Institute For The Future

Super Happy Block Party Hackathon

IFTF would like to invite you to the first annual Super Happy Block Party Hackathon. If you have ever been the a hackathon before, all you need to...

Food Forests and Prosperity without Growth

Via NPR's Food Blog comes word of an urban foraging project in Seattle called the Beacon Food Forest. The concept is simple: Populate vacant space...

Video Game as Design Fiction

Design fiction is a powerful tool for helping us think about the future. Often times, the goal in creating a design fiction is to explore what a...

The Future of Medical Microwork

My lates Fast Coexist piece is available here. In it, I argue that medical microwork is emerging as a means to improve global health-as well as an...

A New Tone for Health Authority?

The Chinese government is taking a softer, more cuddly approach to marketing its one child policy, according to an article in yesterday's Gaurdian....

What’s in a Name? Strategic "Medicalization"

I recently read an interesting article in the Atlantic about the history of how we came to see alcoholism as a medical...

Rod Falcon and Philips on the Future of Aging Well

How do we age well? It's a challenge each of us will face as individuals someday, if we're not doing so already. But all over the globe, we're seeing...

Environmental Health Drones

Via Make Magazine comes word of an aerial drone that inadvertently happened upon a meat packing plant in Dallas that was polluting a nearby river with...

Gathering Experts to Explore the World of Open Fabrication

During the one-day session on April 19 at the AutoDesk Gallery, experts, researchers, and guests explored the many different frontiers where 3D...

What if Your Doctor Prescribed a Chatbot for You?

A couple weeks ago during a research meeting for our upcoming year, our colleague Lyn Jeffery challenged us to imagine a future where, at some point...

Cameroonian Engineer Invents Medical Tablet

A 24 year old Cameroonian engineer, Arthur Zang, has invented the Cardiopad, a touchscreen medical tablet used to perform tests similar to a...

Your Personal Placebo Profile

During their work on the Future of Persuasion, my colleagues in the Technology Horizons program developed the idea of a personal persuasion profile -...

The Business of Social Health and Well-being

When thinking about the future of health, it’s natural to look first at emerging technologies— indeed, part of this year’s Health Horizons research is...

Snacks are the new meals? Not exactly...(but maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing)

Could snacking do the cultural work of meals in the future?

Exploring the Future of Games and Health

IFTF was invited by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to help organize a workshop at the White House conference center on health...

Designing Health Interventions Around Our Weaknesses

My most recent Fast Coexist piece is up - taking a look at a concept I wrote about in 2010 called Embedded Health, which argues that the future of...

50 Cent and the Future of Empathetic Foods

Since one of my research beats at the Institute is to track the emergence of weird, misguided, and yet, at times, brilliant packaged foods, I'd be...

Vivian Distler, May 1965 - December 2011

IFTF has lost a dear colleague and a bright node in its network community in December. Vivian Distler, a Director of Research and Collaborative...

Pop-Up Urbanism to Build Community Health

I enjoyed, but was also a bit disappointed by, a recent Health Affairs article by David Erickson and Nancy Andrews looking at the role that community...

The Toxic Effects of Childhood Stress

The American Academy of Pediatrics released a fascinating, and potentially transformative, statement a couple of weeks ago about something that would...

Wanted: Adaptive Encouragement

It’s that time of year again. The global holiday of January 1, and with it, the annual ritual of self-improvement: setting New Year’s resolutions. ...

Avoiding Short-Term Thinking In A World of Big Data

My latest piece for Fast Company's

Replacement parts: “We can rebuild him, we have the technology”

Regenerative medicine will replace, restore, maintain, or enhance tissue and organ functions, dramatically improving patients’ health and quality of...