As a futurist-in-residence for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Jessica has been exploring the relationship between media and health equity across a variety of realms: misinformation, public trust in news, the dangers of pernicious narrative frames, and the unexpected ways in which people acquire medical information. To get a read on what might come next, I’ve read a slew of articles and reports including Generative AI: Why it’s suddenly on fire, and why that matters for health equity and Three Hunches About the Future of News?

In collaboration with the Guild of Future Architects (GoFA) and Omidyar Network, Portals to Beautiful Futures: Trends to Watch in 2021 and Beyond flowed from a yearlong process of imagining life beyond the pandemic. Each section of the report, edited by Jessica Clark, offers a fictional story set in a future related to post-pandemic life, related trends, an analysis of the architecture of the historic and current systems, and a blueprint for a better future.

Dot Connector Studio conducted research for two years in partnership with 8 Bridges Workshop to develop this field scan for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA): Tech As Art: Supporting Artists Who Use Technology as a Creative Medium. Released in June 2021, this ambitious project was jointly funded by the Knight Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The research we did with 8 Bridges Workshop for the NEA has continued to ripple out—learn more and watch a recording of the webinar, Supporting Art & Technology.

Jessica Clark worked with the Guild of Future Architects (GoFA) and edited a collection of pieces about possible futures and , re-imagined pasts, synthesized from 10 online sessions with GoFA members. and the lessons these offer from each session—as well as responses from participants, entitled 20 Decades of 2020. See the whole series as it evolved here at the Medium publication GoFAR, —now a book., to launch and edit the organization’s Medium site, GoFAR,

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Dot Connector Studio co-produced a futurism project with the Democracy Fund: Democracy TBD. For the project, we convened five groups of diverse thinkers and led them through a scenario-planning process to understand the considerable challenges and opportunities for democracy in the fall of 2020. In more than one of the scenarios that participants imagined, states begin to fragment along party and cultural lines in a kind of bloodless civil war. While we haven’t quite reached that point, it’s easy to see how our country could devolve further. Learn more here.

Created by Clark and Kamal Sinclair, this toolkit provides ample curated resources for making emerging media (VR, AR, social media, etc.) more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. At Georgia State University, Elizabeth Strickler created an entire class based on this toolkit, and the project has also been featured in research, classes, and lectures at universities including USC, Stanford, and Barnard. Learn more about the toolkit and the research here.

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