Design Economics Podcast with Vinny Tafuro

This is where you develop your mythic identity, and this is influenced by jazz musician Sun Ra. He gave himself that name influenced by ancient Egypt. And he said that he was from the planet Saturn and that the music he made, very abstracted jazz, is to help bring his people back home to liberation on this planet. He was in his own iconic entity. But what he was able to do by creating his own myth was pierce through a very, very thick fog of oppression that black men were dealing with.

Hello, and welcome to season one, episode three of the design economics podcast, where we explore how design thinking driven by data is revolutionizing economics for the twenty first century. My name is Vinita Furrow, a futurist, economist, and your host for this episode. Today, I will be talking with Ingrid LaFleur, who is a curator, Afrofuturist, and pleasure activist. Her groundbreaking work has been featured in prominent outlets such as the New York Times and Time Magazine. Our conversation explores the roots of Afrofuturism, the impacts of nonlinear presence, and how Ingrid's stinkinish method world builds can guide us towards better futures.

So with that, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Ingrid LaFleur.

Thank you so much for having me, Vinny.

You're welcome. It's been a pleasure to get to know you over the last couple of years. I wanted to, you know, start off by asking you, could you explain a little bit about what is Afrofuturism? And what how does it relate to our economic futures?

Yeah, definitely. So Afrofuturism was coined in the mid 1990s by a cultural critic named Mark Derry, who wrote an essay coining the term after observing writings by people like Brad Tate and Octavia Butler and commenting on the Black experience being sci fi, to put it short. So Afrofuturism was born in that article. And then from there on, people gathered. I was part of the first Yahoo group that was created, really just kind of exploring what is Afrofuturism.

And it had gone through a lot of, I think, it hasn't gone through a lot of iterations per se, but there are different stages to it. So in the very beginning, it was definitely a super fringe kind of cultural movement based mostly in literature and music and mostly popular music. I could hear it a lot. It would definitely connect to, like, for instance, electronic music. Then over time, it started showing up in visual arts, and then it just blossomed into fashion, architecture, everywhere.

And what happens is that it went from just thinking about Black people in the future using science fiction, fantasy, magical realism for to kind of express that life to then really diving into the intersection of race and technology and race and science, thinking about biases and harm that might come to Black bodies as a result of these new technologies. But it has always been influenced by mythologies, legends, cosmology, practices from African, the African diaspora, and really the indigenous of of the world. We pull from all of those sources to help us recontextualize the past, reorient our present so that we are creating narratives of the future that are healthy and whole and reflective of the desires and dreams of black bodied people. I'd like to say that Afrofuturism creates a new relationship to the Black body and to Blackness, one that's healthier. I mean, within the movement, you will find yourself really difficult to define Blackness after a while.

There are always cultural markers. But in terms of race, we're no longer wanting to hold on to that concept. It is just a source of division and a way to just oppress people continuously. But when we talk about blackness in this context within the Afrofuture, we're talking about culture. And because black bodies have, as I mentioned before, are dealing with certain levels of oppression, we have to be more analytical about the systems that are at play in our world.

And when we're thinking about the economic system, it's very clear that black bodies face a lot of discrimination and be it like within the banking system, redlining for housing, and so just access to resources and then the funds to be able to acquire them. All of that has been systemically made so that it's difficult for us, for Black people to access. And so therefore, when we're thinking about futures, we have to reconsider or rethink, analyze, reimagine all of these systems, including the economic system. So that would look like looking at different alternatives for creating an economy or ways to just share resources, honestly. And so that can look like cooperatives.

That can look like I I dove a little I dove deep into blockchain technology and cryptocurrency thinking about decentralized autonomous communities as a way of thinking of, you know, the cooperative two point zero, right? The digital version of a cooperative that has high level transparency, makes it easier to organize, you know, amongst a group of people. So, yeah, Afrofuturism is a really, really wonderful tool to make sure that what we're imagining planning for the future is not harmful to various populations that have been either racialized or passed in all these different ways.

Got you. That's thank you. That's very comprehensive. And I think there's a few things in there towards the latter part of that is on the cooperatives and the economic systems. And then to the beginning of it, you see this is really kind of a it hasn't been very iterative yet, but it did begin with music and kind of transitioned a little bit.

And maybe we can go into a little bit of depth first on on that the the evolution of it. Because I know, you know, these systems, they they start as one thing and move into another and another. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. The transition from music to, you know, a more whatever tangibility came out of that through art.

Yeah. So Afrofuturism is very nonlinear, and that's one foundational principle of of the movement, which means that it technically has no start date and no end date, which means that we think of the ancient past. Some of their thinking was very afrofuturistic. We can place that label into the far past, near past, present, into the future. But it's really a way of kind of gathering a particular type of perspective on the world.

So with that said, the music, you could a little tricky because, of course, Afrofuture thinking was existing before the music, but the music helped popularize the the term. They like it. It helped make it popular. So you have Broken Beat coming out of London. That would be like groups like Bugs in the Attic.

And so because my friends were DJs, they were telling me about the term as a result. And of and then, of course, you have science fiction literature, which at the time, I hadn't read any Octavia Butler. I was in college at the time. I didn't start reading her until in my early twenties, but the writers started slowly gaining popularity. But yeah, the music was probably the most popular.

Makes a lot of sense. It happens so often. Know I've discussed with other creatives, you could write a blog article, write a book, or if you publish a song all of a sudden, there's a different thing to it. It hits differently in the heart. So it makes a lot of sense.

It's easier to digest. And I like to say music and film are the two easiest to digest for people. And as a curator, I'm very sensitive to how people receive information, especially if it's a little abstract, like visual art can be a little tough. But I will say that so we have been on the fringe for a very long time. It really is Black Panther, the movie, that made us more popular.

And that's when we Okay. Started going into, like, mass consciousness.

That's actually, it's funny. One of the things I've I've looked into in the last couple of years is solarpunk, and there's not a lot of of very popularized concepts around it out yet, but I I've read a pretty strong argument that the Disney movie Tomorrowland at its core was solarpunk. Because without giving away spoilers, like, it was trying to send positive messages of the future. And so it's interesting. And, like like so even though that's not solarpunk, that's, like, the easiest example to give people because, well, it's a Disney movie.

People heard it. You know? They saw it, which is a blessing and a challenge, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, the challenge of it is that Black Panther is not actually a really good example. So as much as I was so excited how people responded to Black Panther around the world and then you know now people want to talk to me about Afrofuturism. They have some sort of understanding if someone's kind of really, really confused, I just say Black Panther. And they're like, oh.

So it's easy in that way. But as a theorist in the space, of course, I'm hyper analytical. And I think one of the things that we have to deeply understand is that if we're going to talk about decolonization, and if we're going to analyze anything based on is this appropriate healing or harmful or what is the impact on the black body, then you have to go all the way down to the root. And that's the issue is that a lot of people never go far enough. So in the Black Panther film, you have this kind of expression of the future that is glass, steel, a disc moving in space.

Well, is coming all from a white man's imagination. The white man has definitely colonized our imagination, the visuals around what the future looks like. And so that's one of many criticisms I have about Black Panther that they just didn't push far enough. Even in Wakanda you'll see some of the architecture and it might look really surreal but as an art history major I know that that's Malian architecture and that they didn't they didn't even play with the architecture they you know they just locked it there because we don't have that exposure to those histories. This, again, is why I love Afrofuturism so much, because you would have been already exposed to that kind of architecture within the space.

Makes a lot of sense. A little bit deeper, maybe, let's the idea of non linear approaches and the bringing in of spiritual and historical wisdom, how does that kind of influence the present, and what does nonlinear really look like? I know many nonwestern cultures like, I I look at lunar years are far more important to me than Gregorian calendar years when it comes to actually how I present myself energy wise in a season. So maybe a little bit on on that nonlinear thinking would be really good to explore.

Yeah. I think that that is something that everyone's really trying to figure that out because we live in such a a linear space. Colonial thinking has us adhering to clocks and time in a particular way. And so how do we decouple ourselves from that and it not impacts our lives, like the money we make or the food we eat, what resources we're allowed access to. I think that though the linear space, linear kind of time is very restrictive and doesn't allow a lot of fluidity.

It doesn't allow for improvisation. You know? So, honestly, nonlinear nonlinearity is best expressed through like jazz.

Oh okay.

Yeah or dance.

Improvised music. Mean that is it's Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So you know you're not doing a 123 ABC, right? You're moving and you're responding to what's happening. We call that a call and response. And so it's that part that we really want to kind of connect to on a deeper level. And in order to do that, you have to be very present, very present, very open, very open to what's around you, the humans, the living beings around you, so that then you can hear and listen and respond accordingly.

That has no time right around that. I like how engaging in simple pleasures, you lose time completely. Yes. Enjoy. You're right.

There's, you know, love. You lose time. Right? So this is why it's all constructed. Once we understand that the way that time is constructed now is literally so that we can serve somebody else so that they can become more resource Otherwise on an indigenous level all of us around the world we follow the movements of the sun stars and moon and that's it.

We knew

and we adjusted seasonally

Exactly. You knew when to wake up. You knew when to eat. You knew when to take bathe to to whatever, you know, and we were learning on an experiential level. And so a lot of the systems we have are outdated, right?

They were for farmers, right? You And you construct a school around farming and agriculture because we used to be that kind of society, and now we're still in that, right?

Oh, we just changed the clocks here in The US this weekend. And man, it messes with everybody.

And it messes with me. I'm in South Africa. No clocks have been moved. And yet I have to wait for The US. I'm too confused already with the time zones.

It's a lot.

Glad we're doing this on Tuesday instead of Monday.

Yeah, definitely.

No. I really like that discussion, like the nonlinear, bringing it to jazz, it really makes a lot of sense that improvisation and just kind of being in. You have to be in the moment to improvise and and there's no other way about it. I kind of want to move to the dinkin ish method. Am I pronouncing that correctly?

Yes.

Alright. And really, the overview of that, the the five portals are kind of like I said, this is this is relatively completely new to me. And, you know, I would love to hear, you know, your perspective on kind of the, you know, what this is and and and what it can do for people.

Definitely so as you know I got my Masters of Science at University of Houston in foresight and as I was studying I felt like when it comes to imagining the future, we were kind of skipping some steps again being black bodied and part of the global majority, but oppressed I. I know that when we make simple statements about the future that they're not very simple actually. They're pretty complicated and throws so many things into question, and there's so many considerations that just get pushed aside because we're going to talk about just humans blankly and there's no such thing as that right. There's no one one future. There's no one type of human that's going to have this one type of experience right so the diversity of that.

Just thinking about how to bring more diversity in Also, how can we use these tools to really investigate issues that concern my communities that I'm a part of? So I came up with the Dinkanesh method. Dinkanesh, she was born 3,500,000 years ago in what is now Ethiopia in that Far Triangle region. And she comes from this place of abundance. And this is me commenting on how we casually say and talk about how all humans are from come from Neanderthals, which isn't true, but it's not about being scientifically factual, it's really about the imagination and what we hold in the imagination and how that is expressed.

So working with my blockchain team and the startup that I was with and how they referenced the Neanderthal and how we humans are inherently competitive because of the scarcity environment that Neanderthals existed in. Therefore, all tech and everything needs to be made with that in mind, which they were doing with kind of opinion about a human. So I was like, no, I come from a place of abundance and co creation. And this is where Dinkinesh comes from. So Dinkinesh, the Dinkinesh method has five different portals.

The first one is living myth. This is where you develop your mythic identity, and this is influenced by jazz musician Sun Ra. He gave himself that name influenced by ancient Egypt. And he said that he was from the planet Saturn and that the music he made, very abstracted jazz, is to help bring his people back home to liberation on this planet. He dressed in regalia.

Okay. Was it amniac, possibly asexual? He was in his own iconic entity. But what he was able to do by creating his own myth was pierce through a very, very thick fog of oppression that black men were dealing with in the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties.

So this was definitely not an open time period. So this was the way for him to find that authenticity?

This was him claiming his freedom and liberation before it was given to him.

Okay.

I think this is the thing about liberation, because this is the center of my work, is that we actually don't have to wait for the liberation to be given to us. You can create your high level of freedom, And that's what mythic identities do, because now you're existing outside of the state. The state no longer holds that name. You're no longer beholden to narratives that were placed upon you because of your class, race, gender, x, y, and z. You get to just kind of break through and enter your own portal of magic that you can hold on a daily basis.

And this is what Sun Ra like showed us. And this is what I want you to do within the living myth portal is to really develop that. The second portal is dark matter which gets into systems thinking. Again, analyzing the systems that impact us and then creating new ones. So within that, though, I get into racial capitalism and necropolitics and the uses of Black death.

I think we need to know on a deep, deep level how these systems specifically impact certain races intentionally and not be naive about that and not want to repeat that when we're creating a new system. The other one is cosmic magic. It's one of my favorite portals. Mean they're all my favorite portals, but I love cosmic magic because we get to reclaim spiritual practices that the colonial state kind of forced us to get rid of even you know within Europe with everywhere you know wherever the the spiritual practice was very close to earth and the cosmos. Had a respect for living beings very animist.

Yeah, that makes okay.

Oh, I was just gonna say those practices were were kind of squashed and pushed aside because of the high level power within them.

Yes, which which I I'm the only the parallel like excuse me. The parallel I can see in in kind of the, you know, the Judeo Christian or especially the Christian Catholic Catholic is kind of the absorption of the paganism and different practices. Why certain holidays are completely aligned with previously pagan holidays to diminish their their energy and power. Whereas with with black historic cultural things, they're just basically erased instead of even absorbed.

Yeah. They're they they they have been definitely minimized. There are certain spaces where you'll find, certain spiritual practices masked by Catholicism or masked by so you'll have the orishas in Yoruba. The orishas would be paired with a saint so that when you're worshipping that saint, you're actually worshipping that orisha. So that was a form of survival.

It happened mostly in The Caribbean, a little bit in The United States. But, yeah, the reclaiming of these spiritual practices really will help to empower our daily lives really give it some fortitude. Then Ultra Destiny, have you scanning at the beginning of the experience signal scanning. And then we organize those signal scans in Ultra Destiny and start pulling some of that emerging tech, emerging science into a scenario that brings together all the other things that we learned in the portals, other previous portals, to create a new reality, a new world. But then also, the last one is the continuum.

So it's here that you hopefully will have created a futures practice that you will carry on and can pull from like a toolbox, but also some ritual around your mythic identity that that will be present for you as we move deeper into this deeply uncertain moment.

For sure. So is this something you would kind of you would take a group through basically? And so you would have some feedback like from everybody to kind of help get in the the zone per se on so that you can actually take this with you when you walk away from the room or the whatever to go, I am to embody that?

That's a good question. Haven't gotten to that part yet.

Okay.

So I've been working on the method for almost two years now. It was my master's project. And then I use it within my world builds, my Afrofuture world builds. And so those gather on the weekend once a month for three hours, and we unpack maybe this one coming up is the future of housing. The one before that was the future of time.

Previous ones is The Future of Black Motherhood. Another one was called Pleasure, Please.

I attended one of them. This is that beginning segment, basically, is that portion of it, but is the method. Is that what I'm do I get the right

So the method was the whole world build. So

we would

do every single thing. It just won't be as because it's only three hours, it's quick, and it's fast. This is why I created the self guided online course Dream Weaving with Dzin Kanoush so that you can go slow and much deeper. And that's based on the kinetic calendar. So it's ten days, ten day weeks that it's based on.

So it's four it takes you forty days to go through it.

Oh, I like ten day weeks.

Ten day weeks. Yeah. But, you know, the way it works is that you get the way they constructed it is two spiritual days, three work days, two spiritual days, three work days. So those construction of the course is based on that. So you'll have two little kind of reflective meditative moments for two days and then three three days of exercises.

And I did that intentionally also because futures can be triggering depending on your context and background. It's not always a happy thing. It can be a sad thing. It can trigger grief, hopelessness. There's so many things subconsciously also that might be laying dormant.

So when I have you go through, for instance a CLA, a causal layered analysis, have you meditating after that because every time I go through it with the groups that I've been with it's extremely emotional. As a black person to talk about the myths and things that inform certain systems, that's extremely triggering an emotional kind of space. So I have that sensitivity in terms of the construction and when you experience what.

That makes sense. Because CLA is such a powerful tool. Really love the way it can be used. But yeah, you really dig back to things. Go, oh my god, it can be very triggering and very much and lead to even hopelessness too because, well, if it's been around for three thousand years, who am I to fix it?

How do I deal with it? Like, it's so difficult. I love doing the meditative pauses. Having that space is phenomenal. Yeah.

I I love I wanna kinda maybe move on a little bit from this to kind of it's interesting how all of this kind of works in and and, know, with with our idea of design economics and the idea that there's these three tenants that have really not been included in traditional or or mainstream economics of the idea that acknowledging change in paradigms over time, embracing creativity, and I would even say here embracing historical wisdom. As a general thing, so many economics programs don't teach economics history. Those are two different programs, which seems completely outrageous. And then the other third one is this idea of cultivating literacy. And I I love the way your work in Afrofutures kind of really follows these in in number one, nonlinear thinking is definitely acknowledging change.

You have to be present in

the moment and go, how do we decolonize? How do we recognize things are changing? Talk a little bit about how Afrofutures has changed, could change, and, like, how that really adapts to that, Because you've done so well so much so far with the presence needed for jazz.

Oh my gosh. Godmother and writer Octavia Butler, she told us God is change, and change is God. That's probably one of the most quoted parts of Parable of the Sower. It is foundational to our thinking as Afrofuturists. You have to be open to change.

And when you're already part of an oppressed group, they will tell you little bits of change at a time, or it's not it's not the time yet to change.

Yeah.

People will feel uncomfortable with the changes. Meanwhile, we're dying. So like

Back there.

Right. So so, like, we've really have to exercise that muscle. Yeah. And how do we do that? I feel like moving into a nonlinear space.

Really adjusting your relationship to time can really help in helping you in dealing with the flux. I'm a Virgo, and I'm a hardcore Virgo. I'm a sun and moon Virgo. Talk about a person who's a planner. I need to know what's happening today, tomorrow, years from now, right?

In order for me to feel comfortable with my entire life. So my Taurus mother and my Taurus best friend really helped me

But just

to get out of my rigidity around time. What you find is that you become more relaxed and you become more open, and you realize that the change actually isn't that bad at all. And if anything, it can be glorious. It can be wonderful. It can open up something that you didn't even account for.

And I think that that's the issue with being linear in your thinking is that you're constantly trying to guess and anticipate to the T what's going to happen. And if it doesn't happen, then there's a frustration, And that causes even more stress. Instead of having no expectations and II feel like in this very moment in 2025 thinking about the geopolitics and especially the politics surrounding the country, United States, we've you know, this is a pretty new place for us. So therefore, the expectation level has to be adjusted. And we think about oftentimes, or I do, change being always going in a good direction and people having to adjust to go into that good direction.

Well, there's change happening in a direction that does not align with my values or my vision. And I've got to adjust in that direction too in order to be present. And we can't be afraid to be present within that uncomfortable space because it doesn't align. Because in order to make another change, we have to be present with it.

Absolutely, absolutely. Reality is in each of us to go what it is. And the thing is how can we be present today to to see the change that we wanna see in the world. And that makes a lot of sense. I think for me personally, that there's a lot of peace for myself in that.

And I think that that's why you and I connected originally and I think one of our first conversations was kind of that that that's identifying that. Really I really appreciate the the this side of it. I kind of want to go a little bit into now the embracing creativity portion of it. And as I I think expanding what's interesting about this design thinking and economics is really, you know, looking at the future and where we can go with that from, like, a speculative standpoint, but then also looking for historical context. And one of the areas you mentioned earlier was black cooperatives.

And one of the things I've learned over the last decade or so of my work is, you know, I had been looking at b corps and conscious capitalism and all of these different movements that talked about stakeholders and whatnot. But it wasn't till I really started digging into black economic history that I started learning about the great successes black communities were having prior to World War one in between, you know, the post civil war era that really were squashed. And then I I one of the things I noticed too is when the civil rights movement happened, black cooperative movements seem to stop as black communities moved into the neoliberal paradigm. So I'm gonna leave it there. That's kind of the context that I have.

So I'd love to see some of the historic context from you on on what cooperatives and where the future of economics could go on that nature, if that makes sense.

Oh, man. So much. Let's see. So there was a black professor that spoke at a blockchain conference recently, and he's anti capitalist. So that was fun.

And he talked about cooperatives not necessarily being the best solution. And the reason is because you need money to have a cooperative. And if you're already we get paid the least, black people get paid the least, black women the absolute least. So when when you're not getting compensated correctly, it's hard to move into a cooperative. And I thought that that was, like, something to consider, which means that, like, now we need to question money because, like, is there another way to compensate people?

Is there another way to exchange resources that doesn't rely on wages? And so that's its own rabbit hole. I have no answer. Agreed. I have no answer.

And, yes, you know, I heard another thing that, you know, there was the boycotting during the civil rights movement. They boycotted buses. Well, prior to that, it was brought up, I forgot by whom, that perhaps we should just create our own bus company and ride those buses. But that was pushed aside. And I think a lot of the and then Doctor.

Martin Luther King wanted to have a poor people's march with others, and that was supposed to bring together quote unquote the races and and and that was an advocating for universal basic income. I'm an advocate of universal basic income And so when we think about, you know, it all depends on context and things historically and what the agenda is and what were they trying to accomplish. And the thinking around the time, at least I will show, of course, I'm way, way post civil rights movement. But in terms of I'm of a generation where you're assimilating, which means that you need to do everything possible, go to college, get a particular type of degree, dress a certain way, speak a certain way, have your hair a certain way, all these things in order to make money. Like all of that was just to make money.

And that high level of assimilation started breaking down because you had hip hop come in who was like, I'm not wearing a suit.

Yeah.

And if you notice now, a lot of people don't wear suits who make a lot of money, So, you know, it's these shifts and changes, really, when we're thinking about futures and we're thinking about economics, it's going to be always complicated. And when we're talking about Black people, conversation doesn't stop there. There's the conversation of reparations, which is huge. It's gained It actually showed up in a debate, in a presidential debate. Like, it's insane.

Like, you know, for, as a Black person, we've been talking about this forever. This is nothing new for us. But for the rest of the country, I'm just like, wow, we're being really, really open about that. And then what does that mean? Is it a particular type of resource that we have access to?

How do we determine who gets it? And this is the complication because it's waited so long. Yeah. Where we are now is in a very interesting place, and we have an opportunity to do something new, something and people would say crypto is the way to go, except that the capitalist paradigm is still there. And so until we get rid of that particular structure, I you know, my faith in crypto has has diminished greatly.

Yeah. I I I definitely have seen that because I I know there were people at the end of the bubble there because I I think the bubble's kind of like, there's more of a realistic idea now where, like, and like it's not stable and a currency has to be stable. Like like, out of the gate, it's not currently able to be a currency. You know? I I've compared it to voice over IP in the 90s when I first got into technology.

And I was like, it's gonna be VoIP, VoIP, VoIP. And nowadays you ask somebody what that is, they're like, But you and I are using that right now as we record across the world. It is in everything, but nobody talks about it. And I think hopefully that whatever iteration comes from blockchain will be invisible and do something.

It will and this is why I I did teach about crypto but preferred to talk about blockchain technology because you can do some more with it and it actually can help organize our world in a beautiful way create transparency, which I'm really big on.

Yeah.

Yeah, blockchain tech is that invisible tech, and it will be. I I I do believe. I I agree with you. It's gonna be behind a whole bunch of applications and systems. So

the third tenant that we really look at is the cultivating literacy part of design economics. And this is where I really love your world building exercises and the accessibility of Afro futures to people for for making economics understandable. Because I really feel like a big part of our challenge over the last sixty years has been, it's the one if I ask you your opinion on some geopolitical issue or supreme court thing or this or that, people are gonna be like, I have an opinion. But if I ask your opinion on economics, so many people will preface by saying, I'm not an economist, but and then answer. Nobody does that with geopolitical stuff.

And so I really can we talk a little bit to how you're working and how Afrofuture is kind of assist with that idea of of making these conversations accessible to to more people.

Yeah. I I like world building because of the creative element, and it makes things more playful and fun because just to to just blankly talk about a system or just even the word like you're about to fall asleep right like nobody out here. Let's go listen to a lecture on economics. No so. So I think that and and wanting to analyze things.

So trying to make it light and fun through world building, I think, is a helpful way to understand how things run, why they matter, and what are the possibilities around them. And I think that's what I like the most about my worldbuilds. And Afrofuturism, in general, just gives us permission to revisit and question everything.

Yeah. I like that. What do you see for the future of afro futures in the idea of this literacy part or growing? We've got one blockbuster movie that's not a great example. How does that spread?

Like if you could wave a magic wand and envision this future, what would that be?

I feel like it's going in a really beautiful direction. Gosh, so the conversation afrofuturism has expanded and it gets into other global futures. So you have African futures, Juju futures, and then it gets into Chicano futures, Indo futures, you know, it can, it just starts growing, but Afrofuturism helped to articulate these other futures, if that makes sense, inspired the articulation of these other futures. And I think that that's really beautiful. And so as a result, you'll see, you know, younger generations, you know, younger than me, how their design, fashion yeah.

Like, the the visuals

Mhmm.

Are are, like, have totally picked up steam and you see and I see a lot on Instagram. A lot of people are making things digitally. These really beautiful kinds of expressions of other worlds with black people in them. I think that that's just going to continue on. I don't feel like if Afrofuturism has an endpoint, especially now, especially now because we need new visions, and we need to be reimagining.

It's a source of survival. It's a source of thriving as well. So that the evolution of Afrofuturism is really just based on also tech. So you have a lot of really interesting AI videos and images coming. So that is spreading things and the internet itself.

Because when I was in Afrofuturism, social media wasn't big. Yahoo groups are still big. I mean, does anyone still And and then like

I remember those. I was part of it.

And so the tech really helped move the information, and now we can find artists easier. You can find musicians, filmmakers, architects faster. And so as the tech grows, so does Afrofuturism.

Makes sense. And that's actually perfect for, you know, how do listeners, how do people that are that would want to get more engaged with Afro futures in general, whether it's your dinkin ish method, or getting involved in their communities to kind of, you know, find because I'm assuming there's Afro future pockets in, you know, of interest in different places. Like, how how can that be applied and and sought out?

Definitely. So the Afrofuture Strategies Institute, my organization, is one great place to start. We we hold workshops and world builds and have an online course. I also do Afrofuture Coaching so I can one on one share with you how to integrate Afrofuture thinking into your life. And then outside of that, there's my God, the list is so long.

We'll put every link in the show notes. No, won't. No, we won't. We will put some.

It is. And you know, it's gotten so big now. Youtasha Womack, just came out with a book, please don't ask me the name of that right now. But she also her first book on Afrofuturism was like the world of Afrofuturism. And that's a great basic foundational text.

Rashida Phillips is with Black Quantum Futurism. She's a co founder. She's a lawyer. She works in housing rights, and she talks a lot about time. So she's really one of my favorite people.

Nnedi Okorafor, N N E D I, Okorafor, she wrote Who Fears Death is one of my favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite books. And she also I think she wrote one of the comet books for Black Panther. And who else? Yeah. That's just like a starting once you you start there, there's gonna be just a rabbit hole to, like, go down.

Like

I love rabbit holes.

Yeah. Just so many people now. It's great, though. I'm I'm a oh, and then in San Francisco, I I consulted on an exhibition that's opening in May in the airport in the International Terminal. If you guys are around, they have an art space there and it's the women of Afrofuturism.

So, it's just, yeah, it's only How

long is that running for?

A while. Yeah, it's like a

museum Through summer maybe? I'm heading to San Francisco and Portland probably over the summer. Will share with our listeners as well. Yeah. Wow.

Minimum a year.

Yeah. Oh, that's great. So no, we'll definitely put that in there as well. That's that's amazing. Congratulations.

So before we really kind of wrap up and close then, is there anything you want to add about the topic? Know, we'll put everything in the show notes about how to reach you and the Afrofutures Institute. Do you have anything coming up that you'd like to mention besides that? And yeah, so I'll leave it kind of an open question. Anything I should have asked you that I didn't?

I'm teaching my students right now to ask that question when they interview.

Well, no. I mean, in terms of upcoming, I have my Afrofuture world builds every month. So you can check that out on our website, AfrofutureStrategies.com. And goodness, so many things. But

We can always put something in the show note if something strikes you afterwards. I I appreciate because this has just been a wonderful conversation.

It's been wonderful, and I appreciate you creating the platform, Vinay, because we do need to be talking about economics. It is like the heart of our society at the moment. It is really ruling everything. Our associate, our relationship to money is is really burning the planet. So once you know so it's important work and I thank you for doing it.

Thank you and and the work you're doing is important as well and I'm I'm really grateful and gracious that we got to spend this time together and that we've gotten to know each other, and the work we're doing, and hopefully the collaborations we can find in the future. So I just wanna thank you, Ingrid, for being here today.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Design Economics Podcast. We will be back next month with another engaging conversation. You can find the design economics podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Please check out our show notes on our website, designeconomics.io. The design economics podcast is produced by the Institute for Economic Evolution, and I am your host, Vinny Tafuro.

Thank you for listening.