Institute For The Future

Lyn Jeffery on bottom-up forecasting

Tech frontiers and social change has been central to the Institute's work since the beginning. More recently, we've been trying to make our work more global: partly this is because our clients are global, and would like it, but also because it's increasingly clear that much of what's interesting at the intersection of technology and social change is happening in the developing world.

 

There are lots of economic indicators that are now familiar, but with this project we want to get underneath that top-down, economy-level data, and see how economic growth, creative destruction, new technologies, etc. are reshaping people's lives. This is an exercise in creating what Steven Johnson calls a "long zoom," the ability to visualize changes at different scales, and to see the linkages between the macro and the micro.