Institute For The Future

How to Form a Signals Group

Signals of change are the building blocks of futures thinking, and scanning for signals is an essential habit for any foresight practitioner. They...

Lessons from the EPIC Conference: Framing a Conversation on How Foresight Can Be Practical and Relevant

It’s a great time to be a foresight practitioner. Design, ethnography, innovation, strategy, experience, change management...people at the edges of...

News from the Future #36

Get signals, news, and new releases from IFTF.

News from the Future #35

Feeling Our Way Into the Future with Jane McGonigal

About Afrofuturism and the Black Speculative Arts Movement

In September 2018, the Institute for The Future (IFTF) held its first panel on Afrofuturism at its Ten Year Forecast at the Museum of Computer History...

Train Your Brain to Prepare

Our brains think of our future selves as strangers and have built-in anxiety about change. This human tendency and our cognitive bias against thinking...

News from the Future #34

Welcome to 2020

To Protect Democracy We Need to Upgrade our Cognitive Immunity

By Marina Gorbis, Executive Director, Institute for the Future and Nick Monaco, Director, Institute for the Future, Digital Intelligence...

Welcome to 2020

It’s a new decade and here are 5 ways you can shape it ......

New Realities of Learning

The Emerging Media Lab at Institute for the Future partnered with California Community Colleges to explore the future affordances and applications of...

The future is now.

Political upheaval. Turbulent markets. Massive climate disruptions. Today’s volatility means big challenges tomorrow. Will the future find you or your...

News from the Future #32

The future is now.

Welcome to the Party: A Data Analysis of Chinese Information Operations

Twitter recently released a 1.6 GB archive of tweets that it determined had been spread by the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as...

Beijing’s Computational Propaganda Goes Global

The Significance of China’s Debut as a Disinformation Actor...

Lessons from Laputa

Whenever I call a customer service line and have to sit through a torturous series of non-human interactions — “If you are calling x, press y,” “sorry...

Exploring Social VR

Negotiating trust and what's real in the new world of Social VR: From thinking about data in three dimensions to re-inventing audience experience,...

Fill in the Blanks

When was the last time you traveled to the future? If you’re like most people, the answer is: just a few minutes ago. That’s because the average...

The Fleet / Car and Rider

What happens when fleets of autonomous cars battle it out for the same street corner? As fleets of autonomous cars make their way into messy, crowded...

The Caregiver / The Artificial Caregiver

What happens when your health is dependent on an upgrade you can't afford? As intelligent autonomous objects proliferate, they can be seen as...

The Ruse / The Roshki Ruse

What happens when products can lie to their owners? Advances in multi-material 3D printing render intricately designed objects called “roshkis” into...

The Pass / I Shouldn't Have Done It

What happens when infrastructure enforces the law? As public spaces become increasingly reconfigurable, and infrastructure becomes capable of...

Scenes From 2027

What kind of 2027 can you imagine?

A Wearable MRI Machine

The path to telepathy is coming indirectly, through Jepsen’s exploration of a more costeffective medical diagnosis tool: essentially an affordable...