TCNJ

8 FALL 2016 8 FALL 2016 W hen people find out Angela Oguntala '07 is a futurist, they usually have a request. "Predictions," says Oguntala, with a sigh. "Tell me what kind of car I'll drive in six months. Tell me about what synthetic biology will look like in 10 years. And then you'll see all the blood drain from my face." It's an easy mistake to make. "Futurist" has a certain cartoonish, Jetsonian feel to it. But Oguntala's job isn't to sketch out some modified version of a coming sci-fi utopia. Her job is to help real organizations plan for all of the potential realities to come. "The future isn't some static thing that will just arrive one day," says Oguntala. "The future is a moving target." Oguntala's career is the product of disparate experiences: a business degree from TCNJ, program management and strategy work in the tech sector, and a graduate degree in design that was "one part computer science, one part psychology, one part anthropology—and a bit about how to design for people." Her unique background, says Oguntala, provides her the skills to both conceive and execute. "It's not just theory. I work in a very concrete way to figure out what possible futures are out there, and then create very explicit action plans [for designing the] futures we want." She's spread her message as a consultant to organizations ranging from Philips to the Danish Film Institute and as a frequent confer- ence speaker, including as a headliner at this year's TEDx event in Copenhagen. Finding alternative futures requires a broad lens, she says. When the Danish Film Institute came to Oguntala looking for a fresh approach to their operations—"everything about how a film comes about artistically, how it travels through the world, and how people end up consuming it"—her hunt for new formulas took her to West Africa, where she's previously worked with tech startups. She found a key cultural difference between, say, Western cinema and cinema in West Africa: storytelling. "The way we tell stories in the developed world is to follow the hero's journey," says Oguntala. "You have to undergo trials and tribulations, and, at the end, you are a different person." (Think The Lion King, she says, or Star Wars.) West African movies, though, are designed to maintain tradition. "Someone has all these trials and tribulations, but they return the same person. You remain very true to your tradition." These kinds of ideas, Oguntala says, serve as creative kindling. "In a way, it is provoking people with the right kinds of images and ideas and prophecies so they can reflect on the work they do and do it differently in the near and distant future." In other words, futurists don't come in and give you certainty. You're not walking away with a solution or a product; you are walking away with a plan. Oguntala embodies her globalist approach: a half-Nigerian, half-American itinerant traveler and culture sponge who lives in Copenhagen. And while her background helped her develop her professional perspective, she sometimes feels pressure from peers to conform to their expectations of what a futurist should be. At an artificial intelligence conference, for example, she might be asked to talk about things like simulations and mathematical modeling—even though her expertise may lie in softer aspects related to, say, family structures or how spirituality relates to algorithms. She gets it. "There's often not a lot of people who represent me at the places I go," Oguntula says. And she knows changing ingrained worldviews is almost impossible. The only thing she can do is help people fashion a new set of lenses from mind-broadening journeys to the corners of the earth. Or, at the very least, they could spend an hour with Oguntula. Just don't ask her to make any predictions. —Dan Morrell Watch Oguntala's TEDx talk at tcnj.edu/oguntala. Oguntala preps for her TEDx Copenhagen talk on the power we have to design our own futures. PRAIRIE

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