Institute For The Future

Scenes From 2027

What kind of 2027 can you imagine? The articles in this magazine thus far provide an overview of the technologies for reconfiguring reality that we’ll have in the next decade, as well as strategies to leverage them. Ultimately, they are meant to help you imagine the world of 2027 so you can proactively find your place in it and make the future today. To give you an idea of what this means, we’ve created a set of scenarios from 2027 that offer a perspective on how these technologies might combine to create new civic and market services, products, and systems—and how this could impact people’s lives. Each scenario opens with an “artifact from the future”: an illustrated image of an object, interaction, or scene from the future.

A team of Institute for the Future researchers created these scenarios by playing the companion “Make the Future Now” card game, which is packaged with this magazine. The game is designed to help you think through the design choices posed at the beginning of the magazine and push you past your assumptions about how you might use technology in the next decade. For instance, thinking through how a set of technologies could be used for different value sets, for novelty instead of efficiency, for health instead of entertainment, putting them in different terrains like home instead of work, reveals new dimensions to these technologies.

Use these scenarios and artifacts as examples for your own creations when you play the card game. While the pace of the game prohibits you from building out scenarios in this level of detail, a way to extend the game, and your thinking, is to develop your favorite ideas the game generates into short story-length scenarios or full illustrations of the same or greater complexity than what we present here.