Institute For The Future

Femi Longe on Designing Tech for Social Change

Part I...

Can Futures Thinking Aid Conflict Resolution?

“Why is it so hard to break out of cycles of violence?” This is the question Tessa has been thinking about since she was a child. While it may seem...

3-D Pharmaceutical Printing Outside the U.S.

The Guardian has a great interview with a Scottish professor named Lee Cronin who is working on developing a system to create pharmaceuticals through...

Four Practical Ways for Leaders to Make the Future

Bob Johansen recently published the second edition of Leaders Make the Future. In the book, Bob presents an expansive ten-year forecast about the key...

Participatory Social Systems for Well-Being

One of the big stories we highlighted in last year's Ecosystems of Well-Being Map centered around participatory health, and it stems from a set of...

Using Technology to Manage Addiction to Technology

File this under the category of things that probably shouldn't be medical problems: Computer Eyes. What are computer eyes? They're what happens when...

Data Exhaust and the Future of Peer Pressure

About a month ago, I received several negative comments through Twitter about a blog post on the idea that people are beginning to threaten themselves...

20 Years from Now, You'll Have Alzheimer's

As part of our Ecosystems of Well-Being map last year, we argued that the increasing importance, as well as the increasingly confusing challenge, of...

Marina Gorbis talks Evolution of the Workforce

Watch the webcast of Marina Gorbis on Rewind with Matt Miller, originally aired June 25th, discussing the evolution of the workforce in the era of...

Product Information: What Do We Want to Know?

Recalls have made people more suspicious of food safety while a diabetes epidemic has led many to reconsider what kinds of food they eat. Increasing...

Lie Detectors Everywhere

Want to know if your son ate his vegetables? Now, based on the work of some Yale researchers, you may be able to figure out what your child, or anyone...

The Non-Ancient, Non-Secrets of Japanese Health

The Japanese people are longer-lived and healthier than Americans. Currently, that information does more to sell diet books than influence policy or...

Info Ecosystems for Well-being Conference

By the year 2020, it’s estimated we’ll have 45 times more data than we had at the beginning of this decade—an explosion of information that is often...

“Toward A Public Social Science” (2011)

“The social sciences deal with humanity’s most pressing problems, but there are barriers between practitioners and the public. We must restructure...

energyMMOWGLI, Navy Tackle Energy Challenges

Can the U.S. Navy be resourceful with fewer resources? The Navy invited the public to play energyMMOWGLI the week of May 22nd to share ideas for how...

Join Dan Ariely for talk & signing at IFTF on Tuesday, June 12

Don’t miss your opportunity to join us in Palo Alto on June 12th at noon for lunch and a book signing with Dan Ariely!Space is limited and...

The Internet Immune System

Recent news around the Stuxnet computer virus and Kapersky Lab's discovery of the Flame spyware have heightened public conversations Internet...

Recipe Networks and Combinatorial Cuisine

The field of network science continues to find new data sets for exploring technology, economics, biological systems, and social relationships. Two...

The Disruptions Facing Higher Education ...

... and How Universities are Beginning to Adapt...

Pushing the Web to the Periphery

We're spending a lot of time this year in the Institute for the Future's Technology Horizons research group thinking about how we will experience the...

How Can Games Make us Healthy? IFTF and HHS Discuss Games for Health

How can games make us healthy? On May 29th, the public joined leading experts in health and health care games—including game designer Jane McGonigal,...

Who is the Internet Human and what is the Human Internet?

For most of its history, using the Internet has involved conforming and contorting to the logic, architecture, and input/output mechanisms of machine...

What Maker Faire has to do with Leadership in the Future

If you've been to the Institute recently, you’ve probably seen this: