The Toilet of the Future is a talk about immersive design, the future, and bathrooms.
I gave this talk at the Gray Area Festival in 2019. At the time, it felt very important for me to speak to two key points: (1) that tech companies and innovators living and working in the Bay Area have a moral responsibility to consider their roles as stewards of our collective environmental, technological and cultural futures, and (2) the work of publicly imagining and building the future has historically been credited to a very small and predominantly white male cluster of capital-F Futurists; a more survivable future demands a more collaborative, diverse and imaginative approach.
I also got to talk about my mom, an exceptionally bright and wry high school English teacher, and the deeply personal framework she used to teach me about the future.