2014 Ten-Year Forecast
10YF2014: Recoloring the World
Ten projects. Ten years. A future of a different color.
The 2014 Ten-Year Forecast Annual Retreat explored the landscape of change over the next decade by inviting attendees to contemplate ten projects that—if successfully undertaken today—could change the paradigm in their fields in the next ten years. These bold projects are already taking shape in the dark underside of the internet, in the foundations of our global cities, in the no-man’s land of our prisons, and in the microbes of our bodies and our planet. They are rapidly recoloring our world.
In just 30 hours on May 1-2, 2014, we built out visions for these projects and expanded our own systems intuition with a Systems Mythology Toolkit that uses four colors—four mythic archetypes—to help us explore the future meanings of the complex systems we’re building today.
Featured in The Atlantic: "The Not-So-Distant Future When We Can All Upgrade Our Brains";
and in The Washington Post: "We need an audacious plan to innovate America’s prison system"
The 2014 Map of the Decade
It’s a decade of turmoil and invention. The dilemmas of the past can wait no longer. They demand resolution. Let’s join the global project to design the futures we want. Use the 2014 Map of the Decade to scan the horizon of transformation, from new foundational technologies to the future of our human settlements, our economies, and even our mental maps of the world. Start at the top and read down to see what’s driving each of the ten projects and the big shifts they could catalyze. Or start at the bottom to survey the very real signals of change that make us say, “Yes, this is possible.”
The Ten Projects
What if ten projects could start today to change our basic paradigms in the next ten years?
At the 2014 Ten-Year Forecast Annual Retreat we explored 10 potentially world-changing projects, from new foundational technologies to the future of our human settlements, our economies, and even our mental maps of the world:
Second Curve Internet
What if we could superstruct today’s internet to create a truly resilient Second Curve Internet?
Wikipedia for Making: creating a universal grammar for manufacturing
What if we could mashup the passion of makers with the branchability of GitHub to create a new platform for describing, sharing, and remixing designs to make literally anything?
3D-Printed Cities: planting the seeds of a new urban landscape
What if we could recreate Detroit as an organic, thriving, living city, using 21st-century fabbing technologies to rebuild, restore, and recreate the urban landscape—in effect, creating a 3D/3R city?
End of Prisons: creating new spaces for healing, entrepreneurship, and justice
What if we could redesign our Fourth City as a productive community that builds sustainable economic futures for those currently excluded from our legitimate economic systems?
National Sharing Economy: leveraging open knowledge for development
What if a country like Ecuador could define a set of knowledge sharing policies that could become the cornerstone of a national sharing economy?
Paying It Forward: launching an alternative economy of kindness
What if we were to package these drivers with today’s social media technology to create a new pay-it-forward infrastructure?
Co-Present Microwork: creating a toolkit for cooperation at extreme scales
What if we could collate these early experiments and give microworkers a co-presence toolkit that augments our ability, as a species, to cooperate at extreme scales?
Global Microbiome Map: tracking microbes across scales from human to planet
What if we could scale up our ability to sample and analyze some of the smallest lifeforms on the planet to provide a new high-resolution map of our world, from our guts to our atmosphere?
Global Simulation Corps: simulating reality from the bottom up
What if we could create a global infrastructure for inventing, testing, and learning from participatory simulations to aid the transition to a viable and just planetary system?
Magna Cortica: declaring the rights of a post-human mind
What if we could anticipate the ethical issues these technologies will inevitably spawn and create a charter for our future cognitive rights and privileges—a Magna Cortica?
For more on 10YF
- Listen to Kathi Vian on the Seven Economy Future from the 2015 Ten-Year Forecast
- Explore the Systems Mythology Toolkit debuted at the 2014 Ten-Year Forecast conference
- Learn about being a member of the Ten-Year Forecast Program
- Check out previous years' Ten-Year Forecast research
- Contact Sean Ness (sness@iftf.org)