Technology explicitly designed or employed in such a way as to alter people’s behaviour (in a sense, technology as a medium always does, interaction design for example makes extensive use of affordances for example) is making its way into consumer products in ever more subtle, even poetic ways. According to Wired …

“Ford and Honda’s next-gen instrument clusters feature trees (a vine in Ford’s case) that grow more lush as drivers learn to hypermile — the fine art of maximizing fuel economy. Leaves grow like crabgrass in springtime if you use a light touch on the accelerator and go easy on the brakes. Drive like Jimmie Johnson and they’ll wither faster than General Motors stock.

The idea, says Honda VP Dan Bonawitz, is “to help drivers improve their efficient driving skills by making the hybrid experience more fun and rewarding.”

The article also includes reflections by Clifford Nass, which some of you with a background in HCI or interaction design might know from the lovely book he wrote together with Byron Reeves several years ago: “The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places”

Reading such developments, one might be reminded of what B.J. Fogg once called captology, which led to Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology lab. Like any paradigm it can be used for better or worse, yet let’s be positive and imagine this kind of design thinking aimed at mentality changes applied to issues of sustainability, good citizenship, healthcare, etc. Imagine waste bins encouraging you to sort your waste, mirrors encouraging you to brush your teeth as you’re supposed to (no scifi any longer), …

Inspired by Wired

… ironing shirts, wasting energy, shortening the lifespan of your shirt’s cloth. The Swedish brand Eton shirts has developed a coatingless cotton-fibre which returns to its original shape after washing. In fact bodyheat is enough to iron your shirt as you wear it. The fibre responds to heat – not unlike shape memory alloys) – to maintain its form.

Let’s extrapolate such a development for a second: imagine a world in which no shirts need to be ironed any longer. Consequences: significant decrease of energy usage since irons no longer need to be heated, presses are no longer necessary, thereby also increasing the lifespan of the shirt since the cloth is spared from several aggressive interactions. Combine that with a waterless washing machine such as Electrolux’ Airwash system. In terms of saving the environment. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen how energy- & eco-efficient the production of the special cotton fibre (and the rest of its lifecycle) is before we can truly assess its impact. From a socio-economic perspective however – like any technological development which renders human (inter)action obsolete – the no-iron cotton fibre – if used on a large scale – might put extra stress on or obliterate ironing shops.

On a higher level of abstraction: think of all the kind of products which nowadays, because of their systemic or material makeup, require labour (implying usage of all kinds of other resources) in order to remain functional, usable etc. Windows need to be washed, houses need to be heated or cooled, etc.

What if … changes at the material/systemic level of these products, which nearly all of us use, could make these ‘wasteful cycles’ of energy. If employed at a large scale, effects (both positive and negative) of these changes can often be exponential in nature as they work their way through the chain of reactions linked to the lifecycle of the product. They alter the system of their ‘ecology’, their context (whether bio-, techno- or homosphere). Glass can be self-cleaning, houses can go without or using a minimum of heating/cooling energy, etc.

… or rather major challenges for the years to come, of which we can already see weak (and even strong) signals. Geert Noels, chief economist at the financial intelligence group Petercam, recently published a book entitled “Econoshock: how six economic shocks will fundamentally change your life”.

In an insightful wake-up call, he describes 6 megatrends to take into account as we move ahead. We highlight them in a few words:

• demoshock: demographically speaking, ageing is not the only challenge society faces, also population increase, megacities & their consequences for food, infrastructure, resources, lifestyles etc. pose tremendous challenges
• Chinashock: shifting economic & geopolitical balances, the East moves & shakes, poses threats and opportunities …
• ict-shock: developments in ICT are about to play a central role in the makeover of the new generations of the world’s energy infrastructures
• oilshock: the search for alternative sources of energy goes on and puts pressure on our systems & societies in general …
• financeshock: greed, irresponsible behaviour, no precautionary measures, no checks … just a few of the causes behind the financial collapse we are living these days. The solution lies in a reversal of these causes. hebzucht, onverantwoordelijkheid, géén voorzorgsmaatregelen, géén controles. De remedies liggen voor de hand: het omgekeerde.
• ecoshock: ecological challenges such as climate change push for major societal changes. do we need an IMF for climate? the financial crisis already cost an estimated 250bn$ (and counting), the climate shock will require at least 600bn$ 

At the inspiring Venice Architecture Biennale - this year’s edition curated by Aaron Betsky, former director of the NaI – the famous Dutch design studio Droog Design & KesselsKramer showcase S1NGLETOWN. 

S1NGLETOWN focuses on the world of contemporary singles. Its relevance is broad, as all of us are likely to belong to this group at some stage in our lives — and likely more than once. In fact, some sources predict that a third of people in developed countries will be living alone by 2026.

S1NGLETOWN is an exhibition that’s also a town, an abstract interpretation of a new kind of urban space. Visitors will be able to walk its streets and interact with its products and citizens, and view their homes.

The concept is a beautiful illustration of a persona-like approach, typecasting different types of singles and imaginatively describe their world, ways of living using their point of experience as a point of departure. Although designed in a beautiful, powerful yet fairly abstract way, one is fully immersed in this ‘view on the world’ being able to walk around in S1NGLETOWN through an exhibition.

The World Future Society recently published their top ten of future developments to keep an eye on in view of 2009 and beyond:

Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030.

Bioviolence will become a greater threat as the technology becomes more accessible. 

The car’s days as king of the road will soon be over.

Careers, and the college majors for preparing for them, are becoming more specialized.

There may not be world law in the foreseeable future, but the world’s legal systems will be networked.

The race for biomedical and genetic enhancement will — in the twenty-first century — be what the space race was in the previous century.

Professional knowledge will become obsolete almost as quickly as it’s acquired.

Urbanization will hit 60% by 2030.

The Middle East will become more secular while religious influence in China will grow.

Access to electricity will reach 83% of the world by 2030.

Honda already came up with its Puyo, begging to be touched, featuring soft curves & soft materials. BMW’s design guru Chris Bangle takes it a step further and developed Gina (Light Visionary Model), a smooth concept car covered in stretchable fabric (on top of a metal wireframe) able to shapeshift on demand. Headlights appear in a smooth motion when needed, doors open like curtains being pulled back/draped, …

“the Gina consists of a flexible ‘skin’ stretched over a metal wire structure enforced with carbon fibre. It allows the driver to change the shape of the car ‘on the fly’ – the rear spoiler can be raised, for example, while the rocker panels can effectively be bodykitted out.

It’s a similar story on the inside, where the steering wheel and instrumentation sit within the centre console and slide into position when the driver pushes the start button.”

The blob meets the car. Seamlessness, smooth morphing/shapeshifting … imagine being able to decide not only the shape of your car and change it yourself, but also its shapeshifting behavior or the characteristics (e.g. stiffness, colour, ) of the material itself. Could smart cars – as body and skin become ever more flexible in design – anticipate upon impact when a collision becomes unavoidable and shapeshift into a form optimized to minimize damage? Fascinating.

Via TopGear & Dezeen

On the basis of co-creation and open innovation ideas the Dutch Favelafabric launched the “Future of entertainment” initiative. Aimed primarily at young digital natives, they decided to set up a three-stage system to involve the core user group of their yet to be designed online music service in the conceptualization of it.

Stage 1: How do you experience (finding & getting, playing & experiencing, organizing & sharing,  creating & promoting music)?

Stage 2: What are your ideas on … ?

Stage 3: Best ideas

An incentive system dubbed Sharepoints, allows the top 100 most (pro)active contributors to take part in the profit of the new service (total of 5% of profit generated in first 12months after launch or 1m € max. to be distributed proportionally among top 100). New ideas/experiences, voting other ideas, giving feedback each allow contributors to earn Sharepoints.

$100.000-$60.000 today (in 4 weeks time), maybe $5.000 (in 24h) by the end of the year, possibly $100 or less by 2012. That is how much it will cost to sequence your full genome.

Low price means high accessibility. Full genome sequencing will be the 21st century’s blood & urine sample. Your ‘personal map’, your ‘personal risk profile’, your ‘personal manual’ for the price of 10 music albums on iTunes. It takes no genius to see the far reaching consequences of such a development in terms of both possibilities as well as responsibilities.

Complete Genomics and BioNanoMatrix joined up to make it happen … fast!

The method and technology developed by BioNanoMatrix is able to sequence long strands of DNA, up to 2.000.000 letters in length currently and rising, and looks at physical location as well as sequence information at the same time, saving loads of computational time as well. The method and technology is being enhanced now to allow for much longer strands of DNA.

“Further speeding up the process with novel chemistry and advances in nanofabrication, the companies will develop a device that can simultaneously read the sequence of multiple genomes on a single chip.”

Via NextBigFuture

Why can’t you plug a version 2.0 component into your car to replace that 1.9b or why can’t you exchange a diesel engine for a gas one? Why can’t you do that? Because it wasn’t designed as such: neither the notion of car-consumption, nor the car itself.

Several collaborative car design initiatives are seeking to redesign the car: to make it smarter, make it cleaner, make it cooler.

We already wrote about Markus Merz & Co’s OScar a while ago, but also check out the Society for Sustainable Mobility’s Open Source Green Vehicle Project, aka Kernel with its modular (nearly) ‘hot-swappable’ design. Or have a look at the Vehicle Design Summit‘s goal to collaboratively build a plugin-hybrid, low-cost, 200-mpg four seater for the Indian market. Also the big boys are in: Sabic‘s set up C,mm,n, an open-source car project ran by 3 three technical universities in the Netherlands. Then there is always the (Progressive) Automotive X Prize Foundation putting $10 million on the table for any team that comes up with a practical mass-producable car getting at least 100mpg (see also here).

As one can notice most initiatives focus on energy (if not fuel) efficiency, some also focus on materials, while few take a full 360° view on production, consumption, waste cycles etc. They are all still counting in gallons, the cars still look like ‘todays cars’. This both means that the threshold for people to switch to such a ‘car’ will be low, yet it also shows how the traditional concept of a car as we know it remains unaltered, hence raising the question as to where the real long view lies. Radical innovation is needed and efforts in this direction thus ought to question deeper lying assumptions of what a car is, could and should be.

Via FastCompany
Image by OSGV

As has been shown, our awareness of our planet, our ecosystem, our society, our behaviour etc. changed dramatically from the moment we were able to observe Mother Earth from the outside, from space. We could suddenly link what we experienced ‘down here’ with what we saw from ‘up there’. Our outer and inner perspective suddenly became linked as we were looking at the bigger pictures of ourselves from outer space. It are these kinds of feedback loops which propell human insight forward.

Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, recognized such feedback loops as core to all intelligent systems. His findings formalized the notion of feedback and influenced a wide variety of fields ranging from engineering to computer science, from biology and philosophy to social sciences looking at the organization of society.

In his latest TED talk, neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms shows how his company Omneuron is using advanced fMRI technologies to look at the happenings inside our brain in real time, in 3D. The sheer possibility of looking at what we think, feel, do ‘up there’, opens up a whole new era of discovery and remediation (e.g. chronic pain control). Psychiatry, pharmaceuticals, surgery were three major categories of treatment. Now there is a fourth. Check out the video here.

Advances in neurofeedback technologies and treatments have already shown some of the ways in which increased awareness of our brains’ activities can be used to enhance training, revalidation and for other purposes as well (e.g. gaming).

Think ahead. Imaging techniques are advancing rapidly and molecular imaging is all the hype now. Think about zooming in from brain to brain area to cell level. Which new pathways does this open up?

Image courtesy of the University of Oxford’s FMRIB Centre

The European association of plastics manufacturers, Plastics Europe, … commissioned UK futurist Ray Hammond to write a book about the world in 2030, with a special focus on the challenges for plastics.

Changing demographics, extreme weather conditions, peak-oil, resource-conflicts, surveillance society, hyperreal leisure time, robots, sustainable globalisation, healthcare revolution, virtual companions, biodigital interfaces, the global brain, new retailing, …

A summary of the book including a first response of the plastics industry on the challenges ahead, can be found here.

The Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews with editors of major newspaper agencies across the world on the future of journalism.

The questions are:

“How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn’t exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

In journalism’s multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

Do you consider that the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?”

Other questions people might wonder about re: the future of journalism: would the role of newspapers and news agencies in the world change in the future? will the notion of newsvalue change? in other words, will disaster, scandal and negative news still fill more pages than good news? will freedom of press and neutrality of voice be things that can still be taken for granted in the future? could language become richer (and correct) again? who will win: depth and quality or mere speed and quantity? will we be able to have a 360° ‘read’ of events, described and discussed from a variety of perspectives? will mergers and acquisitions in the media landscape flatten or enrich reporting? will the two way street between consumer and producer of content, or prosumers for that matter, receive ever more traffic? which new evolutions in their field do journalists dream of? which are the nightmares they fear? who will be the arbiters of quality tomorrow? how will the relationship between fact, opinion & intention evolve? which new skills will journalists of the future need to learn/develop? how will the value set of journalists evolve and differ from those of former days? …

Interviewed until now are Emily Bell (Guardian.co.uk, UK), Dan Bogler (Financial Times, UK), Jonathan Landman (NY Times, US), Abdul Hamid Ahmad (Gulf News, Dubai), Jaroslaw Kurski (Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland), Pana Janviroj (The Nation, Thailand), Pankaj Paul (The Hindustan Times, India), Mike van Niekerk (Fairfax Media, Australia), Azu Ishiekwene (Punch, Nigeria), Ed Greenspon (Globe & Mail, Canada), Jim Brady (WashingtonPost.com, US). Yes, we do miss our Belgian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian, … newspaper.

Regenerative medicine is gaining momentum. The Department of Defense announced the launching of a new 5-year initiative to boost developments in the field, entitled “the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM)”.

“The newly established Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, known by the acronym AFIRM, will serve as the military’s operational agency for the effort [...]  A key component of the initiative is to harness stem cell research and technology in finding innovative ways to use a patient’s natural cellular structure to reconstruct new skin, muscles and tendons, and even ears, noses and fingers [...]“

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, S. Ward Casscells, expects full functional regeneration of fingers and toes within 5 years. AFIRM is a partnership between the University of Pittsburgh’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Both will act as co-leaders in the initiative and receive half of the total grant of $85 million to develop new treatments for wounded soldiers. The teams working on the project include collaborators from 15 other institutions. Director of the McGowan Institute, Allan J. Russell, will co-direct AFIRM (see Alan’s inspiring TED talk here).

Several medical fields are aiming for regenerative solutions to avoid rejection of foreign tissue, prostheses, etc. In the field of oral care for example, UK-based Odontis is searching to grow entire replacement teeth. Other initiatives, such as that by Prof. Sally Marshall at the University of California are looking for solutions to remineralize parts of teeth (see here).

The road is long but every small success, because of its profound impact on the quality of lives of people, will revolutionize the medical field in the broad sense.

The Bank of America teams up MIT’s MediaLab to set up a Center for Future Banking. The new center will operate with a $3-5m annual budget for a period of five years and

“… explore new ideas in banking by inventing technologies that reveal and leverage insights across a wide range of physical and social scales, from one-on-one customer interactions to global transactions. Researchers will address such questions as: ‘How can every customer be empowered with the knowledge and tools to take better control of their financial futures?’ ‘How will banking interactions evolve as a customer’s physical and virtual worlds become completely intertwined?’ and ‘How will social networks and mobile platforms transform customers’ banking experiences, making it easier, more convenient, and better integrated with their daily lives?’.”

Prof. Deb Roy, Chair of MIT’s academic program in media arts & sciences who will lead the project, says:

“We will create a focus of intellectual energy that brings together researchers with radically different perspectives, including behavioral economists, social scientists, computer scientists, psychologists, designers, and others who share a passion for invention. It’s a recipe for producing unexpected new ideas that will trigger significant innovations in the world of banking.”

The world of banking is changing drastically, not only from within, but in major ways also under influence of external developments, which pose new challenges for existing players in the field as well as opportunities for new ones. For example, on the ‘cheap end of innovation’, discount banks popping up everywhere are forcing many players to change their businesses and offer added value in new innovative ways. Worldwide, local and networked communities are stepping up to fill gaps left by the business players and open new markets, introduce new (or redress old) models also in the banking sector. While still marginal now, initiatives such as Zopa, a p2p online loan bank, or community bank Umpqua (experience-designed by Ziba), but also initiatives such as the Grameen Foundation‘s microfinancing model (see also a previous post), the Children’s Development Bank by Butterflies in India, investing in kidpreneurs show the changing face of banking and the mechanisms behind it. As customers become pickier and more demanding, technology offers new possibilities and banks realize customer-centred reasoning pas off, many future-oriented initiatives of existing banks are focusing on improving the overall customer experience through better, more human-centred design of their spaces and products. See for example Deutsche Bank’s Q110 bank of the future. They also aim to enhance simplicity, flexibility and customer enjoyment.

Feel free also to check out this (slightly dated) IBM podcast on the future of banking (or read the transcript).

Inspired by the X-Club, our fellow future explorers over at IFTF launched the X2 project a while ago. This ‘open’, collective research initiative aims to

“identify major trends and disruptions in science, technology, and the practice of science over the next twenty years and their impacts on the larger society.”

IFTF previously also conducted the UK’s Office of Science and Innovation’s Deltascan,  creating a database and map of trends and forecasts regarding the 50-year future of science and technology.