SXSW Panelpicker 2026
Futures Jam | AI, Games, and Wild Ideas in One Hour
Vote for “Futures Jam: AI, Games, and Wild Ideas in One Hour” to bring AI, collaboration, games, and wild ideas to SXSW 2026! The Panelpicker is open Aug. 4-25 at panelpicker.sxsw.com.
Futures Jam is an interactive workshop exploring possible futures through generative AI and collaborative game creation. It’s a fast, fun sprint where you’ll use AI to turn uncertainty into play.
In this hour‑long workshop, you and a few new friends will co‑create a tabletop game idea that makes sense of possible futures. Using rapid‑fire prompts, generative‑AI tools and your own imagination, you’ll turn uncertainty into play. This isn’t a lecture or a product demo—it’s a fast, fun and intentionally messy sprint. We’ll use games both as our playground and as a metaphor for exploring the unknown. You’ll walk away with a futures toolkit to spark new conversations at home or at work, plus a few new collaborators.
Who is Futures Jam For?
Curious creatives, tech explorers, and AI beginners (and experts) eager to play, prototype, and rethink futures—with fun, risk, and fresh perspectives.
Why This Workshop
In a time when most of us lack clear language, shared goals, or imagery for the futures we face, we need better ways to explore them together. This workshop uses playful, rapid game-making as a tool to surface how we each think about the future—and how we explain it to others. By combining generative AI with human storytelling, participants practice making artifacts and metaphors that help decode uncertainty, find common ground, and spark deeper conversations in teams, classrooms, and communities.
- Experience how playful collaboration + AI can unlock expansive, creative futures thinking.
- Learn to co-create fresh metaphors, artifacts, and language for futures conversations.
- Leave with a rapid-fire innovation + sensemaking toolkit you can use with your own team.
Workshop Lead: Dr. Gigi Johnson
Gigi brings 20+ years teaching tech disruption at UCLA, a doctorate in education + tech change, futurist experience at BofA and UCLA, two decades of live event design, and a quirky sense of humor. She’s piloted this program in live university sessions and has a long history as a SXSW speaker.
At Rethink Next, she runs collaborative futures programs around the world. She is a frequent speaker at conferences on AI, media technology, and the future of creative work. Gigi also designs mixed-reality environments as well as producing programs on AI and new creative tools. At UCLA, she ran the UCLA Center for Music Innovation and taught MBAs and executives at UCLA Anderson about disruption in creative industries. Before UCLA, Gigi was a managing director at Bank of America, where she financed M&A in transforming media sectors. She has a doctorate in education, a UCLA MBA, and a BA from USC Cinematic Arts.
Prior Speaking Experience
Longtime speaker and live event leader at events including SXSW, Academy of Management, music industry conferences, panels across the US, Asia, and Europe, and collaborative workshops in Barcelona with bilingual facilitation. Twenty years teaching at UCLA across live and remote settings.
Past SXSW or SXSW EDU Sessions
- Guest Panelist, “The End of Events, The Dawn of Engagements,” SXSW 2023
- Speaker, “Tectonic Mergers: Frictions in Music Education,” SXSWedu 2021
- Speaker, “Navigating Accelerated Changes in the Music Industry,” SXSW 2021
- Panelist, “Blueprint: Finding Sonic Voice with Social Sound,” SXSW 2019
- Moderator, “Music Industry 3.0 – The Great Rebalancing Begins,” SXSW 2019
- Workshop, “How to Teach Designing Your Creative Career,” SXSWedu 2018
- Featured, “Music 2020: How We Can Change the Future,” SXSW Music 2016
- Speaker, “Surviving the Shift: Rethinking Music and Data,” SXSW 2015
- Core Conversations, “Pixelating Reality: How Smartphones Shift Now,” SXSW 2014
- Speaker, “Blending the University: Beyond MOOCs,” SXSWedu 2013
Our Story
Why These Projects
There’s a growing public interest in futures thinking. But most of these resources either focus on individual imagination, corporate strategy, or design practice.
FuturesJam and the upcoming We Are All Futurists book series take a fresh approach:
- We combine personal, collective, and civic futures — showing how individual imagination links to teams, communities, and systems.
- We use playful, participatory methods — like FuturesJam, TimeSkip, and Future Detectives — to help groups co-create and explore possible futures together, not just read or imagine them alone.
- We introduce AI as a creative partner, helping participants surface surprising ideas, test assumptions, and design playable futures games.
- We include a narrative detox lens, helping people see and question the “futures” they’re already surrounded by — at conferences, in media, and in the culture at large.
- We offer ready-to-use workshop models, templates, and tools that educators, facilitators, teams, and individuals can adapt for their own use.
Futures Jam and other Rethink Next projects are about not just playing with futures, but noticing, unhooking, and reshaping them — together. They fill a gap by blending strategic foresight, cultural critique, participatory play, and creative technology.
Join the Jam
Vote via the SXSW Panelpicker for 2026
Vote August 5-24 for #2173 at https://panelpicker.sxsw.com.
Enjoy Futures Jam with Your Team
Connect with us to run a Futures Jam program at your organization or university.