Stuart Candy

Lore & Background

Stuart Candy holds degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Melbourne, and an MA and PhD in Political Science and Alternative Futures from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, completed on graduate degree fellowships awarded by the East–West Center. There, he studied under early futurist Jim Dator. He was the first artist in residence with the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro. He is a founding advisor and contributor to the initiative to embed futures throughout the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Geneva.

In 2010, Candy and Jake Dunagan created Our Plastic Century at the California Academy of Sciences, a display of four large water coolers with representations of plastic pollution from 1910, 1960, 2010, and 2030. At the first Emerge in 2012 at Arizona State University, Candy and Dunagan ran Found futures: the people who vanished, a 'design fiction playshop' to collaboratively create a design fiction artifact reconceptualizing life in Phoenix, Arizona. In 2014, Candy and Jeff Watson, as the Situation Lab, published the card game The Thing from the Future, which prompts players to use a deck of 108 cards to create descriptions of hypothetical objects from different time periods. In 2018, Candy and Dunagan ran the game for a group of city mayors as part of SXSW.

In 2019, Candy and Cher Potter published Design and Futures, a collection of 30 essays documenting design futures discourse, originally appearing in issues of the Journal of Futures Studies.

Reader's Guide

Stuart Candy's significance lies in his pioneering work in experiential futures, using immersive storytelling and design to make abstract future scenarios tangible and engaging. His creation of the card game The Thing from the Future, which won the Most Significant Futures Work Award in 2015, has become a widely used tool for collaborative futures thinking, applied in settings from academic workshops to city mayoral meetings at SXSW. His installations, such as Our Plastic Century and the NurturePod, demonstrate how physical artifacts can provoke public reflection on potential futures. As the first Research Fellow of The Long Now Foundation and first artist in residence with the Museum of Tomorrow, Candy has helped bridge the gap between academic futures studies and public engagement. His work, including the edited volume Design and Futures, has contributed to establishing design fiction as a legitimate method within futures discourse. Candy's legacy is in making futures thinking accessible and participatory, influencing both professional futurists and broader audiences through playful, thought-provoking experiences.