NeoCon 2026 Tuesday Keynote: Resetting How We Think About the Future (Nick Foster RDI)
When futurist Nick Foster took the stage, audiences may have expected sweeping predictions, dazzling new technologies, or bold proclamations about what lies ahead. Instead, he offered a moment of intentional pause, inviting the NeoCon community to rethink how we imagine, evaluate, and prepare for the future of the built environment.
Nick explored how our collective ability to think about what’s next with depth, rigor, and clarity remains critically underdeveloped, particularly in the commercial interior design and architecture industries, where rapid social, technological, and cultural shifts continue to redefine how we live and work. In an era of continuous change, he demonstrated how this lack of depth can leave leaders and designers underprepared for what comes next.
Drawing on decades of experience advising some of the world’s most influential organizations, Nick focused not on providing answers, but on helping attendees build better questions. Through thought-provoking insights and real-world examples, he equipped the audience with tools to add structure to their imagination, broaden their perspectives, and navigate an increasingly uncertain future with greater confidence.
About the Speaker:
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 include: brain-controlled computer interfaces, intelligent robotics, stratospheric internet balloons and neighborhood-scale nuclear fusion. Despite the ambitious nature of much of Nick’s work, he’s 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 ourselves. 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 masters 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.