Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Massage, reflexology, and other forms of bodywork can do everything from boost immune function to improve asthma symptoms. These treatments have...
Simulations are models of reality that help people prepare for possible futures, and the most ambitious of these attempt to model large complex...
The doctor’s office pain chart has long been a source of frustration for distressed people trying to quantify a subjective experience. What if...
Calling all artists, critical and speculative designers—we need you to imagine the future of cities! Bring your visions and provocations to life at...
The CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experience Study connects chronic stress caused by early adversity and later-life health, and could radically change what...
An algorithm arms race risks a Sorcerer's Apprentice scenario ... As prediction algorithms are deployed to detect geopolitical and financial...
IFTF is expanding and extending our research to broader groups of food system hackers, activists, thinkers, innovators, and eaters—including you....
Over several decades, social epidemiologists have done amazing research on how our health is shaped by social and environmental factors totally...
Over the past decade, collaboration and sharing have emerged as powerful core strategies to unlock the value of underused goods and services in...
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...
In our 2013 Health Horizons research, Reworking Health, we examined four emerging sources of authority—computation, narratives, networks, and...
A new report co-sponsored by IFTF identifies steps to better support family caregiving through the use of mobile, online, and in-home technologies....
Face-to-face has long been the gold standard for human interaction, against which other media, from video conferencing to text chats, have been...
With efforts under way to commercialize spaceflight, governmental organizations will become customers of entrepreneurial ventures around medicine,...
Always wanted to explore uncharted territory, forge a new path, or show the world something it has never seen before? Institute for the Future...
20 objects, 10 days, 7 cities, unlimited future possibilities!
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...
Today, IFTF launches its new online map, 20 Combinatorial Forecasts. Innovation happens at the edges—use this map to understand the shifting and...
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...
“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...
IFTF’s 2014 Ten-Year Forecast explores the landscape of change over the coming decade by contemplating ten projects that, if successfully undertaken...
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...
A research team from the Institute for the Future recently visited Shenzhen to explore the maker culture of the city. We toured factories and...
Experiments with new models of value exchange are often dismissed as quirky. Think: Ithaca hours, a timebanking initiative in which an hour of your...