Institute For The Future

The Fascinating Future of Cloud Diagnosis

Via a slightly old article in Good Magazine comes word of a great student project out of Australia called StethoCloud that is aimed at using the...

At Talkoot, Small Makes for Big Changes

On July 30-31, the Institute for the Future, in collaboration with Aalto University in Finland, invited a dozen practical visionaries to reveal the...

Anya Kamenetz Tells What's in Store for Education

Author Anya Kamenetz came in recently and presented some hard truths on education. First of all it is wildly expensive. Second, it is not accessible...

Designing Tech for Social Change Part II

If you missed Part I, click here....

Hacking Security at Toorcamp

You might expect that a hacker camp, like Toorcamp, is full of shady individuals who want to break into your computer and steal your data. Often...

Aligning Business and Community Interests: A Recipe for Hope in Volatile Times

Robert H. Girling’s latest book, The Good Company, uniquely sets the business in the broader context of its relationship with people, the environment...

The Great American Hacker Camp

Toorcamp is a social technology event populated by hackers and makers, held at Neah Bay in Washington state. I am writing from the fog covered...

eSports: The Future of Entertainment?

On the weekend of July 30th, 2011, 20,000 spectators turned up for an event held in the Anaheim Convention Center.  This was no sporting event, at...

Machine-Motivated Ethical Behavior

I'm a fan of technology that gives people more latitude in their social and physical relationships. We live in societies (and environments) laced with...

Civic Labs: Bangalore

Bangalore, Karnataka, IndiaOn June 16th Civic Labs: Bangalore...

The Sharing Economy and the Future of Food

My latest Fast CoExist piece is up and it looks at the challenge of thinking about how to use practices around sharing to rebalance a global food...

Learning in the Algorithmic Age

Not long ago, I wanted to consider how we could provide better tools for foresight, insight and action for individual people to use in their everyday...

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...