Developments in information and communication technologies are often depicted as providing opportunities for a more transparent, open, free and democratic world:

“This new freedom holds great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly information dependent global economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere.” (Benkler 2006)

As Benkler (see The Wealth of Networks) sees it, the former financial and institutional restrictions in the production of knowledge, information and culture – essential to human freedom and human development -  are steadily vanishing. This would increase the role of nonmarket and nonproprietary production, both by individuals and by a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations.

During their lectures at the Future of News and Civic Media Conference at MIT, Gabriella Coleman (NYU) & Karim Lakhani (Harvard) argue that open and collaborative networks somehow behave according to ‘market rules’. Those who for example wish to contribute to the development of Debian Linux will have to pass an extensive technical admission project, they will need to prove their skills and commitment in a discussion on knowledge, policies and ethical issues and will have to learn the language (jargon) of the ‘community’. In this respect, Lakhani notes that “Openness breeds bureaucracy” .

In the end, as Clay Shirky – author of “Here comes everybody” – argues, open and collaborative movements face the same challenges as more traditional, bounded, commercial organizations. Referring to the phenomenon of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ he concludes that both find themselves in such a competitive environment, that both need to find ways to attract attention and to actively recruit skilled contributors in order tot survive.

Although Benkler foresees a society in which non-market actors play an essential role, one needs to keep in mind that this is likely to be a highly competitive society still.

In both loosely coupled networks and traditional organizations alike self-promotion based on skills and contacts as well as personal branding, is already on the rise.  How might branding and advertising evolve in the era of open collaboration? How might HR management change ?

Image via IndependentMail

BMW has a history with film on the web. Remember The Hire ? Now – like Honda, Volkswagen, Toyota and many other automobile companies – they have turned to look at “the future of mobility”. The initiative is entitled Activate the future and features four installments (to be launched one by one this February 2011) : The new city, The future just isn’t what it used to be, Reinventing mobility and How we’ll learn to stop worrying and love the future. Each episode contains bits of interviews with well-known scientists, travellers, authors, entrepreneurs, etc. intended to provoke thoughts and discussion.

As the website mentions, the initiative

[...] is not meant to provide definitive answers, but rather, to ask the right questions from the right people in an attempt to generate discussion, provoke thought and stir the imagination. [... It] was created to get users actively involved in the ever-evolving conversation on the future of mobility. Over the coming months, this site will continue to explore new ways to shape the future of mobility and will encourage users’ opinions and participation along the way.

Nicolas Nassim-Taleb, author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” and professor of risk engineering at New York University, wrote a brief but throught-provoking piece envisioning a future scenario for The Economist. Taleb looks at the world in 2036 and envisions “what will break, and what won’t”. Among other things, he sees top-down nation-states withering away in favor of city-states and statelings. The world will see waves of biological and electronic pandemics, a revival of religious thought etc. Rightfully, Taleb foresees many technologies we know today – at least the robust solutions – to still be around, while others will have been superseded by ‘better’ successors.

Enjoy your read.

Image via this blog.

Future scenarios serve various purposes, one of which is to provide a contextual source of inspiration for new concepts for products/services/experiences. Throughout the years, working with scenarios as such in our participatory workshops brought to the surface many interesting insights.

For example, lately there appears to be an increasing tendency among people to stay away from the design of new physical objects as carriers of solutions for existing and possible future challenges. A few years ago, this still used to be different. Novelty, innovation, creativity used to be correlated rather unilaterally with new stuff. Now, the attempts of a growing number of participants in for example idea-generation or lo-fi prototyping/thinking-with-your-hands sessions that we organize, appear to be oriented towards trying to un-think ‘stuff’, to build further upon already existing ‘infrastructure’ or platforms for solutions, e.g. smartphones, social networks, etc.

A preliminary closer look at this phenomenon leads us to a series of possible explanations, which are most likely interrelated.

First, sustainability has become a top future challenge to most people, leading to a more critical stance when it comes to conceptualizing yet another physical object/product. Second, a paradigmatic shift has taken place in the way many of our technological tools have evolved: from mono-use type of objects, over multi-use, many of our tools have become platforms of/for solutions. Hence one can extend them, build upon them without the need for something completely new. Think apps, think modular hardware bodies combined with upgradeable software, open standards, etc. Third, thinking of solutions in terms of services is becoming more common. In many cases the services are the solutions without a new tangible product. Fourth, many of the major challenges identified when it comes to the future are increasingly complex and deal with designing for behavioural change, shifting focus to a people-based how? rather than an objects-based what?.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. Social, cultural and economic context obviously also plays a role in whether people tend to focus on designing things vs. designing solutions.  Nevertheless these observations lead to interesting questions when it comes to a changing attitude of innovation, of design, and also of the  kind of skills and insights we would like tomorrow’s problem solvers and solution providers to have. Perhaps it is but a mere rediscovery of the notion of a solution, a broadening of its scope, beyond its most physical embodiment. A shift worth exploring further …

Social media, location-based services, anywhere-anytime internet access etc. offer major opportunities for mass-sampling people’s moods, sentiments and emotions.

In October of last year, Facebook started correlating status updates of their (US) users with the Gross National Happiness Index. Later, results from the UK, Canada and Australia were added to the mix. According to a recent article in Fastcompany:

“Facebook demonstrated that the vast historic record of status updates is a potential goldmine of information that could easily be raked through by sociology analysts keen to work out when it’s best to deliver an advert for particular products, or perhaps even to promote a particular political message.”

Indeed, sentiment analysis as the game is called (see also here), is not only interesting for artists and gadgeteers, but also for businesses and public institutions.

The concept is not new, in 2001, webdesign meeting point k10k.net launched Moodstats, a webbased effort to enable people to share their moods. Yet, now that our physical and virtual action patterns are becoming increasingly intertwined, applications like iPhone app Glow enable anywhere, anytime, sentiment sampling.

In most current applications, people are still required to express their mood, emotional state etc. Language processing algorithms can help to analyze this data. The next step is obviously to have emotion sensing technologies (e.g. Philips Design’s VIBE) reading, interpreting and allowing us to communicate our emotions directly. Imagine your t-shirt changing color depending on how you feel, for example.

Image by Glow

As car manufacturers shift away from oil and towards electricity to power our future vehicles, a new race is on. The target this time: lithium, basis for the lithium-ion batteries to be found in everything from electric vehicles, to mobile phones, cellphones, laptops, anti-depressives etc.  The place: Chile (for now), Bolivia (next) … The salt lakes near Uyuni in Bolivia are believed to contain an estimated 28 millions tons of lithium, or 90% of the world’s reserve according to experts. The car industry currently runs on 16.000 tons per year. As the production and demand of electric cars ramp up, the demand for lithium is expected to be anywhere between 54.000 and 500.000 tons per year. At such rates, estimates of shortages starting from as early as 2015 are no exception as automobile, pharma, ICT and many other industries will be fishing in the same pond for the same type of fish.

Although lithium is no fuel (it is not consumed through usage) and lithium-ion batteries ‘can be recycled’ (note: they do contain substances harmful to the environment in case they should end up in landfills and pollute water reserves) other worries arise concerning the socio-economic impact of lithium mining activities in the aforementioned countries.

On a more fundamental level – a more philosophical one if you wish – nature and history teach us that monoculture is generally a bad idea (cf. resilience). So whether we like it or not, we need to (re)learn to think in terms of a mix, of diversity once again.

Image courtesy of PeriodicTable.com

In the past months newspapers have been full of high profile people declaring how the automobile industries in Europe and the US have missed their window of opportunity to transform themselves. Critical voices are bemoaning lead positions lost to automobile companies in booming markets such as China and India, where the focus on hybrids and electric vehicles appears stronger.

So much emphasis is being place on not having the right new car line up to face the future that one wonders why so little attention goes to ‘mobility‘ as a system that needs fixing instead of merely ‘the car‘. Joel Makover - author of Strategies for the Green Economy - illustrated this beautifully a while ago in his blogpost entitled: Reinventing Mobility: It’s Not Just the Cars, Stupid! One could even assert that radical innovation efforts in this respect are hindered by government subsidies ‘to save the industry’ (cf. the argument: ‘too big to fail’).

We have seen cars running on electricity, on air, on algae, on acid, … yet they are still cars as we know them (no, we are not fishing forflying cars). And cars, no matter how nifty, pose certain problems … e.g. idle time storage (aka parking), they rely on heavy, expensive infrastructure subject to wear and tear (cf. roads), they tend to clog rather than swarm intelligently, they are driven by people – like it or not, we are a mitigating factor in terms of safety, efficiency, etc. etc.

Friedman already reminded us that historically speaking truly radical innovation is most unlikely to come from the regime players, the dinosaurs. So imagine IKEA building cars … is what design student Robert Larsson set out to explore in his concept vehicle. How about looking at the automobile industry as a major smart grid player. Or imagine a carmaker shifting to become a smart grid energy player. MeetSchwarmStrom or an ambitious network of mini gas-fired power plants for the home (goal: producing as much as two nuclear reactors within a year). Lichtblick and Volkswagen team up to … perhaps become a major future energy player on the smart grid market? With cars charging at home and charging or providing peak balancing to homes, offices, etc. (after all they spend the majority of their lifetime parked, +90% according to some).

Most of you will be aware of MIT’s Smart Cities project featuring stackable cars (like shopping carts indeed), roboscooters and mobility on demand services. Also Carlo Ratti’s Senseable City Lab at the same MIT looks into ways in which are cities and its users could become smarter, something of which also mobility could benefit in myriad ways. Check out the beautiful EyeStop (up for testing in Turin, Italy). In this respect, of course there are the major IT players looking into the role ICT could play in untying the knot we have gotten ourselves into, e.g. IBM’s intelligent transport. Yet mobility is not only about cars and their infrastructure, we tend to forget about walking. Take a step back and think about it: how much space in a city goes to car-related mobility – which means standing still most of the time and hindering human traffic – and how much is actually still people-space?

If you do wanna see a far-out car concept that could tackle some of mobility’s challenges, check out designer Ahmad Filiz‘s fascinating globule concept design for Peugot.

Although some are still Grail-hunting for ‘one source of sustainable to replace them all’, the more interesting debate on possible future mixes of sustainable energy production, transport and consumption is going strong as well.

According to researchers at Cal State University “high-altitude wind machines could power New York City” (see Wired article). And a consortium of German companies is trying to get Operation Desertec off the ground and use the sunny side of Northern Africa to feed Europe with 15pct of its electricity needs through solar energy. And although many agree with the basics of Kissinger’s ‘interdependence through trade increases peace and stability’ strategy, recent problems in terms of energy provision as a political weapon (e.g.  Russia cutting off gas,  pipelines being attacked elsewhere in the world, etc.) raise fears and warnings regarding creating a new situation of European ‘dependence’.

Solar technology is becoming more powerful each day. Lonnie Johnson (of supersoaker fame) “says he can achieve a conversion efficiency rate that tops 60 percent with a new solid-state heat engine. It represents a breakthrough new way to turn heat into power.” JTEC (or the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion System) “[...] uses temperature differences to create pressure gradients. Only instead of using those pressure gradients to move an axle or wheel, he’s using them to force ions through a membrane. It’s a totally new way of generating electricity from heat.” says Paul Werbos, a programme director at the NSF, one of the funding partners of JTEC.

Yet, of course, there is more out there than just wind or solar, there’s biomass, wave, geothermal, hydrogen, fuell cell, bodyheat, body movement, piezoelectric surfaces,  etc.

There is the science, the technology & the economics, the promises and … the reality. For those of you curious about the numbers behind the current state of the art re: the sustainability/energy discourse, check out David JC MacKay’s astonishing book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air (see his website).

Image: WIRED magazine

Continuing our stroll through the growing landscape of corporate future visions, we re-stumbled upon Microsoft. Microsoft Office Labs put out a series of videos glimpsing ahead into the future of banking, retail, manufacturing and healthcare during the past few years, each time keeping a time horizon of 5-10 years in mind. Although the viewing experience is somewhat hindered by the low quality of the videos, check out some of their mixed-reality futures …

Health (2007) – Imagine a future where you can monitor your own health with smart, connected devices, your health team can share data seamlessly, and doctors are empowered with a view of health records across multiple sources – all leading to better, faster, safer, more personalized care.

Manufacturing (2006) – Imagine a manufacturing environment of the future where workers collaborate seamlessly across time-zones, predictive technologies automate processes, and sense and respond systems are connected across organizations, leading to better innovation, improved efficiencies, and more flexibility for customized products.

Banking (2005) – Imagine a banking experience where you’re always connected to your finances, banks are empowered to anticipate your needs, and transactions are seamless through predictive technologies – whether you’re in the branch, at home, or on the go.

Retail (2004) – Imagine a store of the future where you can quickly find and purchase everything you need; you have instant access to the product information you want; and the store can anticipate your needs and provide price and product offers in tune with your shopping history.

For those of you only out to get a quick glimpse, check out the montage.

Via Customer Experience Labs

In their Big Ideas section, McKinsey’s Quarterly taps into the themes of growth & innovation. In times of economic downturn, crisis, extreme market challenges … the mantra to ‘innovate or die’ sounds louder than ever. André Andonian, Christoph Loos and Luiz Pires address the big picture in Building an innovation nation, Amar Bhidé takes a closer look at Where innovation creates value, Alberto Alessi talks about Cultivating innovation, Hayagreeva Rao looks at Market rebels and radical innovation etc.

Succesful innovation depends on how much your innovation efforts are in tune with your changing environment and the challenges these changes pose. On What Matters, McKinsey addresses some of the major challenges (clustered thematically) businesses need to assess when aiming for a succesful future. As such, they look into biotechnology, climate change, the credit crisis, energy, geopolitics, globalization, health, innovation, internet & organization and turn to some of the brightest minds in these areas for reflections on the world of tomorrow.

To mention but a few of the interesting reads to be found on the site: our friend John Thackara points to The innovator next door, Juan Enriquez looks at How biotech will reshape the global economy, Eric D. Beinhocker and Jeremy Oppenheim talk about Building a postcarbon economy, Stephen S. Roach wonders about new times After the era of excess, Andy Grove and Robert Burgelman assess An electric plan for energy resilience, Jacqueline Novogratz looks into Innovative business models for the poor, etc.

 … is a motto we often use in our workshops as we try to pull people beyond the current day status quo, invite them to push the envelope when it comes to imagining or imagineering what the future might be like. Honda definitely pushed the envelope in many ways. They are now sharing their stories with the rest of the world through a series of short documentaries entitled ‘Dream the impossible‘. Their site currently features three of them, i.e. Failure: the secret to success, Kick out the ladder and Mobility 2088.

In the latter short movie – which shows a different way to approach the future as a company (see here for other examples) – Honda looks 80 years ahead into the possible future of mobility by posing the question ‘what might it be like?’ to some of their employees, but also some science fiction writers, urbanists etc. Honda does not present or push their image of the future, instead it awakens people’s fascination and imagination regarding the subject of mobility in a subtle, almost disarming way by triggering curiosity. Among the interviewees are Mitchell Joachim (urbanist, architect), Dave Marel (Honda Advanced Design Studio), Chee Pearlman (design editor), Guillermo Gonzalez (Senior engineer Honda Vehicle Design), Jason Wilbur (Honda Advanced Design Studio), Ben Bova (science fiction writer), Christopher Guest (film director), Scott Bolton (Nasa Juno), Yasunari Seki (Honda Insight), Orson Scott Card (science fiction writer), Darel Preble (chairman Space Solar Power Institute), Chuck Thomas (Honda Vehicle Safety), Jim Keller (Honda Vehicle Chassis Design), etc.

Several ideas make an appearance, e.g. seamless mobility experiences between home and our means of transport, magnetic levitation, flying cars (how could they not!), on foot, teleportation, dreams and nightmares of jet packs, hydrogen based mobility, satellites tapping solar energy in space, self-driving and self-navigating cars, control-free vehicles, stackable cars, vehicles charging via induction, transformers, etc. All interviewees somehow refer to two notions which drive us towards change with respect to mobility in the future: i.e. concerns about the environment and what we leave to our children, which options we leave open or open up to future generations.

In Kick the ladder, the theme could be described as radical innovation. The metaphor of kicking the ladder says a lot: kicking the ladder while one climbs ups the stakes, forces one to leap. Stepwise advancement is no longer an option. There is no way back, intentionally. No safety net, leapfrogging for a better tomorrow.

In light of some major challenges the world and humanity as a whole are facing – e.g. climate change, depletion of natural resources, pollution, mobility issues etc. – future threats and opportunities are increasing the sense of urgency for massive change. As such, also many of the world’s bigger companies – especially those threatened by the future and a changing public opinion – are turning to storytelling or more open platforms in order to share with their (and new) audiences the ways in which they see, prepare for and involve others in the creation of/steering towards a better future. 

Hitachi is sharing ‘true stories‘, Shell shows their future/innovation oriented endeavours on RealEnergy, Volkswagen takes us to 2028, Philips Design has its probes, Xerox has its Future of Documents blog etc.

Toyota recently launched an interactive website to show and let people explore the ways in which they see and prepare for the future. 

“Toyota’s vision of future mobility. Minimize the Negative, Maximize the Positive and Humanize Mobility.

To enrich people’s lives and society in the future as well as achieve sustainability, technologies must be developed that have minimal negative impact on people and the environment and bring maximum benefit to people’s lives.

Going even furter, Toyota is also incorporating the hopes and dreams of people from all over the world into research and development to create future technologies that are more attuned to human beings. Toyota-future.com introduces Toyota’s future endeavours in a variety of fields, including:

- the safety, comfort and environmental standards demanded of new vehicles

- new mobility to enable greater freedom of movement

- partner robots to support people and benefit society”

Seen interesting ways in which companies showcase their ‘futures’? Drop us a comment.

The Rotman School of Management dedicates its winter issue (pdf) to wicked problems, a concept not unknown to futuregazers. Jeff Conklin of the CogNexus Institute once characterized wicked problems as follows:

1. The problem is not understood until after formulation of a solution.
2. Stakeholders have radically different world views and different frames for understanding the problem.
3. Constraints and resources to solve the problem change over time.
4. The problem is never solved.

Aside from an interview with him, the magazine is chock-full of insightful articles on topics such as Confronting the World’s Most Important Strategic Challenges: The End of Oil, Strategy as a Wicked Problem, Peter Senge et al. on The Next Industrial Imperative: The 80-20 Challenge, Creativity, Improvisation and Organizations, The Designful Company, IDEO’s Fred Dust and Ilya Prokopoff on Designing Systems at Scale, Managerial Algorithmics: Thinking Strategically About Thinking Strategically, Artistry for the Strategist. Muhammad Yunus shares his ‘point of view’. There are Q&A’s with Prof. William Duggan on strategic intuition, reverse brainstorming etc., with Prof. John Broome on the ethics of climate change, with Prof. Sarah Kaplan on the origin of our cognitive frames, with Nigel Cross on the differences between abstract and concrete thinking, with Prof. Lucy Kimbell on the importance of a ‘design attitude’, with Prof. Dolly Chugh on the human foibles of bounded willpower, bounded awareness and bounded self-interest, with Prof. Ingo Walter on new alternatives for microfinance institutions, with Cary Fowler on protecting the world’s food supply via the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Prof. Heather Fraser shares insights on tackling wicked problems in healthcare.

In other words: an issue to devour.

Games, simulations, … have long entered the arena of what-if In fact they have always been in the position of luring our minds into the mode of unfocussing and thinking in terms of multiple possible outcomes, alternative scenarios, strategies etc. Ecofootprint calculators allow us to play what-if with our own (un)sustainable behaviours, GIS-enabled knowledge and simulation systems serve as decision support tools for everyone from urban planners to policymakers, etc.

In true W3 (weird-ways-of-the-web) style, we recently stumbled upon MetroQuest … an interactive scenario planning tool allowing stakeholders (e.g. in the future of a city) to experiment with the future, the outcomes of policy choices, external drivers of change etc. According to their website, MetroQuest can help:

•     Communicate complex planning concepts easily to lay people.
  
•     Generate excitement and public awareness for your initiatives.
  
•     Increase public and stakeholder participation in your planning initiatives.
  
•     Help the community develop an understanding and acceptance for policy decisions.
  
•     Create broad-based consensus for your community’s future vision.

The tool appears to be mostly focussed on quantifiable and quantitative change. Besides a process-embedded version of MetroQuest using handheld keypads in stakeholder workshops, the system also has been deployed online (see the Yellowknife and Niagara cases).

We should have known … looking at our stats: flying cars are still one of people’s favourite future subjects. So to still your hunger, check out the Icon A5. 

With space tourism being commercialized and low cost airlines booming, maybe personal flight is finally on the verge of its long-awaited breakthrough.

Via Wired, Image by Andrew Zuckerman