Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences—the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of “makers” is boldly voiding warranties to tweak, hack, and customize the products they buy. And what they can’t purchase, they build from scratch. Meanwhile, flexible manufacturing technologies on the horizon will change fabrication from massive and centralized to lightweight and ad hoc.

The future is everything we can imagine: the fearsome, the inspiring, the inexplicable, the essential. 40 years ago, our founders imagined a world in which it would be possible to improve human lives and build better institutions by thinking systematically about the future. Today, we call this practice "Foresight to Insight to Action."

This map is a dynamic work-in-progress, and will likely change throughout the year. Stay tuned for updates.

Health costs continue to skyrocket in industrialized countries. Populations are living longer and are subject to a greater number of chronic conditions such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. More people are considering the ethical implications of a consumer-based global economy in general (think of global warming and other ecological disasters) and scientific advances in biotechnology in particular (think of the debates on genetically modified foods and cloning).

Information overload has become a cliche. We use the phrase half-jokingly to describe the stress associated with the onslaught of media that digital technology has unleashed on us. The sobering reality is that we ain't seen nothin' yet. The vast majority of new information technologies are either built for data acquisition (e.g., sensor networks and camera phones) or information dissemination (e.g., blogs, RSS, location-enhanced media, and aware environments).

Over the next 15–20 years we will overcome limits in availability of our computational resources. While today, high-performance computing applications are mostly limited to capital-intensive industries like petroleum exploration, aircraft and automotive design, and pharmaceuticals, over time these capabilities will migrate to mass markets and eventually into the hands of consumers. In this world of abundant computing, our interactions with computers will no longer be constrained to laptops, desktops, and handhelds.

The coming decade is the embarking. Spurred by unavoidable signs of a planet at risk, we begin to look for new ways of living, new ways of measuring and valuing the world around us. What was marginal begins to look mainstream, as people who have been tending the edges of our global culture demand our attention and capture our imagina- tions with unexpected templates for what is possible when the familiar order isn’t quite so orderly.

The future is a passage through worlds we’ve yet to imagine.

Human transitions are accomplished through passages—whether culturally sanctioned personal rites of passage or huge migrations that, only in retrospect, can be seen as movements from one way of life to another. These passages are often stormy, frightening, chaotic. They call on previously untapped human abilities, both personal and cultural, to navigate through worlds that appear to be disintegrating, hopefully to put the pieces back together in a new configuration, a new kind of living.

Three articles:

• Open Source Molecular Biology (Jody Ranck)
• Anytime, Anyplace Delivery in Health Care (Richard Adler)
• Eco-Health Literacy (David Kaisel)

For most of our history, humans have treated Nature as a gigantic warehouse and commissary. The natural world has been a source of raw materials, food, and other resources. Today, rapid advances in biological science and the growth of nanotechnology are taking that inspiration to a new level and driving the creation of a new field: intentional biology. Intentional biology, and its two main subfields biomimicry and synthetic biology, treat nature not as a source of raw materials, but as source and code.

Every day brings new evidence of the planet’s urban transformation. And this demographic transformation to a world of cities is only halfway complete: by the time it has run its course in 2050, one of every three people worldwide will be living in a slum. But there are reasons for hope in the world’s slums, as these extreme environments are creating crucibles for innovation. While multiple forces threaten to destabilize these newest and largest cities, they are also driving adaptations that combine new technologies and new forms of organization.

A technology or tool must meet a need or desire or help alleviate a problem to be used on a regular basis, and thus create a successful market for itself. To understand the changing landscape of needs, desires, fears, and pains in some of the world’s largest and most dynamic places—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Silicon Valley (what we are calling BRIC+S)—this report describes the key "zones of instability" facing ordinary families.

In 1988, Mark Weiser laid the foundation for what he called the third wave of computing. The first wave was mainframe computing, followed by the second wave of desktop computing. The third wave, would be a kind of ubiquitous computing—in which technology would recede into the background of our lives. The world is now on the brink of this third wave, and at the heart of it is something we might call context awareness.

We need only to pick up a magazine or turn on the news to see that there is a furor about obesity. From the halls of public health and corporate boardrooms to tabloid newspapers and women’s magazines people are talking about obesity. A social response is shaping up that is poised to move private behavior into the public domain and broaden the target of intervention from the individual to both the individual and the social, physical, and food environments. Over the next decade, this response to obesity will influence the environments in which we do business and pursue health.

In 2005, the U.K. Government’s Office of Science and Technology asked us to take a comprehensive look at the future of science and technology 10, 20, and 50 years out.

Imagine that every movement of the body is a potential means of control, where a wave of the hand casts a spell or fights off an enemy. Imagine, as this graffiti suggests, if the streets actually were alive with hidden layers of stuff, waiting for someone to come along and use it in entirely new ways. These what-if scenarios begin to describe the world of what we call context-aware gaming. A context-aware game uses physical and digital information about the current status of the player to shape how the game is played.

Health benefits increasingly define consumer value. With more responsibility for the cost of their health care, people are turning to the broader marketplace for solutions rather than just the traditional health care delivery system. this trend is accompanied by an expansion of what it means to be healthy, what is considered therapeutic, and what is an appropriate site for intervention or treatment.

A decade of shapeshifting. The material and the digital worlds have traditionally struggled against each other, each working to overcome the constraints or mimic the affordances of the other. Now, pervasive technologies are bringing about a partnership between the material and digital, and the relationships among humans, machines, and environments are becoming more tightly interconnected and interdependent.

Global health matters to a wide range of stakeholders for pragmatic as well as idealistic reasons. The human and economic costs of disease are substantial, whether they derive from infections, environmental causes, or structural issues such as poverty, lack of education, or armed conflict. One tool for usefully organizing an approach to this extremely complex set of topics is a conceptual framework of health risks, inputs, outcomes, and opportunities.

A group economy threads together past visions of emergence, new kinds of capital, collective action, grassroots economics, and smart networks—and undoes our traditional ideas about economies of scale and the role of large institutions.
Meanwhile, lightweight infrastructures spin complex and creative ecologies out of very small world technologies, individual agency, and smart networks, building grassroots economics into physical structures that bind us together even as we pursue our own ends.

To help Technology Horizons Program members understand the long-term potential RFID, the Institute for the Future (IFTF) has
undertaken a project to map the future of RFID beyond the supply
chain. Even though companies are struggling with the Wal-Mart and Tesco mandates to add RFID tags to pallets and cases of goods, it’s not too early to begin thinking about how the technology could be used outside the supply chain. Our findings are presented in a series of five memos.

The memos are as follow:

• Thinking About RFID [SR-926A]
  Read more >

Emerging digital technologies present a range of catalysts for enabling new social arrangements that will transform our business and social institutions. In particular, new technologies of cooperation will enable social arrangements that help us develop new complex cooperative strategies. Such transformation has happened in the past, with the development of the printing press that led to broader literacy and public discourse, which ultimately shaped the development of democratic society.

The truth is that we humans face tough times ahead—not 50 to 100 years from now, but by the end of this decade. Whether or not we believe that CO2 is a pollutant responsible for global climate change, the truth is that extreme climate events will increasingly threaten crops, ocean-side properties, city infrastructures, and human life within the coming decade. Megacities will sprawl across the developed and developing world alike, their ecological footprints stepping all over one another.

The future is a look around the corner, a different perspective on the place we live right now.

The perspective this year is sober. We humans are fundamentally changing the face of the earth. We are about to become a predominantly urban species, living in megacities of over 20 million inhabitants. We are altering the global climate, creating extreme variations in intensity of natural weather events. We are becoming more extreme in our political and religious views and more dependent on complex, and ultimately vulnerable, technological infrastructures.

Health care is a central “good,” to use the economists’ term, and makes up a large and ever growing part of the U.S. economy. Unfortunately, despite much to be proud of,there’s ample room for improvement. Indeed, some would argue that, with its skyrocketing costs, uneven access and quality, misaligned incentives, and uninsured patients, the U.S. health care system is nowhere near what the world’s richest and most powerful country should be able to achieve. This report examines that gap.

The dramatic scientific advances of the Human Genome Project—the mapping of the entire human genome—are revolutionizing the way we think about health, illness, and disease prevention. Not only do advances in genomics increase our understanding of the inherited basis of disease, allow us to develop new drugs with specific molecular targets, and help us to understand why drugs are more effective or more toxic in people with certain genetic characteristics, they also promise to revolutionize our understanding of nutrition and how people differ in their response to nutrients.

As markets fragment, it is increasingly difficult to identify meaningful patterns of consumer behavior. Health and health care consumers are no exception. Knowing demographic characteristics, insurance status, and even health status are no longer enough to gain strategic insight into consumer health markets. Instead, health care and health-oriented companies must seek to understand the strategies and practices that consumers engage in, that is, the things people do to manage their health. This approach requires building consumer understanding in a different way.

Emerging digital technologies present new opportunities for developing complex cooperative strategies that change the way people work together to solve problems and generate wealth. Central to this class of cooperation-amplifying technologies are eight key clusters, each with distinctive contributions to cooperative strategy.

A new physical-digital landscape is emerging, linking places and spaces to unprecedented amounts of information. The infrastructure that will enable this new landscape—the emerging geoweb—is actually a rich ecology, including technologies, policies, data repositories, and skill sets. This memo describes the emerging ecology—what it is, why it's important, who the key players are, and what future developments to expect.

Traditional business strategy is organized around competition: win–lose models fueled by SWOT analyses, market share frameworks, hard measurement, and protection of quantifiable private assets.
In mature industries, cooperation is confined to supporting industry associations, which focus on issues of common concerns such as tax rules, and professional bodies, which set common technical standards.

Long a mantra at the Institute for the Future, this principle is particularly important in times that serve up more than the usual quantum of surprises and uncertainty. Indeed, this decade has so preoccupied us with surprises that nearly halfway into it, it is the first decade in a century to have no name. Perhaps it is because events are still too new to allow a label to settle in. Or perhaps the name-defining event has yet to occur. Until a name emerges, however, the very namelessness of the decade is itself a compelling indicator of the challenge of making sense of the next ten years.

A place can be described by a set of coordinates—longitude, latitude, and altitude. It can also be described through stories—experiences and memories that are deeply rooted in a particular locale and are often intimately shaped by it. Ancient Greeks had two words for place, signifying these two different ways of thinking about it—“topos”and “choros.” Topos referred to location—objective, physical features of a place. Choros provided a holistic reference to a place as an experience, a trigger for memory and imagination.

In this report, Expanding Meanings of Health, we consider the business implications of key changes in the consumer health landscape. This landscape comprises the information, technologies, products, and services within and outsidethe health care delivery system, as well as the strategies and practices consumers use to manage their health, interact with the health care delivery system, and make decisions.

Health care almost always begins with a diagnostic work-up: listening to the patient’s complaint and history, examining the patient, and testing. It’s the point when the physician determines, via some form of observation or measurement, that there’s been a change in the patient’s anatomy or physiology. And in many cases the news of a diagnosis from the physician changes the patient’s life.

To study how people are using new entertainment media and the skills they are developing as a result, we examined four media—Web logging, digital music, massively multiplayer online games, and alternate reality games. We think that these four are rich areas for developing new social practices that will evolve and migrate into the workplace over the next 5–10 years. We conducted interviews and observations with approximately 20 media users and experts to identify innovative social practices and issues that will have an impact on business.

In the next decade, baby boomers—the 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964—will establish a new concept of health as they age and become America’s senior citizens. They will challenge the formal health care system to serve them better, and successful companies will be those that can extend the market for health with alternative forms of care and new types of health-related products and services.

Today’s world of increasing market fragmentation calls into question the effectiveness of the segmentation methods companies use to understand their markets and address consumer needs.

In this report, Beyond Consumer Segmentation: New Technologies, New Market Lenses (SR-784A), we forecast that in order to be successful in the next decade, companies need to move beyond traditional market segmentation methods and develop a dynamic portfolio of approaches that respond to the diversity, dynamism, and rapid change of the consumer market.

Building on the market lens framework described in the companion report, Beyond Consumer Segmentation: New Technologies, New Market Lenses (IFTF SR-807 A), this report, Reinventing Customization: New Technologies, New Markets, and New Strategies (IFTF SR-807 B), demonstrates how customization is likely to emerge in the future—not necessarily as personalized to specific individuals’ desires, but to small groups based on product use, context, social networks, swarms, and other characteristics.

To recognize the 25th anniversary of its founding, in 1997 The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation asked the Institute for the Future (IFTF) to forecast the future of health and health care in America for the period between 2000 and the year 2010. This is the Second Edition of that Forecast, revised and updated to reflect the changes that have occurred since our initial work in 1997–1998. As we originally stated, the purpose of this forecast is to provide the reader with a description of critical factors that will influence health and health care in the first decade of the 21st century.

This map is a summary and synthesis of the answers we found in the last year. As a summary, it provides some key highlights from our research results. As a synthesis, it pulls together ideas from across the research programs to create an at-a-glance view of a changing world.

In 2002, we focused on five key areas of innovation: households, communities, markets, organizations, and technology. Looking for
common themes across these five areas, we identified six big trends that describe emerging culture of a highly connected world.

In these days of rapidly rising health care costs and retreat from tightly managed systems of care, many health care theorists and business leaders believe that greater consumer involvement in health care decisions and financing is the answer to controlling health care costs and, to a lesser extent, to improving quality. They advocate more consumer responsibility by asking consumers to pay more for the health goods and services they use.