What We Do
Jason Tester
Research Affiliate
Jason Tester is a strategic foresight researcher, facilitator, and speculative designer with specialties in the cultural impacts of emerging technologies and social justice futures. He is currently a research affiliate with the Institute for the Future after ten years there most recently as a Research Director working with numerous Fortune 500 companies, NGOs, and government entities on core and custom foresight research and speculative design prototyping.
In addition to leading qualitative foresight research through many methodologies—from digital and in situ ethnographies to immersive expert ideation workshops—Jason also helped pioneer many of the Institute’s earliest efforts to engage larger public audiences through imagined narratives, digital and physical artifacts from the future, futurized spaces, and fictional lives from future worlds. Many of Jason’s projects at IFTF and in academia, as well as his thoughts on the future, have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Wired, and on MSNBC and CNN. Jason obtained an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction Design from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy and a B.S. in Human-Computer Interaction Design from Stanford University. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National LGBTQ Task Force.
Most recently Jason is launching a collaborative research project at QueerTheFuture.org to understand how the queer lens seen through queer lives can be a powerful perspective for surviving and thriving in the world to come—and a strong foundation for imagining truly transformative alternatives.