Stuart Candy

Stuart Candy is an Australian futurist and designer. Candy is a Fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation, Museum of Tomorrow. He is the first Research Fellow of The Long Now Foundation. His work deals with futurism and designing experiential futures through immersive storytelling.

Career Candy holds degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Melbourne, and an MA and PhD in Political Science and Alternative Futures from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, completed on graduate degree fellowships awarded by the East–West Center. There, he studied under early futurist Jim Dator.

Candy was the first Fellow of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco and the first artist in residence with the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro.

In 2014, Candy and Jeff Watson, as the Situation Lab, published the card game The Thing from the Future. The game prompts 2-6 players to use a deck of 108 cards to come up with "entertaining and thought-provoking descriptions" or hypothetical objects from the near, medium, and long-term future. Players come up with "things from the future" (headlines, posters, games, monuments etc.) related to a scenario about a topic, a state, a time period, and a mood derived from the cards, allowing the players to develop their own future scenarios, which they then assess and discuss. In 2018, Candy and Dunagan ran the game for a group of city mayors as part of SXSW.

In 2017, Candy created the "NurturePod", a hypothetical near-future technology product that automates raising a baby. It featured a model of a baby wearing a small VR visor, sitting in an egg-shaped booster seat. The NurturePod was displayed at M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium.

Book In 2019, Candy and Cher Potter published Design and Futures, a collection of 30 essays and pieces of writing documenting design futures discourse. The collection originally appeared in issues of the Journal of Futures Studies and includes pieces by Minority Report production designer Alex McDowell, Museum of Modern Art curator Paola Antonelli, author of Hyperobjects Timothy Morton, and other futurists and artists.

Awards Most Significant Futures Work Award (2017) for Designing an Experiential Scenario: The People Who Vanished from The Association of Professional Futurists Most Significant Futures Work Award (2015) for the card game The Thing From the Future from The Association of Professional Futurists Norman Meller Award (2009) for his academic achievements as a recent graduate, awarded by the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa