Institute For The Future

Libraries as the Commons for Creation

Libraries are the future of making. Everyone knows that libraries have books, and more recently DVDs and free internet. But libraries all over the...

Gifs, clearly the future of all communication for all of mankind. Seriously

The gif (graphic interchange format) was introduced in 1987 by Steve Wilhite (who knew?)! But gifs are just beginning to find their true usefulness....

Task and Matter Routing for Health

Via Springwise comes word of an interesting project out of the UK called Click to Cure. At its core, the idea is simple: Give people a bit of training...

Urgent Futures: IFTF Advisory Council Inaugural Meeting

The futurist and sci-fi writer William Gibson (@GreatDismal) recently said, “give me a room full of either artists or criminals talking about what...

California’s Cap and Trade System: A Choice for Making the Future

With the launch this week of its cap and trade system, California’s state leadership demonstrates great foresight and a proactive approach to shaping...

Knight Fellows Visit The Future

On November 15 the Knight Fellows visited The Institute for the Future for a workshop on the future of media and storytelling. I was lucky enough to...

Social Bot Competition 2012

As part of last week's Fall Technology Horizons conference, IFTF teamed up with Pacific Social Architecting Corporation to host a first of its kind...

Brazilian Culinary Eco-patriot Reduces Food Waste

In our recently released 2011 forecast report Food Choices in Flux, we looked at Brazil in 2021 “where parents who once faced the threat of hunger are...

Tech Horizons' Make the Future Bootcamp

Our first ever Tech Horizons’ Make the Future Bootcamp is on November 7-8; follow the conference on Twitter with #realignorg. Over the course of these...

2012 Interns present an Interactive Map of the Decade

Explore four worlds crafted by the 2012 Summer Interns in an interactive map of the decade that covers health, food, education, development, and...

Kids Tech Safety: Techno-Guardian Angels

How do you allow your kids the freedom to take risks without putting them in grave danger? How do you allow them enough freedom to break their arms,...

Garbage and the Microbial Economy

Biology will drive the next century.  Biological-based methods will not only disrupt how we make things, they’ll also disrupt how we source materials...

Mapping how Foods can Improve Communities

Edible Geography points toward a great blog post by Jim Davenport mapping where Americans live in relation to Starbucks. Among other things, he found...

Shift Change & The International Year of Cooperatives

It’s the International Year of Cooperatives and I just saw Shift Change, a great new documentary that’s got me more jazzed about them than ever. I...

Welcome to Flatland!

In the world of work, the focus is on skills

A New Civics for Smart Cities

I recently gave a keynote at the 2012 Code for America Summit, held at San Francisco's Mission Bay Conference Center, on "A New Civics for Smart...

Is Crowdsourcing on the Verge of a Breakout?

Next week, IFTF will be one of the participants in the annual CrowdConf event reviewing progress in crowdsourcing. Looking through the topics to be...

The Magic of KidsTech: A Matrix of Well-Being

My friends and I like to joke about how parents survived in the “olden days”--that is, the pre-I-Phone and pre-i-Pad era of childrearing.  “How did...

Maker Education and The WikiSeat Project

If you are a student, a teacher, a maker, or a thinker, I'd like to invite you to participate in a project I've been developing called WikiSeat, and I...

The Future of Kids' Play: Cross-dimensional Playgrounds

Educational? Yes. Therapeutic? Possibly. But these are side benefits; at heart, play is about fun. And the future of play is about taking all the...

TacoCopter and the Imminent Age of Drones

We’re at the ground floor of the Drone Age....

Seeking Silicon Valley: A Map for Discovering and Making the Future

IFTF has been mapping the intersections between technology, the human experience, and the future for more than 44 years. We use these mapping...

The Rise of the Underground Bio-Economy

We like to look to hidden places to find some of our most intriguing signals about the future--and in this case, an unusual crime seems to be pointing...

Reimagining Work

One of the paradoxes of technological change is that as new tools are introduced, people often remain tethered to their existing tools and practices....