Institute For The Future

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 fifteen 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.

My colleague Jake Dunagan, a research director in the IFTF Technology Horizons Program, points out that our experience and our physical surroundings influence how we think. They are indeed filters on how we see and what we think. And on a daily basis we are surrounded by artifacts from the present or the past—buildings, streets, roads that were built decades, sometimes centuries ago. There is rarely anything in our physical environment and day-to-day interactions that gives us tangible and actionable cues to the future. No wonder the future is always so abstract and non-real; no wonder we fail to act on future forecasts, even if these are highly probable.

This is why the work of futurists, and our work at IFTF, in particular, takes on new urgency. We need to make the future tangible, to make it a part of our everyday thinking, to integrate a futures lens into our environment and interactions. As my colleague Kathi Vian, director of the Ten-Year Forecast Program, put it succinctly, “We need to speak for the future.” This has indeed been the promise and the mission of IFTF for over forty years now.

However, what is exciting is that today, in the midst of one of the most fundamental crises facing humanity, we have new and better tools for accomplishing our mission. From Jason Tester’s pioneering work in designing and embedding artifacts into everyday environments, to the Amara Fund's bringing future literacy to schools and general public, to our massively multiplayer forecasting games that engage large groups in pro-actively thinking and acting on future scenarios, we take the responsibility of being speakers for the future more seriously than ever before. You will see this in our work in the second part of the year, bringing design, new platforms, and methodologies to reach the larger public and to make the future real and tangible.