Guild of Future Architects

I am the Executive Director of the Guild of Future Architects and Senior Consultant to Sundance Institute’s Future of Culture Initiative. I also served as External Advisor to MacArthur Foundation’s Journalism & Media Program, Creative Advisor to For Freedoms, MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality, Starfish Incubator, and Eyebeam. 

Previously, I was the Director of Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Labs Program, which supports artists working at the convergence of film, art, media, and technology. I also consult for the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms program on a research project aimed at furthering equality in emerging media, which resulted in “Making a New Reality.”

We are at the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Rapid innovation cycles require us to negotiate hugely disruptive and exponential technologies like artificial intelligence, bioengineering, immersive media, and the internet of things in an increasing interdependent world. Meanwhile, challenges are becoming existential threats: climate crisis and global migration require new systems to rise above ideological and political stalemates. Now, confronting dual pandemics of disease and racism, we can see clearly that our systems are buckling and broken.  

We must work toward building resiliency and wellbeing-based systems. GoFA has a 100-year vision that sees the Guild as a critical animator of enlightened cultural, social, economic, and political systems. Generations of Future Architects will raise humanity’s collective consciousness for radical transformation, give birth to more diverse and sophisticated organizing forces, and usher in a new era of equitable societies bound by shared values.

In recent decades, progressive movements have become increasingly scrappy, disjointed, and under-funded, while conservative campaigns and think tanks are well-funded by those who benefit from their capitalist frameworks. People working to imagine and prototype potential realities that lead to justice, inclusion, and shared prosperity so often operate from singular perspectives and confront seemingly intractable problems, when solutions from another discipline, region, or perspective might loosen a logjam that moves several concepts forward together in a shared community. At the same time, the prevailing capitalist philosophy of competition stifles ideas before they can flourish, perpetuating a culture of scarcity.  

There is great value in recognizing and naming this community of systems-changers because, while powerful, it is fragmented and underserved. Bringing change-makers together to share support and resources perpetuates abundance and builds power. We know that there are many Future Architects out there because we know them; we are them. Our work is to name and build a community to welcome every future architect home.

GoFA fosters collaboration and co-creation among people imagining and prototyping potential realities. We have three main offerings: The Community of Practice, Shared Future Incubator, and Collective Wisdom Platform. The Community of Practice will enable and foster supportive connections while offering the learning programs as a resource for developing Shared Futures.  The Shared Future Incubator will nurture these Shared Future concepts with cohorts of Future Architects through funding for prototyping and content development, learning programs, convenings, and support from the GoFA team. The Collective Wisdom Platform will document and share learnings and resources from the Shared Futures and the Community of Practice, making them widely available. 

From our Community of Practice, GoFA curates learning programs that support imagination and collaboration. Our initial learning programs include the Futurist Writers Room, the Group Dynamics Dojo, 5C Meditations, Story, Rule & Money Workshops, and the Community Model Canvas. It is our intention that these learning programs will grow and evolve alongside the Community of Practice and will be responsive to changes in our ecosystem and to new, emerging frameworks. GoFA offers these learning programs out to other Community of Practice members, to our Shared Futures, and through the Collective Wisdom Platform. 

The GoFA community are people who work through intersectional collaborations. They are audacious, insightful system-changers. They are brilliant, passionate, and committed.  They are artists, engineers, scientists, activists, organizers, healthcare professionals, educators, and economists. They are Future Architects.

GoFA was founded by Future Architects in the context of working among and sharing a community with other Future Architects. Existing Future Architects include GoFA Board Member Mark Beam, a social architect focused on regenerative strategies and technologies for carbon drawdown in the Midwest, and GoFA Shared Future InSite Baltimore, a collective of Black artists, activists, community organizers, philosophers, and scholars working to create an intentional creative community in Baltimore.

For much of my career, I have researched humanity-centered design. GoFA’s architecture is based on the “Making a New Reality” framework for emerging media that I developed with support from the Ford Foundation and Sundance Institute, and on “Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating within Communities, Across Disciplines and with Algorithms,” a field study of the media industry conducted by the MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Co-Creation Studios.

Bringing people together committed to the progressive values in community with tools and resources to cultivate and prototype innovative and radical ideas for a better future will catalyze systemic change. By supporting change-makers, GoFA will elevate the existing issues and potential new realities that they are exploring; by investing in these ideas through the Shared Future Incubator, GoFA will create prototypes to solve the most difficult problems of our world.

I’m collaborating on the vision for GoFA with founder Sharon Chang. Sharon’s work focuses on reframing the relationship between creativity, capital, and impact. As the former Chief Creative Officer of 19 Entertainment, the company that created American Idol, Sharon knows firsthand what it takes to achieve mainstream mega success; and as an impact investor, she saw a crisis of imagination on capital deployment and recognized that she was seeking outcomes—in both measurable and unmeasurable ways— that benefit and uplift people and communities on a scattershot basis and finding them under-resourced and working at the margins. As an artist who has studied the emerging media landscape through “Making a New Reality” and at the Sundance Institute, I could also see the gaps in the field for projects that don’t come with the financial or outcomes metrics that traditional philanthropists and investors demand.   

Through our experiences, Sharon and I recognize that existing models of success are extractive; our systems prioritize profit over people. We decided to imagine a new future and manifest the change we seek in a new organization to support other change seekers.

My lived experience exists at the intersection of social change and activism. As a child in an interracial family, my story includes my father being chased by the Klan in the 1960s. My experience as a woman of color in America has required imagining a new future as a means of survival. I understood from an early age that our systems are broken and would not serve me, my family, my community, or humanity.  

As a teenager, I understood this crisis on a global scale when I visited Southeast Asia on a humanitarian mission with the Save the Children Fund. This led to a humanitarian award from the United Nations when I was in the eighth grade. We visited Vietnamese refugee camps and Chinese rice paddies. I bore witness to the legacy of political dynasty and war that created systemic oppression across oceans. 

I began imagining a new future as a child.  I began understanding that my liberation is bound up with people across the world. My journey as a radical change-maker began then, and GoFA is my largest manifestation of that work to date.

As described, I have dedicated my life and work to understanding and building equity in cultural and media spaces, and I documented much of this through developing the “Making New Reality” framework. But the greatest testament to my ability to lead this project is the community that I have already fostered around this idea. We began GoFA by inviting our friends, colleagues, and networks to join us in naming future architecture as a discipline and as the beginning of a shared language around the work. We have been eagerly joined by artists and technologists working at the intersection of future architecture and seek to expand our network to include Future Architects across disciplines. We offered complimentary Guild membership to 50 founding members and have accepted additional members on a pay-what-you-will scale. We now have more than 130 Community of Practice members.  Within a few months of word-of-mouth recommendations, we have already received over 200 requests for Guild membership. With this community, we are in an incredibly strong position to help individuals, organizations, and governments in a rigorous way to navigate this time of disruption through the lens of the commons and with the tools of collaboration and co-creation.

When Sundance Institute launched the New Frontier Lab in 2017, we became ground zero for the hype cycle around emerging technologies and virtual reality. We existed to support artists at the intersection of storytelling, film, media, technology, music, and performance.  Suddenly, our work was intercepted by powerful interests who wanted to invest in these emerging technologies. Tech companies are a white, male-led space, and their ideation for their involvement was necessarily informed by their experience in taking up space.

As collaborator of the program with Shari Frilot, we had to constantly enforce boundaries to create space for the artists - women, queer people, people of color - to have meaningful leadership in creating these emerging technologies. We came up against powerful white male supremacy in technology and had to be strong and clear about the priorities of the program and demand equity in the development of these emerging technologies. We were successful in doing that, and in establishing New Frontier as an inclusive space for diverse voices to create the future of film. 

When I was at Sundance Institute, I was invited to sit on a panel on artificial intelligence at the World Economic Forum as part of a cohort of arts leaders (included as my video clip above). Quickly, it became clear that our mandate was to hold space and prove the importance of arts and humanities being at the center of the development of AI. On my panel, the experts discussed culture as a great distraction for people when their jobs and livelihoods have been designed away through AI. As the arts leader on my panel, I pushed back on that logic, emphasizing the need to invest in human potential and in people over metrics. There is wisdom in replacing meaningless work with automation so that human beings can return to nature, to their roots, and community and cultures. But imagining that this culture is a “distraction” is anathema to the human condition. Pushing back as a powerful forum in a male-dominated panel of global leaders to amplify human-centered design was a testament to my sustained leadership in advocating for equity.

GoFA cultivates values-based, intersectional collaboration and co-creation.  Whereas our prevailing frameworks prioritize competition, GoFA is innovating in the space of collaboration.  In the digital age when human connection and communication are disrupted, and in a capitalist society where winning is paramount, we don’t know how to effectively collaborate and co-create ideas, systems, and models that truly nourish our communities.  Via sophisticated orchestration of intangible forms such as trust, sentiment and power dynamics, future architecture creates conditions for more nuanced impact that honors interdependency and prioritizes shared values.  

Creating learning programs, communities, and shared futures that cultivate connection and collaboration is not only innovative, but radical and necessary to co-create a future with greater justice, equity, inclusion and beauty.

Those who value compassion, justice, and harmony tend to envision futures marked by elevated beauty and authentic inclusion. Across the world there are numerous people working towards such visions. So the question must be asked: “If so many are working toward these futures, why aren’t we seeing greater impact?"

Perhaps it’s because the most audacious and insightful systems-changers aren’t being effectively coordinated or properly resourced. Or perhaps there just isn’t enough shared language to describe and promote such catalyzing work.

These brilliant, passionate and committed people are building better futures, but often without the support from an engaged community of fellow visionaries; a community that might provide guidance, access, and belonging.

The Guild of Future Architects was founded to bring together the architects of tomorrow so they may more effectively pursue shared visions through the practice of future architecture. GoFA is home to future architects who want to hone this practice, magnetize resources, and amplify collective action.

GoFA’s design is based on the “Making a New Reality” framework for emerging media developed with support from the Ford Foundation and Sundance Institute, and on “Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms,” a field study of the media industry conducted by the MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Co-Creation Studios.  These frameworks provide a clear roadmap for supporting humanity-centered design.

GoFA started building our Community of Practice and sourcing Shared Future projects in 2019.  We offered complimentary Guild membership to 50 founding members and have accepted a further 90 members on a pay-what-you-will scale.  Within a few months of word-of-mouth recommendation we have already received over 200 requests for Guild membership. We are currently curating the Community of Practice to include a diversity of disciplines and backgrounds and managing the capacity of the group as we scale GoFA to be able to generously support the membership.  The early demand for membership validates our hypothesis that future architects exist and seek community.  We have a goal to increase the Community of Practice to 1,000 members in three years.

As mentioned, GoFA has a 100 year vision.  We imagine Future Architecture not as an organization or an intervention, but as a discipline.  We imagine students studying Future Architecture in universities, Future Architecture firms, and practitioners who can imagine and prototype prosperous, kind, beautiful and just futures across industry.

In the short term, we are focused on scaling our operations: growing our Community of Practice, developing our four inaugural projects in the Shared Futures Incubator, and creating the Collective Wisdom Platform.  As we cultivate a strong, diverse, impactful community of systems-changers and operationalize the equity and collaborative ideals set forth in years of research through “Making a New Reality” and “Collective Wisdom,” we can cultivate the discipline of Future Architecture.

GoFA has assembled a community of consultants, Board members, and early GoFA members to architect a network, incubator and resource center.  The early interest in our programs indicates that there is a market for this work, and Sharon and I bring the technical expertise and backgrounds to meet this demand.  Truly, the sky is the limit for Future Architects, and we are mostly limited by available resources.  We have some early investment from our founder, but to realize and manifest the breadth of potential that GoFA has to offer, we need sustained early investment while we grow our revenue generating programs.

Please see the “Path to Sustainability” section below.

GoFA’s Community of Practice and Shared Futures models require collaboration and partnership with all kinds of organizations.  Organizations represented in our Community of Practice include For Freedoms, NYU, and Sundance.  We have also developed partnerships based on the learning programs emanating from our Community of Practice, the Futurist Writers Room (FWR), which help participants imagine speculative histories and futures as a first step in manifesting meaningful change.  We have conducted FWRs with Google, the Rockefeller Foundation/Second Wave, and New York Live Arts (resulting in a larger project, Traveling the Interstitium”), and we have been invited to partner of FWRs with iTVS and the Doris Duke Foundation.

GoFA itself is structured as a Shared Future.  Think of a Shared Future as a cousin of a Startup.  They are both organized endeavors to bring innovation to humanity, only a Startup prioritizes the market, and a Shared Future prioritizes the commons.  Thus, whereas a Startup is primarily funded through investment and debt, a Shared Future has multi-stream funding, including patronage, charity, investment, public support, debt, and fee for service.  GoFA is pursuing this diversified funding profile, so that our sustainability model is dynamic and rooted in community, reflecting the Shared Future that we are manifesting.

In our early first six months of operations, we have received investment from our founder; fee for service from corporations for whom we have provided consulting or operated programs; public support from our early membership; and charity from private foundations. As we model our future, we will continue fund-raising from both public charities and private patrons; funnel investments into GoFA and directly into the Shared Futures we incubate; increase from 100 Community of Practice members to 1,000 members who pay an annual fee; grow our consulting and programs practice to increase our fee for service; and strategically take on debt as risk capital to grow our programs.  By diversifying our income and actively seeking multi-stream community support, we can create a stable financial foundation and successfully create a business model that is both supported by and provides benefits to our community. 

GoFA is working to raise $700,000 in FY20 and increase revenues to sustainably support our projected $1.5 million operating budget in the next three years.  We are actively developing multiple revenue streams, including: growing our Community of Practice membership;  launching an individual investor/membership program in fall 2020; cultivating relationships with foundations and institutional donors; and developing our fee for service work Futurist Writers Rooms and other learning programs.

1.25 Million in 2020

Truthfully, I am applying because my friend and colleague Gigi Pritzker recommended that I apply!  In learning about the program, it struck me that The Elevate Prize offers the opportunity for the exact kind of one-time financial investment that GoFA seeks as we scale our operations. In addition, the imprimatur of the Prize as a recognition of people and groups catalyzing positive change and confronting longstanging roadblocks would amplify and affirm our work in our first year of operations.  

GoFA has an embarrassment of riches with regard to human capital and relationships.  Change-makers are eager to participate in our Community of Practice, and Shared Futures are developing rapidly.  We need financial investment to fund all of these brilliant thinkers and innovative ideas while we continue to scale our revenue generation toward sustainability.