Valdis Silins

Valdis is an interdisciplinary researcher, strategist and writer whose work seeks to reframe underlying assumptions around technology and social change. With a background in media theory and philosophy, he uses foresight and speculative design to expand the possibility space of other modernities.

As part of the Toronto-based foresight studio, From Later, he works with a crew of poets and engineers to produce design fictions, experiential futures, and clear-sighted and judicious futures research. He was previously a senior foresight strategist at Idea Couture, where he developed participatory futures methods in collaboration with anthropologists, and has worked across a range of sectors and scales.

Valdis’ work has appeared in publications like Logic Magazine, MISC, and Scenario Magazine from the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. In 2019 he was a New Normal research fellow at Strelka Institute in Moscow, where he incubated a project whose current iteration explores the creative application of machine learning to scenario generation.