We are a strategy and visioning collective that inspires people to shape better futures.

 Our mission is to develop and share disruptive human-centered insights, inspiration, and spaces that help people get out of limiting mindsets and daily contexts to shape better futures.  We operate as a collective because we believe that the strongest ideas don’t come from a single visionary—so our teams are custom-tailored to bring in varied perspectives, gather unexpected inputs, and communicating bold new ideas in approachable ways. We can’t wait to get friendly!

Hi, I’m Roshelle.

Roshelle Ritzenthaler founded The Friendly Future in 2016 to create new forums for future-building alongside other designers, entrepreneurs, thought-leaders and community-makers. Her professional experience as a design strategist, facilitator, visual storyteller in healthcare, workplace, education, finance, hospitality and government have informed her unique approach to guiding groups of people as we envision better futures of ourselves, our businesses and our communities. It’s an approach that incorporates elements of design thinking and human-centered design, as well as sparking conversations with more peripheral future-building frameworks in culture, science, nature, history, spirituality and language.

Roshelle has served as the Program Director of Strategic Design at UW Health, Director of Research for Epic Decade, founding member of The School for Radical Futures, Board Trustee for Taliesin Preservation, the Leadership Advisory Council for University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Human Ecology (SoHE), Honorary Fellow with the Center for Design and Material Culture, Design Researcher and Strategist at both Bruce Mau Design (Chicago), Gensler (Chicago), and Delve (Madison). Her speaking engagements have included South by Southwest, Better by Design, Agile, Forward Fest, Stryker Connect and Collaborate, American Marketing Association, Chicago Ideas Week and The Scottsdale Institute.