M HKA Ensembles

° 1980

Born in Adelaide (AU), lives in Toronto (CA), lives in Chicago (US).

A professional futurist and experience designer, Dr. Stuart Candy is currently the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Visiting Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a tenure-track faculty member of the world’s first foresight and design program, at OCAD University, Toronto. Professor Candy is Director of Situation Lab, and his experiential futures work has appeared in museums, festivals, conferences, and city streets, on the Discovery Channel, and in the pages of The Economist and Wired.

A museum of contemporary art, where every presentation is supposed to be unique and where subverting expectations is almost standard practice, is a particularly challenging environment for experiential futures. They have the greatest effect in ordinary present-day settings where they are revealed and understood only after the unexpected encounter has taken place. Professor Candy’s NurturePod, 2017, has all the trimmings and trappings of commercial branded design. It takes the idea of transformation in a near future to a doubtful extreme, just like so many tech-optimist advocates of transformation do.

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