Imagining Otherwise: Storytelling, Design & Speculative Imagination

A multidisciplinary panel on storytelling as a dynamic tool for imagining otherwise

What stories prepare us for the futures we want to live in? And what happens when performance design, narrative experimentation, and speculative imagination collide?

Imagining Otherwise is a cross-disciplinary panel that brings together theater-makers, performers, and designers to explore the role of storytelling in cultural and civic futures. This is not just a conversation about design — it’s about how creative practice becomes a tool for social imagination.

Panelists will share their approaches to narrative experimentation, discuss the tensions of innovation, and reflect on how performance can both challenge and expand cultural norms. Together, they’ll examine how design and performance practices can reframe the questions we ask, the worlds we rehearse, and the futures we begin to prototype.

✨What to expect:

• A lively panel conversation featuring local and visiting creatives
• Insights into how theater and performance intersect with design and systems thinking
• Reflections on the challenges of making work that straddles art, activism, and speculation
• Time for audience Q&A and dialogue with practitioners

✨ This event is for:

• Artists, directors, and performers working at the edge of their fields
• Designers, storytellers, and futurists curious about cultural imagination
• Anyone interested in how art and design can open pathways toward justice, joy, and belonging

Details

Time and Date: Monday, Oct 20, 2025 • 6 PM – 8:30 PM • Doors at 5:45 PM

Location: Kiln (SE Portland)

Agency for Speculative Futures

A civic imagination lab treating the future as a public work, blending design, storytelling, and systems change. We create experiences and invest in spaces where communities can rehearse and reimagine just, joyful futures

Impact x Design

A community of designers, strategists, and change-makers who believe design has the power to shape more equitable futures. We curate conversations, facilitate workshops, and resource projects exploring impact at the intersection of creativity and systems change.

The Imagining Otherwise panel concludes a three-day exploration of performance as a design method for cultural futures:

• Story in Motion: Performance as Prototype(Sat, Oct 18) → A public table read that opens a window into the creative process of performance-making
• Story in Motion: Performance as Prototype (Sun, Oct 19) → A second public table (the same in-progress work as the Saturday Table Read)
• Narrative Design Lab: A Hands-on Workshop (Sun, Oct 19) → Directly following Sunday's table read, a hands-on lab unpacking the design of story

And be sure to check out the Radical Future(s) Fest (Oct 6 - Oct 8), a three-day celebration of design, systems, and belonging — with panels, showcases, and design jams imagining more just and joyful futures.

Explore these and more at the .

Get ready to be inspired, share your ideas, and connect with others who are shaping what comes next

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Kiln, 1120 Southeast Madison Street, Portland, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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