Adelaide’s future gets brighter with new agency
Two of the city’s most colourful have joined forces to launch an agency that’s looking to impart lessons on foresight to the people of Adelaide.
What do you get when you mix one of the world’s foremost experts in foresight with a local creative that has a flair for the colourful?
You get SA Futures Agency – a new foresight consulting, research and events firm that stands by the idea that “the future doesn’t belong to experts or algorithms – it belongs to all of us”.
Formed primarily by Dr Ariella Helfgott, a strategic foresight practitioner and professor at the University of Adelaide, and Stavroula Adameitis, the artist and designer behind kitsch-glamour fashion label FRIDA LAS VEGAS, the agency is on a mission to help businesses and organisations in Adelaide make better decisions today by understanding the possible worlds of tomorrow.
By bringing together Helfgott’s expertise in foresight with Adameitis’ unique eye for design, the duo hopes to get Adelaide interested in understanding what the future might look like.
They’re not fortune tellers and there’s no crystal ball. Rather, by asking people what they want out of an Adelaide of the future they will give them skills to better plan or prepare for eventualities.
“We have the ability to observe, sense change, to listen deeply, to look up at the stars and down into the soil, and to find our way – not alone, but together – through unfamiliar terrain,” said Helfgott, who is also the director of foresight and strategic learning at the World Energy Council.
“That’s what foresight is. It’s not about prediction, it’s about navigation. It’s about recognising that we’re all moving through a time of great transition – climate, technology, social cohesion, economies – and asking: How do we prepare? How do we adapt? And how do we create futures that are just, inclusive, regenerative, and alive with possibility?”
The team, which also includes the likes of Kate Simpson, Paul Hermans, Dr Matthew Berryman, Dino Vrynios, Dr Aaron Davis and Brooke Ferguson, have big plans.
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This includes running events and learning workshops, offering businesses and leaders private sessions on foresight, and developing a suite of products like trend cards to better prepare the state for possible futures.
Helfgott – who previously served as the director of strategic foresight in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet – told InDaily that “people liked the fact that we are independent and we’re not affiliated with any one government department private enterprise”.
“We’re not representing any particular set of interests, but we’re bringing people together across divides,” she said.
“The future belongs to everyone. Everyone deserves to have a voice in shaping it.”
In a world where leaders and businesses are increasingly handing decision-making to AI servants, Helfgott said their role was even more important.
“Yes, AI can process huge amounts of data, but it can’t intuit the future, even if it feels like it can,” she said.
“It can’t actually do that meaning-making in context and checking in with values. An expert, no matter how smart they are, can’t know everything because no one can see or know everything and everyone has their blind spots.”
The pair are both Adelaide-born and boomeranged back to SA – Helfgott from Europe and Adameitis from Sydney. They met only recently and bonded over a shared sense of colourful style and a passion for examining the future.
“Ariella came in as a customer and she was looking for a fabulous outfit to wear to a government event,” Adameitis recounted.
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“She gravitated towards a Kath & Kim caftan, and I was instantly fascinated. I asked: ‘What is the futures and foresight space?’ I hadn’t really heard those words being used in a professional context, but I was intrigued.
“I just thought she was delightful and so interesting and friendly. I did something that you find yourself doing when you’re in school and I said: ‘Ariella, would you like to be friends?’”
The duo swapped emails and began catching up regularly. Adameitis was doing an Art Pod at the City of Adelaide at the time and there they started having deeper conversations about foresight and futures.
“I realised that in my current job as an artist and designer I’m working with patterns, but in a very visual way. I’m looking at how images correlate and tell stories with graphics.
“I realised: I’m looking at patterns, Ariella is looking at patterns too. And we realised there was no real aesthetic – besides a sort of cybernetic, AI, scary Terminator – for this kind of work.”
Adameitis’ work at FRIDA LAS VEGAS is primarily concerned with nostalgia. Her work features local mythology – both Greek and typically Australian – alongside pop cultural ephemera and tongue-in-cheek visual puns.
She discovered she could use that to inform the aesthetic values of what Helfgott was exploring.
“I can be using the aesthetics of the past to be communicating the ideas about the future,” Adameitis said.
“It’s so much easier for people to use retro-aestheticism in order to grasp these ideas.
“I felt it was something that I could contribute to beyond textiles and prints. To use my degrees in media and arts to positively contribute to the work that Ariella is doing.”
Eventually, they took the plunge and decided they’d work together to form SA Futures Agency.
“The pace of change we’re experiencing is really fast and fundamentally changes every single aspect of society, economy, geopolitics, technology and environment,” Helfgott said.
“People need help in knowing how to navigate that level of uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is a real opportunity for innovation and other possibilities. We have lots of structured sets of tools and processes and ways of thinking that can help people deal with that so that they don’t have to just run towards fascism.”
