We have almost reached the end of the year which means list-time … Our fellow future-gazers over at SocialTechnologies asked themselves the following question:

“What will likely be the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs with significant commercial value and impacts on the lives of consumers out to 2025?”

In order to answer it they put together a global focus group of experts in the areas of business, technology and innovation, including members of the Association of Professional Futurists, Tekes, Duke University, Hasbro, Worldwatch, General Motors, Shell, Johnson Controls, Oxford University, and others.

The following list of twelve was the result:

1. personalized medicine
2. distributed energy
3. pervasive computing
4. nanomaterials
5. biomarkers for health
6. biofuels
7. advanced manufacturing
8. universal water
9. carbon management
10. engineered agriculture
11. security and tracking
12. advanced transportation

Via ChangeWaves

Images of the future are littered with multi-layered (mega)cityscapes, highways in the sky, across buildings, underground pipelines for transport of people, data and goods. The main driver? As population increases, people expect space for living, for mobility etc. to decrease below acceptable levels. In other words, the savanna in which our human species grew up and shaped its senses and being, made room for an urban jungle about to suffocate us. If we are not careful and do not start thinking in terms of more sustainable and flexible designs, the fragile balance between ‘the city advantage’ vs. ‘our innate and societal need for space’ risks to tip towards the deep end.

When you lack space you try to compress the things you need the space for, get rid of them entirely or look for space elsewhere as in in the sky, in space, or … underground. According to some, it is one of the only areas of refuge and salvation for sustainable cities in the future. Think: underground construction sites, geothermal energy, groundwater-management, transport, waste-recycling and -upcycling, etc.

On December 14th the Netherlands Centre for Underground Construction will be organizing a Festival of Underground Space. Check out the fascinating preliminary programme here.

One of the most visible innovations in the building industry of the last years in terms of materials is undoubtedly Aron Losonczi’s LitraCon, the translucent material combining the strength of concrete with the translucency of glass fibres.

At the same time, the window industry has seen the arrival of self-cleaning glass. Similar techniques are used in other active materials which break down pollutants in the air or surface dirt into water and oxygen. Also in terms of energy-generation, developments in nanotechnology for example are increasing feasibility and efficiency of photovoltaic films incorporated in windows.

While these materials are already on or close to market, one can expect a wide range of new composite materials, intelligent materials and systems to alter our built environment significantly in the coming years. The search for a more sustainable future in terms of dealing with challenges concerning waste, energy, water etc. is accelerating developments in the related field(s).

Image courtesy of LitraCon

Via ExtendLimits

Bryant Rousseau of Architectural Record interviews William Mitchell, Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and director of MIT’s Design Laboratory, author of fascinating books such as e-topia: Urban Life, Jim—But Not As We Know It and ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked city. Mitchell speaks about future challenges for our cities, for the architectural profession, etc. Check out the video and/or read onwards.

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The World Future Society recently released their Futurist Outlook 2008 report, sketching some major trendlines concerning times ahead, as seen through the eyes of their futurist memberbase. In an article titled “The Good Old-fashioned World Future Society”, Bruce Sterling distilled some of the most significant trends covered in the report (see also here for more info on the freely available top ten):

1. a million billionaires by 2025
2. technologies will revolutionize the textile and fashion industries
3. war with China and/or Russia might become a bigger threat to US foreign policy than terrorism
4. counterfeiting pressure on traditional currency might speed up the move to a cashless society
5. our planet is on the verge of a major extinction event (cf. strong decrease of biodiversity)
6. water will be to the 21st century what oil was for the 20th
7. healthier and longer-living people might lead to larger world population growth than expected (by 2050)
8. Africans threatened by floods likely to increase 70-fold by 2080
9. the Arctic becomes a new focal point in the rush to exploit natural resources, as prices rise and availability decreases
10. more decisions will be made by non-human entities (cf. networks, robots, AI etc.)

Via Wired

We know, in terms of impact on our environment, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves (ever calculated your footprint?). Industry, companies, organizations are doing a lot more to lower their environmental impact than we individuals and families do. We are living on too large a footprint each and every day and changing our habits is hard.

Colin Beavan is taking things seriously however and started a year long experiment to live as NoImpactMan, or in Colin’s own terms:

“A Guilty Liberal Finally Snaps, Swears Off Plastic, Goes Organic, Becomes A Bicycle Nazi, Turns Off His Power, Composts His Poop and, While Living In New York City, Generally Turns Into a Tree-Hugging Lunatic Who Tries to Save the Polar Bears and The Rest of the Planet from Environmental Catastrophe While Dragging His Baby Daughter and Prada-Wearing, Four Seasons-Loving Wife Along for the Ride”

This basically means: only local food, transport by foot or tricycle, no electricity, no heating, …

Colin notes correctly on his blog that living a true zero impact life is utopian. One aims to combine doing less harm and doing good to arrive at a net zero footprint.

Key to understanding footprint is thinking in terms of the whole chain of events from resource(s) to waste and beyond. This is something we still have to get used to and the complexity of our world makes for some surprising results. According to some researchers for example, walking to work or to your shop actually damages the planet more than driving there (cf. Times article). After all walking requires energy, energy we get from food, food that is increasingly produced in highly energy-intensive ways.

Via ABC News

With astonishment (and envy) we often watch how nifty and elegant nature is at tackling its challenges. After billions of years of evolution, nature has learnt what works, what works best, what lasts …

As we face some serious complex challenges of our own (e.g. finding an alternative for oil) however, we realize we do not have the time to ‘evolve’ a solution in the same way or ‘copy-paste’ a solution found in nature to our field of application as it is.  The environment sets the pace for evolutionary change … As we gain ever more grip on chemical and biological processes, however, it has always been only a matter of time before we would try to tinker with the process and speed of evolution itself.

Scientists at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School laboratory, recently succeeded in using accelerated evolution to develop a new enzyme, an RNA ligase that catalyzes a reaction joining two types of RNA chains. A forward look leads one to note that :

“Evolution by selection between whole organisms is too slow a way to turn up better designs. Computer simulations and automated lab equipment that generates more real life variations of proteins will some day allow us to search much more deeply through the space of all possible protein shapes to turn up much better genes. In order to give ourselves higher performing bodies we will some day replace some human genes with variants found in labs.” 

See also the example of cellulosic ethanol or cellulosic biofuels in general, where we are challenged to produce enzymes to break down cellulose cheaply enough at an industrial scale and speed. Different approaches under investigation include genetic engineering a supermicrobe to do the job, use directed evolution to ‘improve’ upon existing microorganisms that produce such enzymes naturally, search the planet for better micro-workhorses. Wired notes:

“It’s bio-construction versus bio-tinkering versus bio-prospecting, all with the single goal of creating the perfect enzyme cocktail.”

The present can be a great stimulant to think about the future. A high emotional response to the rights and wrongs today is a powerful way to enhance contrast between the present and the future, to think further ahead, to be less bound by today’s reality, while staying in context.

John Berger once said: “We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.” Edward Burtynsky chose to look at our planet there where our impact on its landscape is strongly visible. He lets us look through his eye and judge for ourselves.

As a movie, Manufactured landscapes won the 2007 Genie Award for Best Documentary. Some of the amazing imagery reminds of Godfrey Reggio’s famous Qatsi trilogy.

Photo by Edward Burtynsky

Finally got it online, Serge. Thanks again for the pointer.

The future of agriculture is a much debated issue: eco-footprint, spatial footprint, bio-mass and bio-fuel production, …
A recent BBC article relaunched the idea of vertical farming. Think: skyscrapers built to grow and process food on location, e.g. downtown Manhattan (instead of importing it by land, sea or air). Columbia University Professor Dickson Despommier sees several advantages:

• Year round crop production in a controlled environment
• All produce would be organic as there would be no exposure to wild parasites and bugs
• Elimination of environmentally damaging agricultural runoff
• Food being produced locally to where it is consumed
• [...] vertical farming would allow some existing traditional farms to be returned to natural forests. Good news in a time of global warming.

Many people in the low countries will experience it as a kind of déjà-vu. The idea is reminiscent of the Dutch architectural firm Maas-van Rijs-de Vries’ (better known as MVRDV) pig cities.

Image courtesy of MVRDV

Guy Negre’s engine running on compressed air – which we blogged about a while ago – is picking up steam. Belgian entrepreneur Jan Peetermans appears to have bought a license to start producing cars featuring Negre’s engine. Among other models, he plans to release a 4.000€ model by next year. The production process will be similar to that of the airplane-industry, featuring polyester and aluminium as basic construction materials. Furthermore, MDI’s cars will be produced worldwide but locally, through a licensing scheme. Transport costs both in terms of money as well as ecologically can hence be drastically reduced at production level as well.

Via De Standaard, picture by MDI

NewScientist reports on a giant microwave project in which plastics are ‘zapped’ back into oil and gas. Not only does it help to repurpose materials into fuel, by breaking down the hydrocarbon links it also aids in separating composited materials (e.g. plastic wire-covering, car-parts, tires, etc.) into basic component materials (e.g. hydrogen, petroleum as fuel and gas, steel).

“Anything that has a hydrocarbon base will be affected by our process,” says Jerry Meddick, director of business development at GRC, based in New Jersey. “We release those hydrocarbon molecules from the material and it then becomes gas and oil.”

Whatever does not have a hydrocarbon base is left behind, minus any water it contained as this gets evaporated in the microwave.

Global Resource Corporation developed the Hawk-10 apparatus, of which a first will be delivered to a scrap-metal processor. A video of the process can be viewed here.

In a way the installation potentially could help to close the loop in material lifecycles by breaking down hydrocarbon-links, returning the material to more basic building-bricks. Cradle-to-cradle philosophies encourage returning materials to their original components (as found as resources in nature), quantitatively as well as qualitatively. The latter is often the challenge (cf. recycling vs. downcycling). In this sense, the question is – aside from side-products and side-effects – whether the resulting fuel is merely a new product which can be used to be burnt, or whether it is truly ‘back to basics’.

Via NewScientist

Utopian cities, few ever get built and the track-record of success of those that did get built is subject to strong debate (e.g. Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia). (For a historical overview of ideal cities, be sure to check out Ruth Eaton’s fascinating book ‘Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)built environment’.) New challenges and a more integrative worldview and tools (cf. Arup’s homebrewn integrated resource model software) in the process of design are advancing new solutions for new city design and development. Which better place to look than China …

“We have to make cities, as much as we can, future proof” says Alejandro Gutierrez, one of Arup‘s top architects & urban designers working on the design of an eco-sensitive city or rather ‘eco-system’ Dongtan (‘East Beach’) for China’s ChongMing Island, near Shanghai. Arup shows itself brave and determined in addressing the challenge, by taking a different angle on the design than some of its peers (some of the world’s leading architectural offices). Gutierrez’ critique: “[...] they’re not addressing the central problem of this age — resource efficiency — and how it relates to cultural, social, and economic development.”

The futureproofed eco-city will feature an 80% efficient (fuel conversion) renewable energy plant (in the centre) running on rice husks and piping waste heat directly throughout the city, a plug-in energy grid with smaller biomass, wind and solar energy infrastructure, underground ‘plant factories’ (highly-productive organic food growth), a linear public transit corridor, a twin water network (for drinking and for flushing), consolidation warehouses where trucks from the mainland ‘plug-in’, zero-emission transport, waste recycling and waste-to-energy conversion. “It’s a green island that shows you can decouple economic development from environmental impact”

Arup, not unfamiliar with foresight or scenario studies (see also here), also seems to have looked into a few scenarios (of use) for their Dongtan city with a tourism-inflated city on the dark side of the spectrum and a sustainable labs/industries mixed work/live/recreational environment on the brighter side.

Dongtan has been designed as a sustainable city from the ground up, or rather, from scratch, but the world is littered with existing and growing megacities. When Gutierrez says “We can program into its [Shanghai] DNA a sustainable growth pattern”, the greater challenge for large cities around the world can be reformulated as a need for a kind of gene therapy to alter the DNA of our existing cities. How can we turn London, New York, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Tokio, Brussels (we know it’s not that big, but we’d love to see Europe’s (and our) capital as a sustainable example) etc. into more sustainable infrasociostructures.

Obviously large cities face challenges far beyond mere energy and resource efficiency. Sustainability also has a socio-cultural, economic, political-institutional side. As they grow, city complexity increases and we are challenged to come up with ever more clever solutions. At TED 2006, Steven Johnson gave a talk about John Snow’s famous cholera map for the city of London and the following changes this triggered in the way people thought about the relationship between cities’ ‘sustainability’ and the (upper limits of) number of inhabitants. Other TED talks of interest with respect to the topic of sustainable cities are those of William McDonough and Robert Neuwirth.

Inspired by Wired

Bruce Sterling coined the term ‘spime‘ to denote his vision of a future generation of objects following the convergence of a set of technologies and insights, objects that we shall be able to track in space and time throughout their lifecycle. Aside from new functions for the objects themselves and new modes of interaction, spimes could also help bring about a more sustainable world (think: tracking materials, conditions, usage, etc.).

On April 30th, Bruce gave a lecture together with Scott Klinker, a 3D designer in residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, on the topic of spimes and the possible future they might bring about. Their talk can be viewed online at Google Video. Interestingly enough, the video contains an invitation “to team-up with Google to create a short documentary film that would portray a speculative future of life with SPIMES. Distributed online, this short film would convey the look and feel of SPIME scenarios as a provocation for widespread industry discussion about the new potentials of ubiquitous, ambient, searchable, geolocative products.”

Companies, labs and enthusiasts around the world are shaping up the so-called Internet of things, a world of blogjects.

Shout-outs for an alternative way to measure progress, to move beyond the too-unilateral GDP, are sounding louder throughout the world. Spurred by the need to decouple the link between economic progress and ecological disaster, as well as a growing awareness of socio-democratic unequality, of the gap between wellbeing vs. welfare … all elements slipping under the radar of or hiding behind the gross domestic product index, call for alternative ways to measure and compare progress in the world.

The past decades several attempts have been made to change the way we measure, compare and see progress, but none of the instruments so far has managed to achieve a worldwide accepted and objective status. The underlying methodologies continue to be up for debate.

To mention but a few examples: the happy planet index, the UN’s Human Development Index, the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, the General Progress Indicator, etc.

When assessing future scenarios many discussions related to measuring, monitoring and comparing evolving situations often come up. Often people feel the urge to connect qualitative and quantitative data. What one wishes to measure, what one really measures, how one does it, what it means, how relationships possibly change over time, etc. make these discussions interesting but also very complex.

Siemens published another report in their ‘Pictures of the future’ series. Among other subjects, the Spring 2007 issue looks at the following themes:

Livable Megacities: Moscow, St.Petersburg, Chicago, London, Curitiba, … mobility, clean water, lighting, noise prevention, security, households.

Molecular Medicine: microscopic miracles , dissecting disease machines, in vitro & in vivo diagnostics, detecting cancer with ultrasound, molecular therapies, visualizing tumor growth, combining images with lab results, data analysis, interview with Prof. Ralph Weissleder on tomorrow’s treatments

Technology for the environment: persuasion, our vanishing options, sources of greenhouse gases, cutting emissions, energy efficiency saving fortunes for cities, working smart in China, zero-emission power plants, fuel cell power plants, energy from waste,  earth-wind-fire-water energy, green transportation, water treatment solutions