Institute For The Future

When Everything is Programmable Digital Stories

As a part of the year-long Technology Horizons Program research task, When Everything is Progammable: Life in a Conmputational Age, the research team created a digital story—a scenario of of the future—in three parts to accompany the research released for the 2009 Fall Exchange.

The story follows "Omar"—a doctor working at Seattle Grace in about 2019—as he moves through his day and interacts with our programmable future. Each of the three videos represent a different segment of the task technology map, A Map for the Programmable World.

• Part 1: The Programmable Self
• Part 2: The Programmable Society
• Part 3: The Programmable Environment

Digital stories provide another path into the forecasts from this research by offering us a way to draw out potential implications and dilemmas through the tangible filters of living and working in a programmable world. The technologies in the story are meant to be plausible but provocative. We acknowledge that some might take longer than a decade to move out of the lab.

Use and share these videos when you're exploring the research to exemplify the forecasts and stimulate your thinking in a programmable world, or simply as a taste of the ideas we discus in our Technology Horizons Program.

For more information about the Technology Horizons Program please contact Sean Ness at [email protected].