ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Scott Smith
Scott Smith is founder and managing partner of Changeist, a futures research and consulting partnership established in 2007 in the United States, now based in the Netherlands.
Having worked for more than 15 years in futures, Scott has consulted to a range of global institutions, including SWIFT, UNICEF, The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, The Royal Society, Nesta, and the Dubai Future Foundation. He has also led engagements with some of the largest and most respected global financial, retail, telecoms, technology and media brands, such as the BBC, The New York Times, AXA, VF, and Comcast. He has designed and delivered futures projects, talks and workshops in over a dozen countries and facilitated projects and workshops multiple languages.
Scott helped create and lead the Strategic Foresight program for Dubai Future Academy, and lectures in the Innovation & Future Thinking program at IED Barcelona, a course he designed. He was also recently named to the Executive Board of the Center for Futures Studies at the University of Dubai.
Scott has written for international publications such as The Atlantic, Quartz, WIRED UK, and How We Get to Next. He has spoken at major events worldwide as diverse as The Next Web, Lift, Helsinki's Flow Festival, South Australia's Open State, Atlantic Council Energy & Economic Summit, Oxford Futures Forum, EPIC, SxSW, Sibos, FutureFest, FutureEverything, NEXT14, 15 and 19, and Frankfurt’s me Convention. He has also contributed work to pieces featured in several cultural exhibitions, including for the BIG BANG DATA exhibition at Barcelona’s CCCB in 2014, and the 2017 Vienna Biennale.
He has more than 25 years’ experience in forecasting, and has lived in three countries over that time. He currently makes his home in The Hague, where his spare time is currently devoted to developing several fiction and documentary projects.
Find out more about his work at changeist.com.
Photo: Do-Ming Lum
MADELINE ASHBY
Madeline Ashby is a futurist and science fiction writer based in Toronto, Canada. Alongside supporting Changeist projects, she has worked with organizations like the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, Nesta, Data & Society, the Atlantic Council, Strategic Innovation Lab, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and others. She has conducted workshops with groups like Engineers Without Borders Canada, United Way Canada, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
She also lectures on science fiction and design thinking at OCAD University in Toronto, where she graduated with a Masters of Design from the Strategic Foresight & Innovation programme. Madeline is also a guest lecturer at the Dubai Future Academy.
She is also the author of the Machine Dynasty series, and the novel Company Town from Tor Books, which was runner up for the Canada Reads prize in 2017. Her fiction has been translated into Japanese, German, Italian and Romanian. Her work has been published in Slate, MIT Technology Review, BoingBoing, and The Atlantic.
Find our more about her work at madelineashby.com.
SUSAN COX-SMITH — CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Drawing on over twenty years experience as a writer, designer, creative director, interactive producer, and researcher Susan seeks to enrich public engagement with possible futures.
Across multiple engagements for Changeist, she has consulted on futures projects for ADCB, AXA, BBC R&D, Comcast, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, National Lottery Fund UK, Nesta, and several Silicon Valley tech companies. She has contributed to trend research and scenario development looking at the futures of personal transport, health and wellness, entertainment, arts and culture, and emergency response practices. Recently, she led the design and delivery of a public workshop platform exploring feminist futures in a post-Covid world for the International Women’s Development Agency.
Susan also oversees the design of and co-leads Changeist’s capacity building workshops, and the development of related instructional materials, developing futuring skills in leaders from organisations ranging from Microsoft to Netflix, Wells Fargo and NASA JPL. She was the contributing editor on How to Future: Leading and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange, published by Kogan Page Inspire in September 2020.
In addition to client work, she has written for several Medium publications, including How We Get to Next, as well as The Next Web and other publications. She has presented and facilitated strategic foresight, design futures, and scenario planning workshops at A/D/O in Brooklyn, Sibos in Geneva, ThingsCon Amsterdam and UXLondon. She has co-facilitated How to Future courses at the Dubai Future Academy, and for organizations in the US, UK, Abu Dhabi and Malta.
Susan is a graduate of the Miami Ad School at Portfolio Center in Atlanta, and has a post-graduate certification in art history and appraisal studies from New York University. She has also worked in digital curriculum development, and supported the University of Leiden’s respected online learning lab courses, as a consultant, community coordinator and mentor.