people exchange the tools they're using to imagine and build better futures together.

​No design background. No AI expertise. No "right" answers.

​Just bring your curiosity, your imagination, and maybe a friend.

​🎉 Your Hosts

​👩‍🏫 Sara Blenkhorn is Director of Innovation at the Buckminster Fuller Institute, a nonprofit carrying forward Buckminster Fuller's 43-year legacy of creating a world that works for all life through design, systems thinking, and regenerative innovation.

​👩‍🏫 Mingzhu He is a life-aligned systems designer and Executive Director of the Flourishing Systems Foundation, a nonprofit innovation lab researching, designing, testing new models that help people, technology, and living systems thrive together in an age of rapid technological change.

​🎲 Why Games?

​Games are most ancient yet modern —and most enjoyable— ways to rehearse new futures. They've been one of humanity's oldest tools for learning, collaboration, and imagination—and they're found throughout the animal kingdom, too.

​They help us step outside our everyday assumptions, take safe risks, experiment with new ideas, and experience different ways of thinking, relating, and being before bringing them into the real world.

​Many of the systems that shape our lives—from education and healthcare to markets and governments—are built on rules. Games give us a playful way to explore what becomes possible when we redesign those rules.

​So let's rehearse hopeful futures—through play.