Radical Future(s) Fest đź’› Future(s) Assembly
Monday, October 6th, 2025 • 6:00 - 8:30 PM
Evolve Collaborative • Doors at 5:30 PM
What happens when we treat design as a public work — open, collaborative, and experimental? The first-ever Future(s) Assembly mixes design sprint energy with a science-fair showcase, putting futures thinking at center stage.
The evening will feature lightning talks and interactive “Future(s) Stations” hosted by local designers, strategists, and community organizers. From prototypes to experiments, you’ll encounter work-in-progress ideas that test how we might design for futures that are more just, joyful, and community-rooted.
Why Attend
See emerging cross-disciplinary projects spanning a range of design, policy, and community-centered outcomes
Engage with creatives to learn about their process, challenges, and vision for the future(s)
Connect with fellow participants curious about cultural and civic possibilities
Experience imagination as a civic practice in a creative community
Who It’s For
Designers, artists, and changemakers exploring experimental practices
Civic leaders and community organizers seeking new frameworks
Anyone interested in the intersection of imagination, design, and systems change
Featured Future(s) Stations
What’s Next for Asian American Town Presented by Tom Sollitt
Asian American Town is a community-based project connecting local Asian American changemakers in Portland, with the long-term goal of creating cross-functional spaces nationwide. Learn about this grassroots effort and what comes next.
People's Graphic Design Archive Presented by Briar Levit, Co-director
Participate in archiving graphic design history! The People's Graphic Design Archive is a crowd-sourced virtual archive of inclusive graphic design history.Design IRL: People, Practice, Place Presented by Michael Ellsworth
What are ways to connect people and design in real life? This session invites reflection and conversation on how design shows up in real life and resources design practitioners need to thrive.Why Baby Bonds? Presented by Mary Li and JooyoungOh, StudioYellow
Baby Bonds are an innovative tool to address the racial wealth gap in one generation. Explore updates on this cross-sector local initiative and learn more about the national movement. Get a peak at what’s happening at “Baby Bonds: A Path Toward Prosperity for Future Generations” (ACLU, 2023) and “Baby Bonds: A Step Toward Racial and Economic Equity” (Economic Opportunity Institute, 2024).Loy Loy: The Savings Game Presented by Mrinalini Tankha, Design Anthropologist
Loy Loy: The Savings Game is an innovative financial education board game designed as an antidote to Monopoly. Attendees will get a chance to preview the game, which teaches principles of empathy and cooperative finance, inviting reflection on how collective systems of saving and investment can inform community-centered financial models.
Organized by the Agency for Speculative Futures
The Future(s) Assembly kicks off the three-day Radical Future(s) Fest (Oct 6–8) and Imagining Otherwise: Storytelling & Narrative Future(s) Miniseries (Oct 18-20) during 2025 Portland Design Month:
Spaces, Systems & Shared Futures (a multi-disciplinary panel on Oct 7)
Civic Futures Remix (a design jam focused on the future of municipal grocery stores on Oct 8) to be rescheduled
Performance as Prototype (table reads of an in-progress performance on Oct 18 and Oct 19)
Narrative Design Lab (a hands-on workshop on Oct 19)
Imagining Otherwise (a multi-disciplinary panel on Oct 20)
Learn More at bit.ly/asf2025
A few of our Future(S) Assembly Presenters
Mrinalini Tankha
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Portland State University (PSU)
Mrinalini (Minu) Tankha is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at PSU, where she co-founded the Compassionate Computing Lab, an interdisciplinary space addressing bias and fairness in AI. She conducts research and teaches courses on design, technology, money, and economic inequality, with projects spanning Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. As a design anthropologist, she explores how communities navigate effects of financial crises and economic exclusion and instability to craft new forms of value and belonging. Minu is a co-designer of Loy Loy: The Savings Game.
Tom Sollitt
Brand Strategist and Changemaker, Asian American Town
Tom Sollitt is a creative strategist and the main leader behind Asian American Town. His primary focus is brand development and strategy through immersive research. He organizes, produces events, and actively participates within communities and discovers authentic insights. He truly believe you cannot provide meaningful consultation unless you have boots on the ground.
Jooyoung Oh (She/They)
StudioYellow
Jooyoung co-founded StudioYellow, a Social Design consulting group that challenges systemic injustice by taking action rooted in Revolutionary Love. Jooyoung has over 20 years of experience in design thinking, research, and strategy. Before kicking off StudioYellow, she worked with Multnomah Idea Lab, combining her passion for systemic change and racial justice work with her design expertise. She frequently teaches equity-centered design approaches and community engagement.
As a founder of Mugwort Counselling, Jooyoung offers conflict facilitation for individuals, families, and organizations. Healing history is her life's work, which she engages in through dance and writing practice using her other name Miro.
Mary Li (she/my name)
Multnomah County
Mary’s professional experiences include 34 years of service at Multnomah County delivering training, facilitation, coaching, and consulting within and across County organizations to groups and individuals through a variety of learning and skill building learning experiences and methods; as well as extensive experience with and service to the non-profit sector - domestic and sexual violence, HIV/AIDS, general social justice organizing efforts, culturally specific community development and support. She is a proud Asian American woman working locally, regionally, and nationally within Asian American Indigenous Pacific Island communities, and in allyship with communities of the global majority to survive and thrive.
Michael EllswortH
Co-Founder & Principal, Civilization
Michael Ellsworth is the co-founder and Creative Director of the award-winning design practice Civilization, where for the last 25 years he has designed for advocacy and advocated for design. His work has been honored with the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communication Design, received multiple Anthem and Webby Awards, and is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Milton Glaser Design Archives. Beyond the studio, he has produced multiple programs that bring global design voices to the Pacific Northwest, including the Seattle Design Lecture Series and Non-Breaking Space gallery, and he now serves as Executive Director of Volumes Design Library and is a guide at designTRIPS. Michael is also part of the Graphic Design program at Portland State University, where he helps lead the university’s lecture series and fosters connections between students and the larger design community.
Website
Briar Levit
Design Educator, Art Director and Graphic Designer
Briar Levit is a professor of graphic design at Portland State University in Oregon, USA. Levit’s feature-length documentary, Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production, tells the story of how production technologies and workflows informed graphic design from the analog mid-century to the Digital Revolution at the end of the 20th century. She edited Baseline Shift: Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History (2021), which includes the research of 19 scholars including herself. Currently, Levit co-directs The People’s Graphic Design Archive, a crowd-sourced digital archive with an aim to help create more inclusive and participatory design histories.
Assembly Host & organizer
erin stevanus (she/her)
erin is an artist, strategist, and social entrepreneur committed to unlocking the potential of complex systems through foresight and speculative thinking. She runs a design futures studio, collaborating with leaders across the private, public, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors to bring to life not-too-distant futures. As the founder of an innovation platform, she support changemakers in design thinking and social entrepreneurship. In her creative practice, erin writes, composes, and performs works exploring speculative futures and the mindsets needed to navigate them. You can also find her facilitating deep listening experiences and crafting live digital soundscapes through the sonic sound lab project, which invites curiosity, exploration, and rest.
