Unlikely Collaborators Hosts Spark Salon with Futures Designer Nick Foster on Rethinking How We Imagine the Future
SANTA MONICA, Calif., Feb. 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Unlikely Collaborators will host a Spark Salon on Wednesday, February 11 at 7:00 p.m. PT, featuring futures designer and author Nick Foster, RDI, in a conversation titled How Do You Think About the Future. Rather than predicting what lies ahead, Foster invites audiences to examine the stories, assumptions, and habits shaping how they relate to the future. In doing so, he helps surface the often-unseen lens through which we interpret what is possible, uncertain, or inevitable which is a process closely aligned with the Unlikely Collaborators' Perception Box™ framework, which explores how our internal narratives quietly shape the way we see the world and ourselves.
Drawing from his new book, Could Should Might Don't: How We Think About the Future, Foster will encourage attendees to notice how cultural narratives, mental shortcuts, and unexamined assumptions shape the way they imagine what comes next. With clarity, humor, and provocation, he reframes the future not as something to predict or control, but as something continuously shaped by human values, choices, and imagination, offering a more discerning and grounded way to navigate uncertainty.
The evening will take place in person at Unlikely Collaborators' Santa Monica headquarters and will also be livestreamed online. In-person attendees will receive a complimentary copy of Foster's book Could Should Might Don't: How We Think About The Future.
Event Schedule
6:00 p.m. — Doors open, reception
7:00 p.m. — Program begins promptly
8:00 p.m. — Book signing and reception
Cost: Free (registration required)
About 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 as brain-controlled computer interfaces, intelligent robotics, stratospheric Internet balloons, and neighborhood-scale nuclear fusion.
Despite the ambitious nature of much of his work, Nick is 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 us. 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 master's 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.
About Spark Salons
Spark Salons are a signature program of Unlikely Collaborators, the nonprofit founded by Elizabeth R. Koch. These gatherings bring together grantees, researchers, artists, and collaborators for conversations that challenge perspectives and deepen connections. Past Spark Salon speakers have included illusionist Harris III, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD, nutrition therapist Kim Shapira, MS, RD, mythologist John Bucher, Harvard Business School professor and author Michael Norton, PhD, visionary violinist Vijay Gupta, chef and entrepreneur Ellen Bennett, artist Candy Chang, digital workplace expert and author Alexandra Samuel, PhD, grief experts Brennan Wood and Dr. Donna L. Schuurman, and neuroscientist, best-selling author Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, and world-renowned neuroscientist, author, and NYU Dean Wendy Suzuki, PhD.
Watch the Spark Salons Trailer
About Unlikely Collaborators
Unlikely Collaborators is a nonprofit dedicated to helping people see themselves and the world more clearly. Founded by Elizabeth R. Koch, the organization is built on the Perception Box™ framework, which explores how our unconscious lens shaped by our experiences, beliefs, fears, and identities affects the way we interpret the world. By becoming aware of our Perception Box, we can take the first step toward real change.
SOURCE Unlikely Collaborators
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