Future Now
The IFTF Blog
A Researcher's Perspective on the TH Mobility Project
As TH Program Manager Zoe Finkel blogged yesterday, our Open Mobile Ecosystem digital stories and Tech Foundations memo are online and ready for TH members to view. As one of the researchers working on both this project and the Blended Reality work, it was interesting how closely connected the forecasts in each project were. In many ways, the digital stories, written as forecast scenarios taking a look at the lives of global citizens, emerged as the mobile extension of Blended Reality. For instance, the Networking the Environment story was inspired by our Blended Reality theme of Sentient World, where everything is a node on the network. Mobile technology is definitely one of the biggest technology areas shaping this future of Blended Reality.
To come up with the foundations for our scenarios, we pooled the resources of several of IFTF's ethnographers (Lyn Jeffery, Marina Gorbis, Mani Pande, Tessa Finlev, Rachel Maguire and Jason Tester) and sat down for a one-day workshop to develop our forecasts. That research, based on ethnographic work in China, Russia, Africa, India, and the United States, shaped our scenarios.
The digital stories themselves were truly a collaborative process. While I wrote the scenarios, they were carefully reviewed by both Mani Pande and Marina Gorbis, with the input of Jean Hagan and Jason Tester. Jody Radzik produced the stories, and did a beautiful job of bringing them to life in Flash, largely due to Lisa Mumbach's help in gathering appropriate images. But the hardest piece on my end was finding the voice talent.
We used what voice talent from an online service we were able to find, but also called on friends in far away places to fill in the gaps. Equipment issues, recording quality, international payment, and pronunciation made the process a challenge. In some cases, despite how far we've come technology-wise, some things still need a human touch. I recorded myself reading the script and sent it out to several of our voices in order to help them better understand what we were trying to convey. If some of the technologies we highlight in the scenarios were already globally available and well developed—mobile bill payment or high quality streaming sound and video, for instance—it would have been a lot easier.
In the end, using people who are originally from the places discussed in our stories (or who currently live there) makes them feel, to us, a bit more real.
Technology Horizons members can access the stories and Mike Liebhold's accompanying memo here. I hope you enjoy our glimpse into the future of global use of mobile technology.