More than 100 students, alumni, and friends of the University of Houston Foresight program met in Houston for the 2024 Spring Gathering to explore Being and Becoming Human. Travelers came in from as far as Australia, France, South Africa, and across the US as well as right here in Houston to participate in our annual face-to-face event.
Participants were welcomed with a registration packet this year featuring a selection of newly designed T-Shirts, stickers, and socks, courtesy of the fabulous Denise Worrell.
The weekend kicked off with the unveiling of our new Futures Activation Lab (the FAB). The Lab afternoon was structured around its three pillars of EXPAND, EXPLORE, and EXPERIMENT. Expand featured continue learning session of a Scanning Refresh for the alums, tool time for recent students and a financial futures workshop. The Explore round of sessions that followed featured student projects from APF Nominees, the Design Futures class, and Shark Tanks Winners. The Experiment round closed the afternoon describing partnership possibilities with APF, SGR (Strategic Govt Resources), the Open Foresight Hub, and Autodesk.
This was followed with the traditional Friday evening at Goode Company Taqueria, which may have been the biggest crowd they ever had there as we took over the place.
Saturday’s events began at the Engineering Lecture Hall, as we couldn’t fit the whole crowd into our homes base at Cameron Building. After a breakfast service, the conference kicked off with a welcome from UH Foresight Program Director, Dr. Andy Hines, who brought the audience up to date on the many exciting activities going on with the program, including a record 13 graduates this Spring semester.
Juli kicked us off with a sneak preview of her Summer Elective class on the Psychology of Futures. Hauson Le then lead a panel discussion on building community and joy with Amy Weber, Catherine Roy, Moji Karimi, and Peter Bishop. Mina McBride brought the threads of the morning together with “Being Human in the Future” and an extended Q&R.
The group then hiked over to Cameron for an amazing afternoon featuring four simultaneous sessions each hour. I was so proud to see so many of our students and alums presenting on such an amazing set of topics – sixteen sessions in the afternoon. What a remarkable range of speakers: Andy Hines, Denise Worrell, Jeremy Wilken, Simeon Spearman, Fernando Guiterrez, Karessa Torgerson, Karen Rosenthal, Ingrid LaFleur, JT Mudge, Ingrid Furtado, Peter Bishop, Mark Sackler, Kiran Carpenter, Miranda Mantey, and John Smart.
Take a look at this amazing array of topics, too: Post-Work Future; What the Hell is Human-Centered Design & Why Should a Futurist Care? AI + Human Creativity? Exploring Images of the Future & Speculative Fiction on TVTropes.org; LatAm Futurisms: Rehumanizing Latin America; Identity: A Taxonomy; Animal Futures; Welcome to the Afrofuture; Ancestral Futures; Reimagining Womanhood Through the Lens of Intimacy; Teach the Future; Superlongevity: How Long Do You Want to Live? Trauma Informed Futures + Foresight; Humans 2030; and Techno Identity Stories: Transhumanism, Singularity, and Humans 2.0
The meeting adjourned to Andy’s house, which was packed to capacity. The dinner was a fabulous kabob and rice dish put together by graduating Foresight student Nice Goodwin. There was a nice graduation ceremony, ably MCd by JT Mudge, for the grads who received survival kits as gifts, culminated by the emerging tradition of the pool jump! Well, just Andy and Hauson this time.
The UH Foresight community is one-of-a-kind, and the annual Spring Gathering presents an incredible opportunity for the community to gather together, learn from each other, and have fun. Huge thanks to the incredible Juli Rush, and to April Koury and Nicci Obert for making this event a huge success.
Nicci put together an amazing site that has the agendas, presentations, photos, and a LINK to the Foresight Activation Lab (for Master’s alums, current students, and certificate alums. We thank the presenters for sharing their presentation. We are so pleased that we were able to hire a professional photographer, Laura Chiles of LC photographers, who did an outstanding job in capturing the event. She also provided professional headshots for all those who wanted them.
A major Houston Foresight shout-out to the core team of Juli, April, Nicci, Denise, Laura, and others who helped make this such a great success. May I ask for an extra special shout-out to Juli, who just put in an unbelievable amount of effort as a volunteer – we are not worthy! I can testify that the team worked many hours and many months in advance. It’s a labor of love, but it is labor. Thank you team for all you did and do!
Finally, the Houston Foresight Team is working on our 50th Anniversary Celebration that will be the topic 2025 Spring Gathering. Stay tuned! — Andy Hines
