Institute For The Future

Reworking Health: Commoditizing Bodywork

Massage, reflexology, and other forms of bodywork can do everything from boost immune function to improve asthma symptoms. These treatments have...

From #10YF2014: Global Simulation Corps

Simulations are models of reality that help people prepare for possible futures, and the most ambitious of these attempt to model large complex...

Reworking Health: Calibrating Pain

The doctor’s office pain chart has long been a source of frustration for distressed people trying to quantify a subjective experience. What if...

Open City/Art City Festival RFP - We Need You!

Calling all artists, critical and speculative designers—we need you to imagine the future of cities! Bring your visions and provocations to life at...

Reworking Health: Coordinating Caring Communities

The CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experience Study connects chronic stress caused by early adversity and later-life health, and could radically change what...

From #20forecasts: Risks of an algorithm arms race

An algorithm arms race risks a Sorcerer's Apprentice scenario ... As prediction algorithms are deployed to detect geopolitical and financial...

Forecast the Future of Food with IFTF

IFTF is expanding and extending our research to broader groups of food system hackers, activists, thinkers, innovators, and eaters—including you....

Reworking Health: Uncovering Empowering Identities

Over several decades, social epidemiologists have done amazing research on how our health is shaped by social and environmental factors totally...

From #10YF2014: The National Sharing Economy

Over the past decade, collaboration and sharing have emerged as powerful core strategies to unlock the value of underused goods and services in...

Learning from Extreme Learners: What's next?

Around a year ago at IFTF we began researching a concept we call extreme learning. We have extreme athletes, right? Why not extreme learners? Extreme...

Reworking Health: Optimizing the Care Effect

In our 2013 Health Horizons research, Reworking Health, we examined four emerging sources of authority—computation, narratives, networks, and...

Catalyzing Technology to Support Family Caregiving

A new report co-sponsored by IFTF identifies steps to better support family caregiving through the use of mobile, online, and in-home technologies....

From #10YF2014: Co-Present Microwork

Face-to-face has long been the gold standard for human interaction, against which other media, from video conferencing to text chats, have been...

From #20Forecasts: The New Space Race Yields Innovation on Earth

With efforts under way to commercialize spaceflight, governmental organizations will become customers of entrepreneurial ventures around medicine,...

Given $50,000 what would you explore?

Always wanted to explore uncharted territory, forge a new path, or show the world something it has never seen before? Institute for the Future...

The Future of Food in 20 Objects

20 objects, 10 days, 7 cities, unlimited future possibilities!

Participatory Biology: Socialstructing Science

On June 17, 2014, IFTF's Eri Gentry joined a panel of community biology leaders at Techonomy Bio to share her experience. Eri co-founded BioCurious, a...

IFTF Presents 20 Combinatorial Forecasts

Today, IFTF launches its new online map, 20 Combinatorial Forecasts. Innovation happens at the edges—use this map to understand the shifting and...

From #20forecasts: Code Becomes Law

We are familiar with tactics like firewalls that censor banned websites, whether you are in China or in a Kansas office cubicle. We are also...

The Future of Food: Creating an Open, Shared Food Web

“Eating is an agricultural act,” Wendell Berry reminds us, and it is also just as much a technological act. The ways in which we engage with...

From #10YF2014: A Wikipedia for Making

IFTF’s 2014 Ten-Year Forecast explores the landscape of change over the coming decade by contemplating ten projects that, if successfully undertaken...

Living Infrastructures | #Catalyze4 Zone of Innovation

In 2010 we started a journey to uncover new paths out of poverty. We analyzed 18,000 ideas from Catalysts for Change, a global participatory game on...

Maker Cities: Shenzhen

A research team from the Institute for the Future recently visited Shenzhen to explore the maker culture of the city. We toured factories and...

From #10YF2014: Paying It Forward

Experiments with new models of value exchange are often dismissed as quirky. Think: Ithaca hours, a timebanking initiative in which an hour of your...