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. 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. Note that 5 of the 24 workshops are LA CES approved but do not qualify for health, safety, and welfare (HSW) credit. This is indicated in the descriptions below.

MORNING Workshops

Bodies in Space

Facilitators: Sarah Kuehl, Melissa Hudson Bell
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

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 

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

Co-building a Design Activism Toolkit

Facilitators: Claire Latané, Jean Yang
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

In this hands-on workshop you will create a three-part toolkit to take transformative ideas into durable action on climate change, biodiversity, and equity. This includes: Diagnosing the situation and mapping the “urgency context” to choose appropriate responses. Identifying power-sharing moves such as reflection, care, collaboration, activation. And shifting conditions for endurance by diagnosing “regime” barriers. Participants will leave with a printable packet and facilitation script to use in studios, firms, agencies, or community partnerships.

Learning Objectives 

1. Be able to name what kind of crisis context you are working within and what tempo/scale of response it requires.
2. Analyze and select power-sharing moves that build capacity and redistribute authority over time.
3. Identify institutional barriers and develop tools to overcome these barriers to co-create policies, criteria, roles, and resources.

Currents of Change: Imagining Adaptive Climate Futures

Facilitators: Jenn Low, amalia deloney, Varun Gole
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

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 

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

Designing for Healing: Trauma-Informed Community Engagement

Facilitators: Sarah Konradi, Corey Dodd
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

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 

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

Designing for Time: Bridging Ecological Design and Long-Term Landscape Management

Facilitators: Judy Venonsky, Scott Martin, Sasha Eisenman
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

Benefits such as carbon sequestration, stormwater management, and resilient habitats depend not only on thoughtful ecological planting design but also on informed, adaptive management that allows landscapes to mature, regenerate, and evolve. Yet many clients are often unprepared for the long-term commitment required to sustain these landscapes. This workshop 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 

1. Explore how management differs when stewarding a native and ecologically sensitive public landscape. 
2. Understand what is often lacking in knowledge and human resources to successfully steward these types of landscapes. 
3. Discuss how colleges and universities can support a new hybrid profession that focuses on landscape design for the public realm with hands-on horticultural stewardship for future well-paid employment.

Emerging Voices: 10-Years Ago, 10-Years Ahead

Facilitators: Nina Chase, Azzurra Cox, Tim Mollette-Parks, Joanna Karaman, Sarah Primeau 
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES)

In 2016 at LAF’s Summit on Landscape Architecture and the Future, six emerging landscape architects gave declarations on the future of the profession. In this workshop, those presenters will reflect on the ideas that have held up, what has shifted, and what new responsibilities have emerged. They will facilitate an interactive discussion to imagine the next decade. The workshop is intended for current students, past LAF Olmsted Scholars, and emerging practitioners.

Learning Objectives

1. Learn how early-career ideas about the future of landscape architecture evolve once tested through 10 years of professional practice, especially during a decade of unprecedented global change.
2. Reflect on your own aspirations for the profession, consider how those ideas might evolve over time, and identify actions you can take now to shape landscape architecture over the next decade.
3. Gain perspective on long-term professional growth, clarity about how individual values translate into sustained practice, and feel a renewed sense of agency in shaping the future of landscape architecture. 

Making Chicano Public Landscapes

Facilitators: Fernando Magallanes, James Rojas, MaFe Gonzalez, Daniel Ortega
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

This workshop addresses 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 were built on Eurocentric epistemologies, and this session will discuss new norms in scholarship and practice for decolonized methods and thinking. The facilitators will discuss who Latinos are, share how their history continues to inform their lives, and offer a direction for the evolving study of Latino/a/x urban spatial patterns.  

Learning Objectives 

1. Understand that powerful colonized historical legacies are still impacting Latino/a/x sites and impairing the design, protection, and making of Chicano landscapes. 
2. Consider ethnographic, historic, and observational approaches to Chicano culture, Chicano history, and interpretation of Chicano history for the site. 
3. See examples for managing Latino heritage, inquiry into defining Latino/a/x issues and spaces, and past actions in reconfiguring urban spaces.

Shade for All: Design for Equity in the Urban Heat Era

Facilitators: Han Fu, Qiaoqi Dai
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

This workshop is an interactive design lab centered on a physical model of a Los Angeles shade-desert corridor. Participants will engage in a performance-based design sprint in teams of 3-5, using a curated kit of parts to prototype interventions that challenge real-world constraints like narrow parkways, shade-neutral palm trees, and complex utility zones. By integrating validation through thermal imaging, the workshop demonstrates how innovative design can bypass bureaucratic friction to provide immediate, measurable relief.

Learning Objectives 

1. Understand the barriers that prevent equitable shade distribution in heat-vulnerable neighborhoods. 
2. Explore and learn strategies that will help achieve shade equity. 
3. Fast prototype interventions and visualize the after-effect.

Speak with Presence: Turning Big Ideas into Action

Facilitators: Chelsey Rives
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES)

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 

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

The Site Question: Architecture, Landscape, and Partnership

Facilitators: Maria Landoni, Vladimir Krstic
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES)

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 

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

Water Signals: Storytelling as a Climate Resilience Tool

Facilitators: Halina Steiner, Claire Napawan, Linda Chamorro
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

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. In this workshop, participants will identify everyday “signals” from their communities to share lived experiences of climate impacts and spark dialogue about coastal residency. 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 

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

Work in Progress: Design and Labor

Facilitators: Michelle Franco, Nuith Morales, Jenny Jones, Stephanie Hsia, Adrian Tenney
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

A great majority of manual laborers in landscape architecture are immigrants from Mexico and Central America. They are rarely included in the visual, philosophical, and social discourse of landscape architecture. The workshop leaders have been collaborating to invigorate greater co-creation between builders, gardeners, and designers, with guidelines established in the “Work in Progress” publication. Participants will be guided to reflect and refine their firms’ practices toward expanded and conscientious relationships with contractors and manual laborers.

Learning Objectives 

1. Understand the critical role of immigrant laborers working to construct and maintain landscapes in the United States, including the social, political, and economic context and conditions that affect this labor force.
2. Analyze your own firm's internal and external practices that form their working relationships with landscape laborers, identifying areas for evolution and improvement.
3. Develop an action plan to implement in your landscape practice, which will define discrete and actionable items that increase acknowledgment, collaboration, dignity, safety, and connection with immigrant landscape laborers.

AFTERNOON Workshops

Actualizing Just Transitions through Transdisciplinary Design and Participatory Scenario Planning

Facilitators: Brett Milligan, Justin Marsh, Maggie Gallagher
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

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 

1. Learn techniques to design and implement a collaborative, transdisciplinary design project.
2. Understand how to foster co-learning and trust-building through participatory scenario planning. 
3. Explore how to effectively use storytelling, visualization, and modeling to creatively and collectively imagine and explore future scenarios.

Adapt to Coastal Groundwater Rise in Cities with Equity

Facilitators: Kristina Hill, Tim Mollette-Parks, Cristina Bejarano
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

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 on 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 

1. Learn to translate new science and groundwater maps to predict, as well as visualize, impacts on urban districts.
2. See examples of how to use landform-based strategies for adaptation that work with pumping to protect public health, safety and welfare. 
3. Discuss strategies for advocacy to achieve policy changes in their states/cities that could bring an environmental equity lens into this adaptation work.

Coalition Building Through Design

Facilitators: Deb Guenther, Linda Chamorro, Claire Napawan, Olivia Bussey, Ellen Oettinger White
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

Pathways to coalition building and collective power can grow our shared ability to adapt to climate change and support community networks. This workshop will daylight the role of positionality in design as well as how to consciously model inclusive practice and power shifting in support of coalition building. In the context of discussion with affinity groups, participants will advance their understanding of their personal and collective role in building trust, power and kinship.

Learning Objectives

1. Identify pathways to coalition building that can be integrated with the design process.
2. Build familiarity with pathways to coalitions and collective power. 
3. Advance an understanding of personal and collective roles in building trust, power and kinship through design and community relationships.

Landscape Architecture as Climate Translator

Facilitators: Mohammad Arabmazar, Claudia Wu
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

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 

1. Explore how climate data, such as heat maps, flood risk, and sea-level rise, can inform design intent, spatial logic, and experiential quality beyond performance verification. 
2. Use a structured method for translating climate datasets into clear and actionable design principles. 
3. Analyze project precedents to understand how climate data has influenced — or could better influence — key design decisions. 
4. Interpret climate datasets from a landscape architectural perspective rather than an engineering framework. 

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

Facilitators: Matthew Potteiger, Malik Yakini, Elizabeth Kennedy 
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

This workshop advocates for leveraging the transformative power of food systems, food cultures, and advocacy to address critical issues of environmental and social inequities. It focuses on urban foodscapes and these three interrelated realms of practice. The workshop illustrates place-based activist efforts in Detroit as a model for food sovereignty and how foodways serve as powerful narratives of identity, resilience, and resistance to develop deep connections between people, plants, and place.

Learning Objectives 

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

Life in the Time of ICE: Take Action

Facilitators: Anita Bueno, Patricia Algara, MaFe Gonzalez, Adrian Tenney
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

In this time of increasing ICE and Border Patrol activity and disruption, it is imperative to know what you can do to stay safe and help your community be safe. This workshop covers individual rights with respect to interacting with federal agents in the workplace and considerations to make a plan in case you or someone you know is detained or arrested. Participants will then put that knowledge into practice through a role-play exercise.

Learning Objectives

1. Understand an individual's constitutional and legal rights and how they differ whether interacting with ICE or Border Patrol on private or public sites.
2. Examine what you can do to stay safe in situations of immigration enforcement by learning to appreciate multiple perspectives, improve teamwork, and develop critical thinking skills. 
3. Learn through experience by developing a plan and practicing complex interactions with ICE through role playing in a safe, low-risk environment.

Mountaintops to Mountain Ranges: Creating Futures and Community

Facilitator: Marc Miller
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES)

Inventing the future is as important as reacting to the present and past. In this three-part workshop, participants imagine collaborative futures. First, each participant will develop their own vision of the mountaintop, describing what they see and goals needed to make it real. Then all will share their visions and goals to discover commonalities and groups (mountain ranges). During the final part, participants will create new goals as groups, developing journeys that are more robust.

Learning Objectives

1. Learn about visioning as a form of reverse engineering.
2. Envision collaborative actions to fulfill goals.
3. Explore developing small collective "goal seeking" or groups.

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

Facilitators: Lisa Du Russel, Joan Iverson Nassauer, Keenan Gibbons
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

This 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 

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

Soil Literacy in Practice: From Diagnostics to Digital Workflows

Facilitators: Jason Radcliff, Nik Braun
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

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 

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

Time to Act: Draft Your Action Plan Now

Facilitators: Jana Wehby, Jonah Susskind, Willa DeBoom
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES)

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 

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

Transforming Underutilized Parkland into Native Meadow through Cross-sector Partnerships

Facilitators: Kathleen Gmyrek, Meredith Holm, Diane Cheklich
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

This workshop presents the Detroit Bird City project, a cross-sector partnership that by June 2026 will have turned 76 acres of underutilized turf grass into native meadow. The partnership engages community members, installs native meadows, and programs and maintains them through best management practices. Each partner organization will discuss the resources they bring to the project and how its lessons are transferable to other cities. The film "Pheasants of Detroit" will be shown.

Learning Objectives 

1. Learn about the USFWS Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program and the range of ecological restoration services and expertise the program offers. 
2. Learn about the Detroit Bird Alliance, their advocacy for bird habitat within the city, and the projects and history that helped develop this partnership. 
3. Understand 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.

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

Facilitators: Leann Andrews, Kara Fikrig, Justin Brown
Approved for: 1.5 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

One Health recognizes that 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 

1. 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.
2. Discuss why landscape architects need to be leaders in One Health practice and the necessity of transdisciplinary collaboration.
3. Learn about specific One Health issues in the United States and globally and brainstorm potential landscape-based solutions to take action for One Health.