Thomas Ermacora is a futurist on a lifelong quest to bring about a new age for humanity and a luminary for the post-covid generation who has been at the forefront of regenerative culture for more than two decades.
He is a discreet star, often unseen in the public eye, who has produced a list of extraordinary experiments. Karen Wong, deputy director of the New Museum in New York, described him in December 2016 as a true Renaissance man for good, which is exactly what he strives to be. He is a multicultural polyglot and polymath with a unique ability to draw on a vast range of disciplines to develop disruptive projects and innovation pilots addressing wicked problems facing communities. From the global supply chain to structural inequality, from climate risks to mental wellbeing, his body of work targets systemic faults that have a macro-micro solution bridge. In his prolific history of disruptive (ad)ventures, he has brought together design thinking, participatory placemaking, exponential technology, circular innovation, digitised crowdsourcing, policy innovation, scenario planning and storytelling with an unusual facility not unlike master painters of the Renaissance who would concentrate talent to achieve great expression. His approach is also profoundly human-centred; he takes cities, communities and clients by the hand and helps them transition to a better future by means of a curated yet serendipitous co-creative process. Yet the most distinctive feature of Ermacora’s journey with collaborators and clients is that he is not a traditional futurist trying to prognosticate, but one who builds relationships with others to break the mould of the possible and deliver new paths to a more resilient 21st century.