Anticipation Conference 2026

By René Capella, HCDE PhD student

Summer 2026

Traveling to Italy for the Anticipation Conference 2026, I had the opportunity to dive into the space of future studies and meet with many interesting people who I’m excited to work with in the future. The theme of the conference was the paradox and ambiguity of the future.  The website asks “How do ideas about the future operate under the conditions of uncertainty, indeterminacy, and unknowing”? The five days were broken up into two days of PhD school and three days of conference time. 

The two days of the PhD school were jam packed with activity. We were not just looking at slides and having deep conversation or writing papers, we were set to design a game around a common theme we shared with our fellow teammates (who were decided based on submitted abstracts from before the conference). With the air of a hackathon, we worked together for those two days, quickly iterating and prototyping a game we called “Race to the Summit” where the instructions were to pretend the player was an AI Tech Bro and to move toward the top of the gameboard (shaped as an upward climbing spiral). Along the way, the play encountered barrier situations, ethical dilemmas about the people the company was impacting, the detriments of AI, for example.  These barrier cards were where the player could wait and “stay with the trouble”, writing reflections about the barrier and skipping their turns, or avoid the problem by implementing quick solutions that served the benefit of a tech bro mentality. Either reaction was stored on predetermined color post-its. The person who got to the top first then counted how many “staying with the trouble” post-its, and how many quick fixes– and if the latter out-numbered the former, the gameboard would collapse. We went on to present this game in the conference.

While at the PhD school, I met people from around the world in the future studies space whose work related to my own. My team in the PhD game creation were from Berlin, Budapest, and Milan all studying theory around critically considering the detrimental effects of the category, of the archive, of solutionalism. As a team after the PhD school, however, we went on as a group to befriend a fellow PNW colleague who studied future studies with a renowned future studies researcher, Riel Miller, and a Nigerian writer who worked in a similar space to my own sociotechnical science fiction. It was invigorating to meet like-minded people from around the world, and motivating to know future collaboration is on the horizon.