Institute For The Future

We Know What You Want

As someone who spends most of his waking hours listening to Pandora, I haven't just accepted the idea that algorithms can get me what I want, but...

SIGNALS: Medical Data, Wind, Solar, Milk, Displays, Water, Energy, Leaf, Robots, Climate Change, Cyborgs

Thomas Goetz TED Talk: It is Time to Redesign Medical Data (source) #MedicalData #VisualizationUS Wind Energy Installations Collapsed in...

The Future of the Value of Data

Some of the more interesting questions that emerge from using advanced analytics and algorithms to drive our understandings of health surround a...

SIGNALS: space junk, 3d printing, biosensors, neuroscience, personhood, nuclear, darpa, resiliency, printable insects

NASA Working On Laser System To Zap and ‘Displace’ Space Junk (Source) #FreeSpace #TechTYF3D printing method advances electrically small antenna...

Engineering Health Care—HC2020 Perspective

Accelerating the Process of Change...

From Personalized to Empathetic Technologies

There's a lot to like about Eli Pariser's recent TED talk about the ways in which algorithms designed to personalize our experiences of digital...

SIGNALS: battery, robots, 3D printing, kidney, biofuel, LED, Wave Disk, Phase Change Memory

New Sumitomo Electric Battery 90% Cheaper Than Lithium Ion (Source) #AltEnergyOur depressing robot overlords (Source) #IFTFRobotsEADS's Airbike is a...

The Right to (Local) Food Risks

Local food activism typically involves demanding healthier food as part of local services, attempting to create healthier, more connected local food...

Makerbot Day 5 (Part 1/2): It's Alive! (sort of)

I have no doubt that February 26 will go down in history as a momentous day. On Saturday morning, after an evening spent fine tuning the current of my...

US Government Exploring Health and Identity Information Ecologies

It's satisfying to see that since IFTF's recently released 2008-2009 research: Health and Health Care 2020 Perspective Report, containing my own short...

Tools for Understanding Well-Being Ecosystems

Popular Science has a great article examining the future of understanding health ecosystems. As the story's author Virginia Hughes describes it,...

SIGNALS: Adaptive Power, AltEnergy, TechTYF, Persuasion, IFTFRobots, KidsTech

Beijing to pinpoint and trail citizens via cellphone (Source) #AdaptivePowerARPA-E: How the Government Agency With a Name Out of Lost Could "Win the...

Neurocentric Health: Moving into the Mainstream

In our recent research, the Health Horizons program has been tracking the continuing maturity of what we call neurocentric health--the idea that the...

What is the Relationship Economy?

Today, IFTF Research Affiliate, Jerry Michalski came to IFTF to share about his work on the Relationship Economy.  The next social and industrial...

Religious Nudges: Sabbath App

 At sundown this Friday, March 4 the 2011 US National Day of Unplugging will begin (powered by Reboot).   Think slow, think sabbath (Abraham Heschel...

SIGNALS: Language, Retail, FabFutures, AltEnergy, TV, Water, TechTYF, Medicine, Noble Gases, Collaborative Consumption

The Future Tense (Source) #FutureOfLanguage Consumers Hold On to Products Longer (Source) #FutureOfRetailKinect as 3D scanner: Fabricate...

The Future of Food Experiments

A couple months ago, I happened upon a flier for something called Micro Beekeeping. The premise of micro beekeeping is pretty simple - the proprietor,...

SIGNALS: Fab Futures, Risk, Alt Energy, Packaging, Adaptive Power, Coal, Wind

3D-Printed Skin Could Revolutionize Treatment for Burn Victims (Source) #FabFuturesYou will commit a crime in the future (Source) #RiskAssessmentDirty...

The Rise of the Therapeutic City--HC2020 Perspective

Therapeutic City

MakerBot Day 4: It Takes a World to Make a MakerBot

You may have noticed that, four posts into this series exploring life with a MakerBot, I've yet to actually print anything with my Thing-O-Matic. To...

Three Lessons from Genetics for Thinking about the Future

There have been a lot of great articles looking back at the history of genetic sequencing to mark the ten-year anniversary of the sequencing of the...

SIGNALS: Turing Test, Regenerative Medicine, Pakistan, Coal, Spy Plane, Carbon, Energy, Kinect

Mind vs.

4 Lessons from Gaming in a Corporate Context

This is a question I've heard a lot over the past couple of years.  Based on aggregated lessons from the corporate games of which I've been a part,...

Maker Bot Day 4: Spaceship Thing-O-Matic

Sometimes, when I am really and truly immersed in something, I find myself making some truly banal, self evident non sequitur, but then treating them...