This introductory episode provides our audience the opportunity get to know the series host—Radha Mistry—as she speaks to Deem co-founder and creative director Nu Goteh about the discipline of future studies, the personal and professional circumstances that have shaped her career trajectory, and what it means to practice, think with, and cultivate foresight in the context of design.
Radha Mistry @radha_mistry
Nu Goteh @nuthervandross
Deem @deemjournal
Find more information about Future Feelings, as well as our other podcast offerings at deemjournal.com/audio
00:04.60
Nu Goteh
My name is Nu Goteh, co-founder and creative director at Deem.
Here at Deem Audio, we take an exploratory approach to interview formats, oral histories, and storytelling. We produce original podcast series about topics at the intersection of design and critical social issues. We produce original podcast series about topics at the intersection of design and critical social issues.
00:35.06
Nu Goteh
today we're excited tune you Today, we're excited to introduce you to our newest series, Future Feelings with Radha Mystery, who was kind enough to spend some time to talk a bit more about her practice. Radha, please give our listeners a sense of what this theory is about and what they can expect from the next coming issues. Radha, please give our listeners a sense of what this theory is about and what they can expect from the next five episodes.
01:05.81
Nu Goteh
But before we hop into that, let's learn a bit more about you. Who is Radha? Where are you from? What do you do? And how do you do it?
Who is Radha? Where are you from? What do you do? And how do you do it?
04:15.48
Radha Mistry
Hi everyone. My name is Radha. I'm currently based in Los Angeles although I've grown up in a few different places and I've had the chance to live a lot of different places all around the world like Taiwan and India and England and cities like New Orleans and London and San Francisco. My current role is that I'm The America's Region Foresight Leader for an engineering and design firm called Arup and they operate globally, they're all over the world. We have 90 offices. We're a pretty massive firm and I lead our futures oriented research across North and South America and the team that kind of helps to put that together. I also teach part-time at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) over here. So I teach future studies and foresight on the M Arch 1 and M Arch 2 programs and before that I was at Autodesk and Steelcase doing very similar foresight work, and then I also used to teach at Parsons and CCA: the California College of the Arts.
05:36.19
Nu Goteh
Wow! So let me reframe that question. What don't you do? Ah-oh.
05:43.60
Radha Mistry
I think honestly I'm just guided by like you know, just being curious and wanting to try things. So if someone comes to me and is like, “hey, do you want to teach this class with me on, you know, the studio on speculative design,” I'm like “yeah, let's try it.” You know, um, “do you want to, you know, move from London to San Francisco to research the future of work?” “Sure, why not, let's see, you know, if I can make it happen.” So um, yeah I think being able to kind of like shapeshift a little bit throughout my career has been a really important driver in the way that I make decisions and feel like, you know, it's something that will probably remain consistent in the ways that I kind of move forward in in my work and even in my personal life. Honestly.
06:30.16
Nu Goteh
I guess let's talk about your career, and it's not the average career. It is super inspiring and has touched many different practices. So I guess could you provide some context in terms of the work that you used to do—what you did for school—how you even got there and then how you got to where you're at now?
06:56.18
Radha Mistry
Sure, Um, so I will say it was very confusing for my like super immigrant Indian parents to watch me go through. But I really started thinking I wanted to be an architect um, believing that you know I was really really interested in like art and design, in practices of making, um—I loved physics and calculus. Um, when I was in high school and to me, like, Calculus told the story of physics. I don't know if that makes sense but I just loved having kind of these very different ways of making meaning and kind of finding understanding about these big problems in the world. And so to me at the time, the natural continuation, the progression of those interests felt like architecture. And you know this was the early 2000s. I think now we have so many of these like, you know, hyphen slashy programs, transdisciplinary kind of programs. Um, but I wasn't aware of them when I was kind of applying for a university um, and so I ended up moving to New Orleans to study architecture at Tulane University and when I was working on my Master's degree there Hurricane Katrina hit and it was a first, you know we had to, for those of you who maybe weren't familiar with that or you know, um, weren't kind of around at the time but um, it was a really really really devastating storm.
I think we used to call those hundred year storms. Right now they happen so much more frequently and so much more intensely. But it absolutely kind of overtook the city and they had to shut down New Orleans for a few months and I remember coming back into the city and thinking, one, just seeing that everything had changed almost overnight and feeling truly like what is my role as a designer here, as a young designer right? As someone who still was finding my way through like my point of view as a practitioner. Um. And I really wondered like you know, fifty or one hundred years ago what were the architects and the planners and the policymakers —like what were they thinking about when they were planning out and designing for the city? Um, and its evolution and who had they left out of those visions right? And like how do you do that, like what is the practice of thinking about what comes next and who belongs or doesn't?
And I think that was like my first real questioning around future studies. I didn't know what to call it at that time. Um, but what I did start to think about especially in an architectural framing because I wasn't familiar with foresight was this idea that like holy shit buildings are future artifacts right? Because you have to consider the context within which this like machine in the ground evolves and time becomes one of your design constraints. Um, and so I'm not just designing this thing that needs to have you know that's sitting on a 2 to 5 year construction timeline and like, is going to meet occupancy. Um, you know, like programming and occupancy restrictions for like the next 5 to 10 years. Hopefully this entity lasts for 50, maybe 100 years. I don't think everlasting is, you know, is a thing we get to look forward to anymore. But realizing that really reframed my role as I'm not just making buildings. It's my role to help people to kind of mediate their future environments in some way and to be part of the translation mechanism that gets us to a place where we say like, is this something we actually want in a future right? So um, so that kind of led me to like getting, you know, I was really obsessed then with what I called paper architecture at the time, or like speculative architecture. Again I did not have the vocabulary to really say this is speculative design or this is foresight or this is future studies or whatever. I was really taken by the work that like Archigram and Superstudio and Ant Farm and the Metabolists had done, and which felt like you know they were using architectural ways of approaching problem solving but like really thinking beyond just the form of architecture itself, right? Or the practice of architecture itself, and asking like really big questions, like what if cities could float or if cities could walk or if they could um, you know, if we could think of them in these like modular forms that could shapeshift you know for changing conditions of what society required and how we moved around in our worlds and in our lives. Um, and then that you know like I ended up graduating.
I loved school but I had a really hard time with my thesis because my school you know, Tulane at the time, was really kind of set on your thesis must be a building. It must be something that takes built form and that didn't make sense to me. I felt like architecture could be more than that. But I graduated um and then I, you know, and worked for a little bit. It was during the kind of the crash in the early 2000s so it was really I think not the most fulfilling time to be a young designer. And so I decided to move to London and go to grad school. You know, like, sell your car to buy a plane ticket and like these were the decisions I was making at the time, it was like I really really really want to do this. I feel like I have to be in London. And I ended up doing a graduate program at Central Saint Martins and it was an MA with a focus on narrative environments and it was the first time where I really started to have the language for what it was that I was interested in um, you know, and this is like degrees. I did a BArch and an M.Arch and like, you know, I'm not an architect today right? But I still really value the lens that education brought me.
14:14.99
Radha Mistry
And then I ended up finding, or Arup found me. We did a project with them when I was in grad school in London and it was to envision the high street, you know, here we'd call that the main street of the future—kind of like what is the future of retail and the citizen experience of kind of like engaging in this space in the next twenty-five years, and I loved it. I loved that thought exercise. I loved being able to think about what the built environment could look like and could be and how it could kind of help, you know, people thrive in their lives and their work and their relationships with each other. And once that project ended, I ended up becoming a contracted researcher with them. Um, and then you know, long story short, moved from London to San Francisco with Arup and then went on to Steelcase and then went to Autodesk where they didn't have a foresight practice but I set up the foresight practice. Then spent a few years there leading it and then came back to Europe.
15:25.93
Nu Goteh
Super cool. It's always compelling and I'm always fighting the urge of selling a car to move to London and live in London. I guess what was happening culturally during that time in London that you felt so pull pull towards?
15:48.75
Radha Mistry
Um, you know this was like the lead up to the 2012 Olympics and there was so much creative energy in that city at the time. This was a place that you know we had, I have, family there. We'd been visiting London since I was a kid. Um, I'm one of those people where like, I just don't want to live my life with “what ifs” you know? I don't want to look back on my life and be like, oh I wish I had done that thing. I want to do the thing, realize maybe it wasn't for me, and then move on to the next thing right? I think maybe that spirit is a lot easier to embody when you're like, in your twenties and like, don't have a family or whatever it might be, but my partner and I still try to kind of embody some of that spirit in the ways we make decisions. But I just wanted to be part of that creative energy and I think I also just got lucky with the timing, like Central Saint Martins had just moved, they just updated their campus. So now they were in King's Cross and this is before all the major kind of development was taking place there, so you really still got a lot of the old you know, the kind of the existing kind of original spirit and energy of that place and and the people that were there, beyond the moment when, beyond kind of like its original kind of classification as like a “red light district” or whatever it might fit, and so there were lots of like artists and designers and like thinkers and creatives musicians just kind of like hanging around in that space.
It was just something that I was super drawn to and the thing about being in London as well was like, and I didn't know it at the time, but it is a really huge hub for future studies and futures practice. So like the RCA has a program there. Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne were leading one of their design interactions programs. They had been brought in to teach that and a lot of the folks that came out of that program including, you know, one of my former co-teachers like Elliott P. Montgomery and Tobias Revell have become really kind of well-known practitioners in the future studies space now. Fiona and Anthony are kind of like given the title of being the godparents of speculative design. They wrote that book Speculative Everything. There’s a lot of critique around it but they were one of the first to kind of like put something in a written form. Um, that felt like compelling in some manner for that time. Like Archigram, they were based out of the Architectural Association in London right? Um, and London was also connected to a lot of other parts of Europe, so I just wanted to be there. I wanted to experience it. I wanted to like work on really fun stuff and collaborate with people and you know there's so many design festivals there and it's really easy to like hop on a train to Paris or you know get a forty Euro ticket on Ryanair to Lisbon or Berlin or whatever it was, to see what else was happening. And I was really just craving that, I felt like.
I remember having this rant in architecture school I had written—I used to like write a lot in my sketchbooks—and at the time I was really interested in like what lasts like how do we make stuff that matters and is everlasting, and I didn't feel like I could adequately understand that in a country like the US where I felt like our history just wasn't deep enough. And so I wanted to learn about that in places like London and Rome and Lisbon and you know, um and kind of just be part of yeah like that creative energy.
20:12.37
Nu Goteh
So can you help us connect the dots because you went from architecture to now you're sitting in foresight, future studies. But there's narrative environments. What are narrative environments and how did that assure you into foresight?
20:34.98
Radha
Yeah, um, so narrative—but so here's the thing that I always felt about architecture is that it's not just about the building, the shell right? There's a story that we relate to when we walk into a space, whether that was intentionally designed or it was something that we projected onto that experience of moving through that space. And that was something that was always very important to me but I didn't know how to articulate it and I didn't know how to say that like story is just as important to the design process as the process of making the structure itself. And so what narrative environments allowed me to do was it gave me the language and the kind of set of like methodologies I suppose to really say like—built environment is important but it's not the only thing and so how can we take elements of narrative building and narrative structure and have that lead and guide the design process?
And then pull in all of these other elements that are also very important, like how do we house this thing and where does the funding come from and who accesses it and you know all of those pieces. Um, but really to say like what's the story first? What are we trying to activate here? Who are we trying to bring in? Who are we maybe not deliberately like leaving out? Why is that happening? Um, and that was a thing that was really cool to me about the speculative architecture movements that I was reading about right? Like they were really focusing on these story worlds that they had created that were helping them to kind of dive into these super deep inquiries around what architecture could be if it was not just building. Um and so I finally kind of had this mechanism to like connect those two worlds—like, “oh cool, I get to do the architecture stuff, the thought experiments around architecture,but I also get to think about like worldbuilding and imagining what could be” And then the piece that came after that was if we have the ability to create stories around what we might want to happen around these preferable visions of futures, do we then have some like sense of agency and maybe ownership over what the future becomes, and that was a really big kind of moment for me and that was something that you know I happened upon more at my time in an era, and the first time around, which was this realization that was like: I don't have to resign myself to stories that have been told by others. I can use this framing around narrative environments and foresight and future studies to start to build stories that actually make sense and make meaning for someone like me. And that felt like a really kind of like liberating, kind of like awakening. My learning journey at the time.
24:11.91
Nu Goteh
And so then that led you to—dun dun dun—future studies. Foresight. What is foresight?
24:21.41
Radha Mistry
What is foresight? What even is foresight? Um, so foresight is like one of the areas of practice that I would say sits under the umbrella of future studies. There's a few different, I mean all of these you know fields of research and practice, kind of the common denominator here is that they're ways of looking into possible paths. Forward into possible futures. Um, as part of this series, you know we had a chance to sit down with Julian Bleecker and his focus has been design fiction, which is kind of taking the attributes of making—like physically making objects and artifacts and storytelling—to kind of transport us into these near future kind of other worlds. So you know like, if you were thinking about like what does breakfast look like in 10 years, right? What is the cereal box that's sitting on your dining table tell you about how your experience has changed and how the world has changed? There's so much you can do around that, like the labeling, the shipping mechanisms, the material the box is made of—what kind of cereal is it? You know like there's so many things you can start to kind of insinuate about how the world has changed. There's things like speculative design, which you know, to me, kind of fit a little bit more closely with my experience in architecture and really think about again, kind of through these like designed artifacts and experiences, how are we speculating on what the future might be, what alternate realities might look like, or even what counterfactual histories might have been?
Foresight is—and then there's kind of like the art movement around futurism which exists but doesn't necessarily have the same kind of lineage into the ways we practice today. Um, some might kind of pull that into the umbrella but I often don't reference it. Foresight to me is the practice that you'll probably come up on from corporations, like in organizations like RAND or the UNDP, or DARPA, or folks like that. Arup has a foresight team kind of in these corporate foresight functions. Shell famously has had a foresight team for decades. It's really the practice of understanding uncertainty and navigating change to have a better sense kind of, to be able to better grapple with what might be coming and what we might do about that change, as opposed to kind of just having to resign to the future happening to us.
Foresight provides us the tools and methodologies to be able to say, “what am I noticing out there on the horizon that has not already been articulated as a trend, as something that is very clearly understood and acknowledged and maybe accepted as a way of being?” And if I can connect the dots between these very quiet whispers of what might be, what picture does that paint for me and is this something that's preferable? Is this something that's probable, right? That it's going to happen if we just continue business as usual? Is it something that feels super crazy and out there but we should maybe pay attention to it right? So it starts to kind of give us this framing around what change around us, what uncertainty around us, feels um kind of tangible and what feels totally out there, and what do we want to pay attention to and invest in addressing in some way. But it's really, you know, it's really about kind of being able to articulate what the future might look like and then being able to kind of either design towards it or mitigate against the visions of the future that we don't want happening.
29:09.81
Nu Goteh
I think what's exciting for me, and especially through the lens of Deem, is that we see design as a practice right? It's not limited to artifacts or buildings or these shells that are being created, but this process or this notion of people being able to participate in shaping their reality and shaping their current reality one way or another. Um, creating means for people, communities, and systems to thrive. I think what's very compelling when you start to think about foresight is this notion of what happens when you start to frame up your current agency to say: there is a preferable future that I want to move towards as opposed to a future moving towards me, and even in that exchange and how people negotiate that, I feel like it's such a powerful framing.
Whether you know the methodologies or not, whether you know the future outcome, all those things, like just even that framing of like—okay, well if I can envision a preferable outcome I then have more opportunity right now to move towards that, as opposed to being on the receiving end. I think what excites me is getting more voices and perspectives into this thinking. So I'd love to hear from you about the history of this industry because like you said it's from DARPA, like it's coming from all these other places, and now it's converging with amazing, brilliant thinkers like you and some of the people that were interviewed in this series. How has it evolved from where it was to where it is now?
31:14.29
Radha Mistry
Yeah I mean you know one of the biggest critiques of future studies as a whole is that it typically wasn't accessible to everyone right? It was these visions of the future were being cultivated and you know these glass towers, and in the academy and on the white walls of galleries. And not everyone has access to those spaces right? and into those rooms? It was groups of people who had maybe power and influence who were deciding for everyone what preferable was, right? I think one of the biggest things that I focus on in my practice is the inquiry like, who is this preferable for? Constantly asking that because something that works for me might not work for you, right?
Radha Mistry
So you know the practice of foresight and of futuring like I said had kind of been held in these very like closed off you know, maybe unfortunate, like kind of sacred spaces that a lot of people just didn't have access to. And when I first started in the kind of foresight space I often found myself being like the only me in the room. Um, and it wasn't very comfortable. It was, you know, I did thankfully have mentors who kind of realized that there needed to be other voices and other other perspectives in the room and they were willing to kind of teach me foresight and then you know I found ways to kind of take space and make space. But what's been really awesome to see over the last like 15 years is how much the field has evolved and how much it has expanded.
You know there have always been like really interesting kind of foresight and future studies projects and practitioners around the world. But those folks are really coming into focus globally in interesting ways.
04:41.80
Nu Goteh
And coming out of this series with all the great conversations that you've had with many different practitioners, What was something that you learned for your practice from the conversations that you've had in this podcast?
05:05.24
Radha Mistry
So I love that question. I will say I think the conversations themselves were kind of meant to be these like meandering chats over like tea or coffee right? It's not meant to be like, hey I'm sitting on a panel and you're watching me as like this expert saying something. What was really great and kind of like comforting was that each of the folks in their respective kind of corners of future studies all had these slightly at times confusing meandering paths into what they do now. And that was across the board. It didn't matter, you know, how long you were practicing when you kind of came up into the industry, what domain area of research you focus on in future studies. I think the common thread between all of our experiences was that it didn't feel like we fit into any one, you know, design language or creative field or area of practice or whatever it might be. And even for the folks who kind of like came up through like OCAD's foresight program, or University of Houston's foresight program, or the RCA, and had more of like an institutional, you know, understanding of foresight and future studies, just being able to kind of reflect on that and hear that everyone is just kind of figuring it out, myself included, you know that in itself was like a really kind of validating reflection.
07:01.62
Nu Goteh
One more question—this one's gonna be a curveball. So earlier you set something that really stood out to me that had to do with calculus. You said calculus tells the story of physics. If we were to apply that same logic to design, what does design tell the story of?
07:29.61
Radha Mistry
That's a great question. What does design tell the story of—can I ask you?
07:47.69
Nu Goteh
Yeah, I think design tells a story of optimism. In order to be a designer, you do have to naively believe that you can affect your current environment or your being in one way or another in a desirable way, and so embedded in that is a sense of optimism that I think is shared with many people who are in underclass communities, minority communities, like different people who are disenfranchised and who continue to exist and move into spaces that they can break through and thrive. So I would say design tells a story of optimism.
08:42.95
Radha Mistry
I think design tells a story of what could be. I don't know if it's always an optimistic point of view on that, and I say this because when I run you know workshops or do any kind of like community engagement or kind of like things where we're out in the public realm, when we ask people about what they think the future, it usually leans negative. It's so much easier to tell stories about the things that scare us than it is to imagine a way out of these systems that sometimes feel quite oppressive and sometimes are oppressive, right?
So like I, as a designer myself, I try to take—I try to like—as a mediator, take that neutral position to say there's space for all of these possibilities right? and they can lead positive or negative.
09:47.53
Nu Goteh
Yeah.
09:54.67
Radha Mistry
But the language we use when we talk about, design is what could be, because again like what feels optimistic for you might not feel like an optimistic future for me, right? And that's like um, yeah…maybe it just means I'm a little jaded and I need a sabbatical or something but, but I leave room for all of it right? We contain multitudes, I leave room for the full expanse of that and what that conversation holds.
10:30.74
Nu Goteh
Yeah, and I think in the sense of the way how I think of optimism, I'm not necessarily thinking of an optimistic world. But I think of optimism and self-belief in in somebody's ability—
10:39.54
Radha Mistry
Yes yes for sure and that's where agency comes in right, like design allows us—I don't want to say it's the end all be all—but it's like it allows us, if we can harness the power of it, a sense of agency and that has been like a a career shifting revelation for me. Um.
10:58.99
Nu Goteh
Yes.
11:14.68
Radha Mistry
It’s that agency piece.
11:18.80
Nu Goteh
I think we can end on that note—I want to thank everyone for listening to this wonderful conversation that I got a chance to have with Radha
at the beginning of a really deep series where we're holding space for uncertainties, we're holding spaces for voices, we're encouraging agency and just encouraging new ways to explore ourselves, the world, and the possible futures that we want to participate in.
12:14.92
Radha Mistry
Thank you for having me. This was fun.