Bryn Athyn College Alumni Magazine Spring/Summer 2018 | Page 30

running header
Dylan delivering a keynote at the Future of HR
Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2017.
Dylan speaking at OuiShare Fest Paris in July 2017. OuiShare gathers 1,500 visionaries,
entrepreneurs, and movement builders to explore how digital technologies and
a more collaborative culture can address today's greatest challenges.
Athyn yet.” His friends from the
high school were enjoying Bryn
Athyn College, and he wanted to
go back and have more of that
kind of experience. “I wanted to
dive deeper into the topics that
our College is uniquely suited to.”
Dylan enrolled in the College to
pursue an interdisciplinary degree
in psychology and religion, while
continuing his video work on the
side.
Dylan felt that his classes en-
hanced his ability to dig into the
hard questions, setting him up
for his current career. He said, “At
the College, there’s passion for the
pursuit of the truth, and so much
discipline and rigor around the
way you think.” He added, “I es-
pecially appreciate the willingness
to think and talk about poten-
tially uncomfortable topics, like
life after death, the nature of evil,
or why we have certain thoughts.
When we confront these ques-
tions, we can begin to work with
them and turn them into some-
thing positive.”
Dylan explained that this
constitutes a big part of his work
at IFTF. He said, “I believe we’re
30 | S P R I N G / S U M M E R 2 0 1 8
not passive recipients of life. Ev-
erything we do moves us toward a
certain kind of future. So, we need
to be able to imagine the scenarios
that could happen that would be
desirable, and then we can active-
ly create the future.” He added,
“My job involves helping people
see that they have permission to
reimagine the future, and then we
give them tools to do it.”
The Cutting-Edge cutting edg
of an Industry
After graduation, because of his
video experience, Dylan worked
for a year in the Academy’s ad-
vancement office under Andy Sul-
livan, and also co-taught a sum-
mer video course in Bryn Athyn
with Alex Lindsay. Alex, who had
worked on the Star Wars prequel
movies, then hired Dylan to work
for his digital video production
company in San Francisco.
In 2010, after a year with
Alex, Dylan started his own video
production company, Material
Artifact, with a couple of friends
including his fellow highschool
classmate, Lane Genzlinger. Be-
cause the young men had entered
the field at the first emergence of
video technology, they soon got
hired by various big tech clients
such as Adobe and Salesforce.
Dylan said, “We’d experienced
an industry that got disrupted,
and we got to be on the edge of
it. I started to see this happen in
other industries as well, and I got
really interested in learning about
future trends.” In 2012, to learn
more about the future, Dylan
started working with IFTF, not
knowing that he would soon be-
come one of the organization’s
directors.
A Typical Day / Current
Projects
Today, one of Dylan’s current
projects involves working with a
youth foundation based out of
Saudi Arabia. For this project,
Dylan’s team offers workshops
around the world, talking to
young people about the changing
skills youth will need, based on re-
search. This project, which kicked
off at a TED conference earlier
this year, will take Dylan and his
colleagues to Germany, Saudi Ara-
bia, and Nigeria. At a global youth
conference in November, Dylan
will present the research, empha-
sizing that “we don’t need people
to prepare for jobs that already ex-
ist. Instead, we need imaginative,