ALEDA JOHNSON

Creative Strategist

Aleda is exploring the future of economics through the lens of wellbeing, community engagement, and tech enablement.

SOCIAL FUTURES

DISTRICT 6

ABOUT ALEDA

Aleda lives at the intersection of innovation, psychology, and systems design — drawn to the question of how we build better on-ramps to civic life through art, public experiences, and emerging tools like AI. Her work centers on funding and supporting innovation, with a particular focus on alternative financing structures for mission-driven enterprises and on empower women in roles whose contributions too often go unrecognized.

INTERESTS

Immersive Art, Technology, Behavioral Economics

VISION

A San Francisco with smarter governance. Technology serves the people — to surface blind spots, test policy ideas rapidly, cut through needless bureaucracy, and give residents real, tangible agency in local decisions. This is where economic policies and funding structures prioritize collective well-being.

Economic Soul Mapping

Economics is usually thought of as cold, numbers-driven, and soulless; mapping a "soul" implies something deeply personal, emotional, and profound. Classical models love to pretend we are perfectly rational transaction machines, but behavioral science keeps proving that’s a glitch in the theory. We need to address the human side of the ledger. Economics touches everything in modern society, yet the daunting nature of the topics keeps many from participating in dialoge around the future of our economic systems.

Economic Soul Mapping is an approachable on-ramp for discussing economic systems. It is a futuristic experience where individuals will identify their economic soul type to help future scientists navigate to a better economic timeline. Participants will engage in a reflective calibration exercise to unearth their values around labor, ownership, and equity.

There will be a low-pressure space designed to break the ultimate social taboo: talking openly about money as we work to encode our values into the future of economics.