Institute For The Future

Is our future all sunny?

Last week, I mentioned that we're hosting a workshop:  Reinventing Our Energy Futures.  Yesterday, we kicked things off with a keynote speech by Tony...

Youth Leaders Make the Future

On June 16 from 8am-1pm, Institute for the Future and the Center for Creative Leadership will host a Train-the-Trainers module on Futures Thinking,...

Reinventing Our Energy Futures

Next week, members of IFTF's Technology Horizons research program will be attending a workshop on alternative energy called Reinventing Our Energy...

The Future of Mobile Health is Disconnected

Like an increasingly large number of people, I avoid computer, phones, and just about any other form of interaction with technology-based media when...

Collaborative Consumption and Food Distribution

Danielle Sacks' recent article on sharing has gotten a fair amount of attention, and rightly so, for providing a great overview of the sharing...

How Products Are Shaping Social Networks

I'm not typically inclined to blog about evil genius, but it's hard to know how else to describe the redesign of an e-cigarette Blue Cigs....

If This Blog Post Offends You, I Have Insurance

Worried that your edgy new advertising campaign might offend a lot more customers than it attracts? Worry no more. The CBC has a great story about a...

SIGNALS: Reprogrammable Chips, Super Corn, Transport, Robot Pharmacists, Indoor Location, Bots, NFC, Flesh, Robot Farmers

Reprogrammable Chips Could Enable Instant Gadget Upgrades (source) #TechTYFThe Battle Royale for Super Corn (source) #FoodFuturesRoadmap to a Single...

Augmented Empathy

Today, at IFTF's Technology Horizons workshop on the Future of Open Fabrication, Dominic Muren spoke on the future of manufacturing.  His presentation...

SIGNALS: Avatars, Solar, Tar Sands, Shock Wave Engine, SketchChair, Robotics, Biopunk, Algae, Virtual Currency

3-D Avatars Could Put You in Two Places at Once (source) #TechTYF #FutureOfVideoGoogle Invests $168 Million Towards the World’s Largest Solar Power...

Exploring Social Production in Education

One of the key themes of our Ten-Year Forecast retreat last month was the concept of social production - production that draws on contributions from...

SIGNALS: Obesity, Wind Farms, Eye-Tracking, Printable Buildings, Robotics Badge, Batteries, Fracking, Contagious Solar, iPads

Tackling Obesity with Neuroscience and Clever Design (source) #Neuroscience #FoodFutures #ObesityGermany May Replace 17 Nuclear Power Reactors With...

SIGNALS: Saudia Arabia, Alternative Energy, Rights After Death, UAVs

Saudi Arabia to Spend $100 Billion on Renewable Energy (source) #AltEnergySaving the Planet: Just Like Cleaning Our...

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...