Future Now Workshops

Summit attendees can choose from 24 workshop offerings.

The Future Now summit includes two 1.5-hour workshop sessions on the second day. Attendees will choose their two workshops from among the following (LAF is still determining which workshops will be available during each timeslot - stay tuned!). Starting in April, summit registrants will be sent a link to a form to select their desired workshops. Attendees must attend both workshop sessions to earn the full 14.75 PDH (LA CES/HSW) for the summit.

Workshops

Adapt to Coastal Groundwater Rise in Cities with Equity

Facilitators: Kristina Hill, Tim Mollette-Parks, Cristina Bejarano

This workshop presents strategies for adaptation to rising groundwater in coastal cities. This new challenge will create a major new role for landscape architects in urban design and infrastructure work that is focused not three-dimensional landforms and drainage. Success will require visualization and mapping of layered underground systems, compelling narratives, and a clear articulation of equity issues in the distribution of impacts and investments. We will share new approaches from California and the Netherlands.

Learning Objectives

Participants will learn to translate new science and groundwater maps to predict, as well as visualize, impacts on urban districts.
They will see examples of how to use landform-based strategies for adaptation that work with pumping to protect public health, safety and welfare.
Participants will also have an opportunity to discuss strategies for advocacy to achieve policy changes in their states/cities that could bring an environmental equity lens into this adaptation work.

Designing for Healing: Trauma-Informed Community Engagement

Facilitators: Sarah Konradi, Corey Dodd

Participants will actively practice trauma‑informed facilitation methods through hands‑on exercises drawn from the East Kinston Neighborhood Hub project. Attendees will create safe spaces for difficult conversations, design engagement activities that acknowledge community trauma, and test frameworks that move groups from harm recognition toward collective healing and resilience. Through guided activities, participants will build practical skills to foster trust, support authentic participation, and apply healing‑centered approaches in their own planning and design work.

Learning Objectives

Identify signs of collective community trauma and understand how they manifest in physical and spatial environments.
Apply trauma‑informed facilitation principles within community design and planning engagements.
Integrate healing‑centered strategies into both engagement processes and resulting physical design outcomes.

Work in Progress: Design and Labor

Facilitators: Michelle Franco, Nuith Morales, Jenny Jones

Work in Progress takes as a foundational principle that the working relations between designers and laborers are part of the site of design. A great majority of manual laborers in landscape architecture are immigrants from Mexico and Central America; they are part of a global precarious labor regime and are not often included in the visual, philosophical, and social discourse of landscape architecture. The leaders of the workshop have been collaborating for multiple years on ways to invigorate greater co-creation between builders, gardeners, and designers within professional practice. The session will build on the guidelines established in the “Work in Progress” publication, which will be provided. Participants will be guided to reflect on their working practices with immigrant laborers, and facilitators will assist attendees to refine their firms’ internal and external practices toward expanded, fulfilling, and conscientious relationships with contractors and manual laborers.

Learning Objectives

Understand the critical role of immigrant laborers working to construct and maintain landscapes in the U.S., including the social, political, and economic context and conditions that affect this labor force.
Each participant will analyze their own firm's internal and external practices that form their working relationships with landscape laborers, identifying areas for evolution and improvement.
Assisted by facilitators, each participant will develop an action plan to implement in their landscape practice. This plan will define discrete and actionable items that increase acknowledgment, collaboration, dignity, safety, and connection with immigrant landscape laborers.

Making Chicano Public Landscapes

Facilitators: Fernando Magallanes, James Rojas, MaFe Gonzalez

This session will address the challenges in shaping Latino/a/x public spaces, rethinking community needs, and exploring Latino/a/x cultural values. Landscape architecture and planning in the United States was built on Eurocentric epistemologies and this session will discuss new norms in scholarship and practice for decolonized methods and thinking. We will discuss who Latinos are, how their history continues to inform their lives, and offers a direction for the evolving study of Latino/a/x urban spatial patterns.

Learning Objectives

Attendees will learn that powerful colonized historical legacies are still impacting Latino/a/x sites and impairing the design, protection, and making of Chicano landscapes.
Consider ethnographic, historic, and observational approaches to Chicano culture, Chicano history, and interpretation of Chicano history for the site.
Our four panelists offer examples for managing Latino heritage, their inquiry into defining Latino/a/x issues and spaces, and their past actions in reconfiguring urban spaces

Leveraging the Power of Food Systems, Food Cultures, and Activism

Facilitators: Matthew Potteiger, Malik Yakini, Elizabeth Kennedy

This workshop advocates for leveraging the transformative power of food systems, culture and advocacy to address critical issues of environmental and social inequities. It focuses on urban foodscapes and three interrelated realms of practice – each from different but intersecting positions:
1. Food Systems design – a comprehensive systems framework for visualizing the complexity and interrelationships of food and landscape across spatial scales and sectors.
2. Activism – Food system change needs to be grounding in communities who have been most impacted by the injustices in the system. It illustrates place-based activist efforts in Detroit as a model for food sovereignty.
3. Food Cultures – Foodways serve as powerful narratives of identity, resilience, and resistance to develop deep connections between people, plants, and place.

Learning Objectives

Identifying tools for visualizing food/landscape interrelationships through practices of mapping and systems diagramming across multiple scales.
Valuing the strategies of community food system activism for creating new food spaces and changing land use policy and planning.
Demonstrating how design and policies of land access, protection and environmental quality can support thriving food culture practices.

Transforming Underutilized Parkland into Native Meadow through Cross-sector Partnerships

Facilitators: Kathleen Gmyrek, Meredith Holm, Diane Cheklich

This workshop will present the Detroit Bird City project, an established cross-sector partnership in the city of Detroit that by June of 2026 will have turned 76 acres of underutilized turf grass into native meadow. Main goals for the partnership include expanding grassland habitat for birds and pollinators in Detroit, increasing equitable access to high quality natural areas for residents, and improving maintenance capabilities for natural areas in the city. Since its formation in 2019, the partnership has utilized resources from its three main partners to engage community members, install native meadows, and once established, to program and maintain them through best management practices.Each partner organization will discuss the resources that they bring to the project, and how its lessons are transferable to other cities. Additionally, Diane Cheklich of Detroit Bird Alliance will show her film ‘Pheasants of Detroit’ which she co-directed.

Learning Objectives

Participants will learn about the USFWS Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program and the range of ecological restoration services and expertise the program offers.
Participants will learn about the Detroit Bird Alliance, their advocacy for bird habitat within the city, and the projects and history that helped develop this partnership.
Participants will learn about best management practices of meadows and their associated costs from the standpoint of a municipality, and how the City of Detroit coordinates maintenance collaboratively through its Grounds Maintenance team and funding provided by partners.

Currents of Change: Imagine Adaptive Climate Futures

Facilitators Jenn Low, Amalia Deloney, Varun Gole

This workshop introduces futures thinking as a practical mindset shift for climate-responsive design: change is a given, and there are multiple possible futures to plan for. Participants will experiment with how to work with signals of change—early indicators of social and ecological transformation—to surface new questions, reveal blind spots, and inform adaptable design responses. Through a hands-on format, participants will explore climate migration challenges through the context of Detroit and the broader Great Lakes region.

Learning Objectives

Learn strategies to gain comfort with navigating complexity and uncertainty in climate-responsive planning and design.
Strengthen understanding of how futures thinking is applied as a supportive layer design processes.
Gain insight and reflect on how shifting conditions potentially influence and apply to your own geography(ies) and projects.

Rigor, Trust, and Time: 30 Years of Sustained Community Engagement in Detroit

Facilitators: Lisa Du Russel, Joan Iverson Nassauer, Keenan Gibbons

This 90-minute workshop explores how sustained community engagement conducted over decades that uses a suite of rigorous tactics can meaningfully shape the built environment and advance ecological literacy. Grounded in 30 years of Detroit-based landscape architecture research and practice at the University of Michigan, the proposed workshop examines engagement as a core method for marrying design and science.

Learning Objectives

Identify and apply three complementary lenses: cultural insight, stewardship, and evidence, to design and evaluate long-term community-engaged landscape projects.
Analyze how rigorous engagement methods (e.g., sampling, spatial documentation, and partnership frameworks) translate community knowledge and ecological data into built and measurable outcomes.
Develop strategies to structure sustained community partnerships that build trust, support stewardship, and enhance ecological literacy over time.

What is the Landscape Architect's Role in One Health?

Facilitators Dr. Leann Andrews, Dr. Kara Fikrig, Dr. Justin Brown

One Health recognizes the health of humans, animals, plants, and environments are interconnected, and transdisciplinary collaboration is necessary to address complex One Health issues globally. This workshop explores how Landscape Architects, as designers of environments, can play a critical role alongside doctors, veterinarians, public health practitioners, pathologists, and scientists in reducing disease outbreaks, preventing pandemics, decreasing health inequities, slowing mass species loss, increasing climate change resilience, and optimizing health-supporting ecosystems, agriculture, and watersheds.

Learning Objectives

Learn about the definition, history, theory and (micro to planetary) scales of One Health and become familiar with terminology and introductory science behind landscape approaches to disease prevention and management
Discuss why landscape architects need to be leaders in One Health practice and the necessity of transdisciplinary collaboration
Learn about specific One Health issues in the U.S. and globally and brainstorm potential landscape-based solutions to take action for One Heatlh

Time to Act: Draft Your Action Plan Now

Facilitators Jana Wehby, Jonah Susskind, Willa DeBoom

Join us to draft your first action plan. After exploring climate-focused examples and lessons learned, we’ll identify your specific goals and roadblocks. You’ll then use our templates and guidance to outline your plan in a breakout session. Finally, we’ll regroup to create a follow-up strategy, ensuring you have continued accountability and support.

Learning Objectives

Gain a baseline understanding of action plan framework and content, with focus on climate action plans as well as biodiversity and equity goals.
Learn about action plan precedents for potential replicability and reinforcement of shared goals.
Identify potential roadblocks to action plan adoption and implementation and how to address them.

Speak with Presence: Turning Big Ideas into Action

Facilitators: Chelsey Rives

Strong design work often gets lost in unclear communication. This workshop introduces practical systems to help participants clarify their message, translate complex ideas, and earn trust in high-stakes moments. Using structured frameworks and live application, participants will improve how they lead conversations, shape understanding, and represent their work to clients, stakeholders, and public audiences with clarity, credibility, and confidence.

Learning Objectives

Translate complex design ideas into clear, audience-specific messages that support understanding and decision-making.
Use verbal and nonverbal cues to signal value, guide conversations, and build client trust in real time.
Notice when communication is losing clarity or focus and adjust in real time to keep conversations clear, aligned, and effective.

Water Signals: Storytelling as a Climate Resilience Tool

Facilitators: Halina Steiner, Claire Napawan, Linda Chamorro

Water Signals is a participatory tool that engages diverse publics in conversations about water in a changing climate. By identifying everyday “signals,” participants share lived experiences of climate impacts. In this workshop, attendees will offer Signals from their communities to spark dialogue about coastal residency. Oceans and coastlines can be seen as resources or threats, and the stories we tell about rising seas, flooding, and storms reveal vulnerabilities and possibilities for resilience. Such narratives build knowledge, meaning, and capacity to navigate climate uncertainty, a practice employed by non-Western societies as science communication for millennia.

Learning Objectives

How conditions of vulnerability or resilience to climate impacts are demonstrated through water signals and their embodied stories.
How different communities tell stories, communicate, and frame narratives about water.
Gain familiarity with a range in artifacts that embody stories about water for different communities.

Landscape Architecture as Climate Translator

Facilitators: Mohammad Arabmazar, Claudia Wu

Climate action is not limited by science but by translation—the gap between climate data, decision-making, and spatial design. Climate information often remains abstract and disconnected from site-specific outcomes. This workshop positions landscape architects as climate translators, bridging science, policy, and design. Through case studies and exercises, participants explore how data on heat, hydrology, and sea-level rise can drive design decisions, empowering landscape architects to lead climate-informed practice across scales and align with purpose-driven, future-focused approaches.

Learning Objectives

Participants will learn how climate data (e.g., heat mapping, flood risk, sea-level rise, GIS tools) can inform design intent, spatial logic, and experiential quality beyond performance verification.
Participants will learn a structured method for translating climate datasets into clear and actionable design principles.
Participants will analyze project precedents to understand how climate data has influenced—or could better influence—key design decisions.
Participants will learn to interpret climate datasets from a landscape architectural perspective rather than an engineering framework.
Participants will develop skills to translate climate data into spatial strategies and internal design guidelines.

Bridging Ecological Design and Long-Term Landscape Management

Facilitators Judy Venonsky, Scott Martin, Sasha Eisenman

Ecological planting designs grow more powerful over time. Benefits such as carbon sequestration, stormwater management, and resilient habitats depend not only on thoughtful design but also on informed, adaptive management that allows landscapes to mature, regenerate, and evolve. Yet many clients—while attracted to the environmental credibility and public-relations value of ecological design—are often unprepared for the long-term commitment required to sustain it. This roundtable proposes a cross-disciplinary discussion about a persistent gap in practice: the lack of a clearly defined profession focused on Ecological Landscape Management.

Learning Objectives

How does management differ when stewarding a native and ecologically sensitive public landscape?
What is lacking in knowledge and human resources to successfully steward these types of landscape designs, and are clients willing look at this as an investment in the future?
How can colleges and universities support a new hybrid profession that focuses on understanding landscape design for the public realm, with a strong focus on hands-on horticultural stewardship as the goal for future well-paid employment?

Breaking the Barrier: Reshading Los Angeles (Shade for All: Design for Equity in the Urban Heat Era)

Facilitators Han Fu, Qiaoqi Dai

The core of the workshop is an interactive design lab centered on a physical model of a typical LA ‘shade-desert’ corridor. This site serves as a typical representation of barriers which the workshop is targeting to address narrow parkways, shade-neutral palm trees, and complex utility zones etc. Participants will engage in a "performance-based" design sprint, and work in teams of 3-5, using a curated "Kit of Parts" to prototype interventions that challenge these real-world constraints. By integrating validation through thermal imaging, the workshop demonstrates how innovative design can bypass bureaucratic friction to provide immediate, measurable relief.

Learning Objectives

Understand the 'barriers' that prevent equitable shade distribution in heat-vulnerable neighborhoods
Explore and learn the strategies that will help achieve shade equity
Fast prototype intervention and visualize after-effect

Soil Literacy in Practice: From Diagnostics to Digital Workflows

Facilitators Jason Radcliff, Nik Braun

Soil is the primary technology for a resilient future—yet it remains a critical knowledge gap in landscape practice. This workshop treats soil literacy as a core design competency, connecting soil data to plant performance, lifecycle costs, and carbon investment. Participants decode real soil reports, explore Power BI dashboards for evidence-based decision-making, and see how AI and BIM workflows make soil constraints visible where design decisions happen. Leave with a practical cheat sheet and a roadmap for your practice.

Learning Objectives

Articulate why soil literacy is foundational to climate, biodiversity, and equity outcomes—and interpret key soil metrics to drive design, specification, and construction decisions.
Understand how soil data dashboards (Power BI or custom chatbot) can be used to identify recurring issues, support lifecycle cost arguments, and demonstrate measurable performance.
Learn how AI and BIM (Revit) workflows can quickly illustrate soil risks and requirements at critical design and maintenance moments—keeping human expertise at the center.

Bodies in Space

Facilitators Sarah Kuehl, Melissa Hudson Bell

Dancing is back! From filming TikTok videos to public waltzing there is a robust desire to dance in public. Designing for movement suggests freedom and flow of spatial conditions. Designing for all bodies in space affirms our right to use and to seek joy in public spaces through movement. This interactive workshop is intended to be playful and fun and will result in tools for design, community engagement, and building office culture.

Learning Objectives

Learn about the history of dance in public spaces and the intersection of landscape architecture and dance.
Play movement games that explore bodies in space and learn tools for engagement.
Learn about scores as both a design and communication tool.

Co-Building A Design Activism Toolkit

Facilitators Claire Latané, Jean Yang

In this 1.5-hour, hands-on workshop you will create a 3-part toolkit to take transformative
ideas into durable action on climate change, biodiversity, and equity.
1) typologies: map the “urgency context” as a relationship between time and scale to choose appropriate responses
2) relationship shifts: identify power-sharing moves such as reflection, care, collaboration, activation
3) systems level shifts: diagnose and overcome institutional “regime” barriers. Participants leave with a printable packet + facilitation script to use in studios, firms, agencies, or community partnerships.

Learning Objectives

Diagnosing the situation: participants will be able to name what kind of crisis context you are working within and what tempo/scale of response it requires
Choosing the next move: participants will analyze and select power-sharing moves that build capacity and redistribute authority over time
Shift conditions for endurance: participants will identify institutional barriers and develop tools to overcome these barriers to co-create policies, criteria, roles, and resources

Actualizing Just Transitions through Transdiscplinary Design and Participatory Scenario Planning

Facilitators Brett Milligan, Justin Marsh

How can we be better and more effective futurists? This interactive workshop will use the Just Transitions in the Delta Scenario Planning project as a foundation to explore transformative techniques for envisioning and manifesting more just futures. Through presentations, live polling, and discussion sessions, we will workshop three key design practices: transdisciplinary process and collaboration; the necessity for future pluralism and the importance of storytelling and visualization.

Learning Objectives

Gain knowledge into how to design, implement and collaborative, transdisciplinary design project
Understand how to foster co-learning and trust-building through participatory scenario planning (how to effectively practice future pluralism)
How to effectively use storytelling, visualization and modeling to creatively and collectively imagine and explore future scenarios

The Site Question: Architecture, Landscape, and Partnership

Facilitators Maria Landoni, Vladimir Krstic

Two decades after landscape architecture's relevance was declared inevitable, we remain too often relegated to the edges of development decisions. This workshop brings landscape architects and architects into direct dialogue to examine why. Through provocations and facilitated exchange, participants will interrogate professional mindsets, missed partnerships, and structural barriers—then identify actionable strategies to reposition landscape architects as conceptual leaders from project inception, connecting individual sites to the ecological, cultural, and urban systems that give them meaning.

Learning Objectives

Identify professional mindsets and structural barriers that prevent landscape architects from serving as equal partners in development from project inception.
Recognize site design as a dynamic interface connecting individual projects to larger ecological, cultural, and urban systems.
Develop concrete approaches for integrating landscape architecture's systems literacy into foundational project decisions where it has the greatest impact.