TOBI OGUNNAIKE

Writer, engineer, event host

Tobi offers a creative and playful reckoning of San Francisco city life, exploring street life, food culture, and our relationship with artificial intelligence.

STEM FUTURES

DISTRICT 2

ABOUT TOBI

Tobi is a writer, engineer, and experience creator who has spent the last decade falling in love with San Francisco, and the last few years fighting to keep it human. Since 2023, he has been hosting sensory events designed to pull people off their screens and into genuine, playful connection with each other. His vision for the city is communal and deliciously analog: neighbors who know each other by name, local spots that feel like home, and a culture that celebrates the full diversity of people and food and music that makes San Francisco unlike anywhere else. Tobi's activation brings that same spirit to the festival, creating a space where attendees can reconnect with themselves, each other, and the kind of city worth staying for.

INTERESTS

Social Connection, Analog Connection, Multi-Sensory Experiences, Writing

VISION

Communal: where we know our neighbors, where we have regular local spots, where it's easy for adults to make new friends, where we're outside off our screens, where night owls and morning birds both thrive, where we reclaim our humanity from algorithms, where we all eat from the diversity of cultures present in San Francisco.

Wet Paint

An Unfinished Portrait of San Francisco

Wet Paint is an immersive, multi-station activation that invites attendees to pause, reflect, and reimagine three pillars of modern San Francisco life: how we inhabit our streets, the flavors of San Francisco, and our relationships with artificial intelligence. Through vibrant visual installations of cities pulsing with street energy, a crowd-sourced "Missing Menu" of dishes and flavors people can't find in the city, and a living heat map of where AI has quietly taken over daily life, participants are prompted to name what they want to keep, what they'd leave behind, and what they'd dare to build differently.

REGISTER