About Us
The Buffalo Signals Laboratory is an independent civic foresight laboratory that helps our community anticipate change, think longer-term together, and act more intelligently in the present. Through signal sensemaking, co-created projects, and capacity building, the Lab helps the community, organizations, and leaders in Buffalo think longer-term together and translate emerging change into coordinated action. We exist to build the civic infrastructure, relationships, and foresight capacity needed to create a more resilient, connected, and future-ready region.
Buffalo is home to institutions doing important work across every sector, but much of that work happens in isolation, with each organization planning for a future it expects to face alone. The Buffalo Signals Laboratory exists to connect that work: scanning for what’s emerging, making sense of it together, and building the shared capacity to act on it before it becomes a crisis or a missed opportunity.
HOW WE WORK
We operate across three core functions:
- Signal Sensemaking: We scan emerging signals, convene diverse stakeholders to interpret what they mean for our region, conduct research, and publish accessible insights.
- Co-Created Projects: We translate foresight into action by partnering with businesses, government, nonprofits, and community organizations to collaborate on projects that build our preferred futures.
- Capacity Building: We train regional stakeholders in futures thinking and foresight methods through workshops, certificates, and our annual conference to cultivate Buffalo’s long-term thinking capacity and build a resilient, equitable region.
WHAT WE TRACK
We organize our signal scanning around five focus areas that span the region’s future:
- Place & Environment: climate resilience and energy, housing and neighborhoods, the waterfront and Great Lakes, transportation, and food systems.
- Economy & Enterprise: manufacturing, startups and entrepreneurship, small business and Main Street, the cross-border economy, and retail.
- People & Community: workforce and talent, immigration and new Americans, health and life sciences, and education.
- Culture & Identity: arts and the creative economy, food and dining, sports and entertainment, and Buffalo’s ongoing story of reinvention.
- Systems & Infrastructure: civic governance and technology and digital infrastructure.
OUR MISSION
The Buffalo Signals Laboratory studies and shapes the future of Buffalo. We scan and interpret signals of change, collaborate on projects that build our preferred futures, and cultivate Buffalo’s civic capacity for using foresight to build a more resilient, equitable, and innovative region.
OUR VISION
A Buffalo where futures thinking is civic infrastructure; a shared capacity and practice where diverse stakeholders collectively make sense of what’s emerging and take practical action to build the future we’ll inhabit together.
OPERATING THROUGH FISCAL SPONSORSHIP
We are fiscally sponsored by BootSector, a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit, which allows us to operate and receive philanthropic and grant funding.
The Buffalo Signals Laboratory didn’t start from scratch. Other regions have already built pieces of this model, and we’ve drawn directly from their experience in shaping our own.
Detroit Future City has shown what it looks like to pair rigorous research with communications built for a broad audience – translating complex regional trends into guides, case studies, and reports that reach business, government, and community readers alike, not just planners. We’ve followed that lead in how we approach our own signal scanning and publishing.
California 100 demonstrated how a foresight initiative can convene diverse stakeholders at scale, engaging thousands of residents in collaborative futures thinking and turning that input into actionable recommendations that outlast any single election cycle. It’s shaped how we think about our own Co-Created Projects work: as regional infrastructure, not a one-time initiative.
Envision Greater Green Bay has spent years building foresight capacity in a mid-sized region through workshops, training, and an annual futures conference – proof that a sustained culture of anticipation can take hold outside a major metro. It’s the closest model we have for our own Capacity Building work, including the Buffalo Foresight Certificate and our annual Futures Fair.
We stay in direct contact with each of these organizations, and Western New York is better positioned because we don’t have to figure this out alone.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Buffalo was one of the fastest-growing and most innovative cities in the country; an early adopter of electric power from Niagara Falls, a hub of grain and industry, and a city that invested in its parks, boulevards, and public architecture with the belief that good design and forward planning shaped a better city to come. That confidence reached its clearest expression in 1901, when Buffalo hosted the Pan-American Exposition: a world’s fair built around the idea that the future could be studied, imagined, and put on public display. Visitors came from across the country to see new technologies and new ideas about what was possible, at a moment when Buffalo positioned itself, publicly and confidently, at the edge of what was next.
Much of that forward-looking confidence faded over the following century, as the city weathered deindustrialization and decline. But the impulse behind it is exactly what Buffalo needs again; A region that can study its future and make deliberate choices about it, rather than simply wait to see what happens. The Buffalo Signals Laboratory exists to rebuild that muscle memory: not as nostalgia for what Buffalo once was, but as practical infrastructure for what it wants to become.
Civic laboratories aren’t new. Cities have used them for years as collaborative spaces where residents, technologists, and local government work together on problems already in front of them: testing a transit fix, prototyping a new permitting process, using citizen-collected data to track air quality. Their focus is the present: fast, hands-on, immediate.
A civic foresight laboratory works on a longer timeline. Rather than fixing what’s already broken, it studies what’s emerging: trends and disruptions five, ten, even thirty years out, and builds a region’s capacity to see them early and respond deliberately. It brings ordinary residents into the practice of horizon scanning, not only professional futurists. It uses scenario building to test how current systems would hold up under different possible futures. And it uses tools like backcasting, which starts from a preferred future and works backward to identify what needs to happen today, this year, and this decade to reach it. The Buffalo Signals Laboratory is built on this model, adapted for our region.
While historians study history, futurists study the future.
Futures thinking is the practice of preparing for what’s ahead rather than reacting to it after it arrives. It doesn’t predict a single future; it builds the skills and habits to notice change early, understand where it might lead, and make better decisions today because of it.
We draw on a set of tools developed across government, business, and academic futures work, adapted here for community use:
- Horizon Scanning: Tracking weak signals: small, early indicators that a larger shift may be underway. A single pilot program, a new policy, an unusual data point – on their own they’re minor, but together they can point to where a region is headed.
- Scenario Building: Developing several plausible versions of the future, not just one, and using them to pressure-test how well our current systems, plans, and institutions would hold up under each.
- Backcasting: Starting from a preferred future, often a decade or more out, and working backward to identify what needs to happen this year, and every year after, to get there. (This work provides focus for our projects.)
Used together, these tools shift decision-making from reacting to what’s already happened toward preparing for what’s next and toward building the future a community actually wants, rather than the one it simply ends up with.