Institute For The Future

Crowd-Tracking Noise and Air Pollution

A new noise/ozone sensor watch being tested in Europe.

The Geneticist Will Skype you Now

One of the more startling statistics I learned last year came from something by geneticist and science writer Misha Angrist: At least as of a couple...

What If Your Genetics Defined Your Community?

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Filtering Out Temptations

When was the last time you looked into the refrigerator or at a store shelf with every intention of grabbing a healthy snack--only to wind up with...

On Governance

Mathias Crawford and I have begun a series on "Futures Thinking" over at GOOD. My first post went up this week--on the need for re-designing our...

Can I Have a Featherless Chicken and a Side of Healthy Bacon?

The New Scientist has a great round-up of the various efforts geneticists are undertaking to modify farm animals. The story doesn't break any new...

15 Ideas to Improve Global Health

If you imagine a healthy future, what does it look like? What will we have done to our bodies, networks, and environments to improve our collective...

Lightweight Innovation

Keeping with Institute for the Future's commitment to share our research with public, throughout 2010 this blog has explored our forecasts and impacts...

Previewing Your Future Self

A few months ago, I highlighted a treadmill at Japanese gyms that flashes pictures of desserts at exercisers as they hit certain calorie counts in...

Lightweight Innovation: Guidelines for Reinvention (Part 1)

Lightweight innovation processes are emerging on the web, aided by new ideas about how to organize innovation and technologies that reduce the cost...

Take the Genetic Test for Longevity

What if there was a simple spit test you could do that would predict how long you are likely to live? Would you want to know?Having this kind of test...

Is That Your Wallet in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See me?

Via PSFK, I came across three concept designs for wallets from MIT's Media Lab that would offer real-time feedback on our spending habits. For...

Curing Cancer in a Garage?

This is the first time I've seen someone happily exclaim, "I'm curing cancer in my garage!"

Longer Lives Make Suicide a More Popular Option

I was presenting some of the forecasts from our recently released HC2020 map last week when I saw a detail in one the map that I had never seen...

Performance-Enhancing... Marijuana?

A recent survey about performance-enhancing drugs and poker has gotten some press for the not-terribly-shocking finding that approximately 80 percent...

Key Characteristics of Lightweight Innovation

In 2007, the Institute for the Future forecast on lightweight infrastructure introduced a set of characteristics common in the design of emerging...

In Memoriam: William Mitchell

I learned with great sadness about the loss of William Mitchell, 65, this past friday after a long battle with cancer. Bill was the chair of my Ph.D....

Our Plastic Century

I’ve been swimming in some murky waters lately (and that doesn’t include the Gulf of Mexico). While conducting research on plastic pollution over the...

David Evan Harris interviewed by Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society

IFTF's David Evan Harris was interviewed at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society....

What if We've Created the Wrong Environments for our Brains?

In an excellent blog post, Jonah Lehrer makes an intriguing argument that in high pressure situations, rather than exerting every last ounce of energy...

5 Innovations Inspired by Liberation of Data

  The air was electric. Voices buzzed in anticipation. I had never seen so many people in once place that were all excited about health data. I...

Flipping the Death Switch

A couple days ago, I was listening to a typically brilliant episode of RadioLab when I heard about a fascinating, niche service: The Death Switch. The...

Pushing Financial Lightweight Innovation

It's great to see a company that gets lightweight innovation and is willing to stick it's neck out. In partnership with NYC-based ChallengePost,...

Rediscover Wakefulness

One of the themes emerging from our Health Horizons research this year is that people are developing expanded meanings of health and well-being at the...