Future Now
The IFTF Blog
IFTF Quarterly Newsletter
A Message from Marina Gorbis, Executive Director
Making the Future Tangible and Real
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that we are in the midst of a period of major climate disruption. Yet, listening to Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and IFTF's newest Board Member, the abstract becomes more real. Here are some excerpts from his presentation to our staff and board in conjunction with the last board of trustees meeting:
• The Arctic Ocean will be effectively ice free sometime between 2020 and 2040, and it could happen as early as 2013.
• The Earth is warming over 100 times faster today than during the last post-Ice Age warming period.
• The melting of the Himalayan ice plateau is putting stress on river resources in Asia, disrupting the livelihoods and food supplies of millions of people.
More than ever, this frightening and yet increasingly likely future needs to be in our thinking and in our discussions at all levels—from policy, business, education, to our local communities. The current climate disruption will affect everything and everyone everywhere. We are literally becoming migrants in our own lands as the physical environment around us shifts—farmlands turning to deserts, coastal areas disappearing under water, habitable areas becoming uninhabitable. The data is here, yet we are collectively failing to do enough to avert some of the most frightening potential outcomes.
The climate issue may be the best example of our inability as humans to perceive the future as something real and tangible and to act on that knowledge. During a recent workshop on sustainability with a group of 15 top scientists from varied disciplines, we asked them to come up with one breakthrough discovery that will have a positive impact on climate and sustainability. The unanimous answer was “human behavior.” The science is clear, but we are failing to act on our knowledge. This is an example of how difficult it is for us to see the future as real and to integrate a futures lens into our actions today.
The Roy Amara Fund: A Social Impact Initiative
IFTF’s Social Impact Initiative continues to take shape and produce results. This spring and summer, three IFTF research managers, Vivian Distler, Tessa Finlev, and Miriam Lueck, organized two projects that brought forecasting curriculums to public schools with a goal of engaging kids in thinking about the future.
The first project was held at the East Palo Alto Charter School, in cooperation with the Collective Roots initiative to engage youth and communities in food system change. The team developed a workbook that provided a classroom framework for storytelling about the future. Ultimately, the goal was to empower the students to share their visions about their personal and community futures using digital stories through video. At the close of the trimester, 15 of the 16 students completed personal digital stories.
The second project was held at Hoopa Elementary School, a public school on the Hoopa Reservation in Northern California. The program focused on teaching the class about futures thinking using content relevant to their lives in their community, particularly the Hoopa tribe's relationship to their natural environment.
Technology Horizons Program
Fall Conference: October 13-14, Cupertino, CA
Technology Horizons researchers have been busy discovering and analyzing our everyday environments that are becoming increasingly programmable—able to be instructed and manipulated to produce specific, repeatable results. Simultaneously, society is developing new tools, behaviors, and systems of education that are allowing our everyday lives to be replete with the programmable.
From systems as complex as human senses to physical objects as simple as a coffee mug, every aspect of our lives is becoming a potential field for programming. When everything is programmable, everyone needs to be a programmer. Our research looks into the kinds of solutions being developed to allow every member of society to engage meaningfully with a programmable world. What new skills will we need? What new behaviors will develop as a result of living in a programmable world? On the flip side, we will also need to examine what new technologies are enabling us to program things we never thought programmable before.
The second conference of 2009,Everything is Programmable, is scheduled for October 13-14 at the HP Executive Briefing Center in Cupertino, CA. Save the date and watch your email in March for the registration package. For more information, please contact Sean Ness at [email protected] or (650) 233-9517.
Health Horizons Program
Fall Conference on Health Care 2020 Strategic Retreat:
A Toolkit for Action, November 16-17, Sausalito, CA
As you know, the IFTF Health Horizons team has undertaken a year-long research program exploring the future of health and health care over the next decade.
Using the IFTF Foresight-Insight-Action framework and processes to guide our journey, we started in the spring with our conference, Scenario Building: Exploring Alternative Futures. This summer, we will conduct a series of Open Space meetings in Chicago (August 14th), Atlanta (August 26th), and the Bay Area (August 31st). We will reconvene in November for a retreat that will include a series of strategic discussions and opportunities to work with our Health Care 2020 Toolkit For Action, which we will present at the conference.
Look out for the registration packet in the coming weeks, but for now please save the dates. We will be meeting November 16th-17th, 2009, at Cavallo Point Conference Center, Sausalito, CA. Please contact Neela Nuristani for additional information at [email protected].
For more information about the Health Horizons Program, please contact Dawn Alva at [email protected] or (650) 233-9585.
Project Spotlight: SigntificLab Experiments
Over the past six months, the Signtific Project has launched SigntificLab, the project's game platform, and has run three trials of our initial thought experiment—"Free Space"— in three different locations: New Zealand (Auckland), Germany (Hanover), and San Jose, CA.
In these tests, the Lab has generated a vast amount of high-quality content regarding the future of space and satellite technologies. In designing SigntificLab, the development team sought to create a system that facilitated rapid ideation around signals that exist in the Signtific signals/forecasts database. In this conception of the platform, the SigntificLab runs a very lightweight version of the Ten-Year Forecast program's multiplayer forecasting game, Superstruct, that lends itself nicely to many interations of the same game, and games that are much shorter in length.
IFTF and the Signtific team are beginning to make the Lab experiments available to a variety of sponsors and organizations. Most recently, a Lab experiment was held at ETech, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, which was open to the public.
Be sure to stay tuned to the latest news on Signtific through Facebook, LinkedIn, the official Signtific blog, and on Twitter: @signtific and @signtificlab (for the game).
For more information on Signtific, please contact Sean Ness at [email protected] or 650-233-9517.
Project Spotlight: The Future of Video
IFTF's Technology Horizon's Program held its Future of Video Conference on May 14, 2009 for program members, distinguished guests, and experts such as Mimi Ito, UC Irvine media professor, Alex Cohen, UC Berkely film professor, and others. IFTF convened these participants to take a deep look into the emerging video technologies and look at the various ways video is changing our culture, communication, and social organization. The conference was filled with key insights about why video is rapidly changing media as we know it and how it will shape the future.
Deliverables from the conference include the Future of Video: Map of Opportunities, available in both hard copy and interactive Prezi map, and an Executive Summary. Additionally, expert insight videos from the conference will be released on the Technology Horizons website as they are completed. You can now view Robin Sloan's expert insight video here.
Recently Released Deliverables
Technology Horizons
The Future of Video Conference materials (SR-1235)
Signtific Year 1 Update Report (SR-1222)
Health Horizons
Health and Health Care 2020 Scenarios
Ten-Year Forecast
2009 Ten-Year Forecast Perspectives and conference materials (SR-1218)
Future Knowledge Ecosystems - The Next Twenty Years of Technology-Led Economic Development