2027 speakers
caitlin steele
TALK
The future is a story
Software is made of stories at every level. Dashboards are narratives told with numbers. A roadmap is a saga about the future you’re building against the resources you have now. Capitalism is the master narrative running over today’s markets, and it feels like the tech industry has lost the plot.
Narrative ambiguity makes for a great novel. It’s not a strategy for building products people love. Going back to the double diamond won’t get us out of this mess, but new ways of working can.
Caitlin’s talk will cover:
What narrative futures means
Why ambiguity is a blank page
Who gets to author the future
How futures methods give us agency
ABOUT THIS SPEAKER
Caitlin Steele (she/her) is the founder of Thoughtful Apes, a strategic design consultancy built on narrative futures and Object-Oriented UX (OOUX).
She worked in design leadership at Atlassian (Trello, Confluence, Jira Work Management), GitLab, and lululemon, and was employee number 3 at MasterClass.
She’s a certified OOUX strategist and is completing an MSc in Narrative Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, researching how story structure can give product teams a more human way to navigate ambiguity. She lives in the Netherlands with her husband and small army of cats.