Institute For The Future

Persuasive Objects Help Users Develop Healthy Habits

The UBICOMP lab at the National Taiwan University is investigating, designing and creating working systems that demonstrate how future computing...

Marketers playing head games

London-based firm Mindmetic's Web site reads like the description of an imaginary evil company in a Philip K. Dick science fiction novel: "Mind...

Do Your Best Job Ever!?

Job satisfaction is at a two-decade low, so I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise that employers have begun enlisting the help happiness coaches...

Transparency informs smarter food choices. Or does it?

Business Week reports that when nutritional information is available on fast-food menus, parents choose about 100 fewer calories per meal for their...

Biological Previews

Looking for a way to see if a drug might give you side effects--without having to deal with the whole pesky process of experiencing those effects?...

Keiichi Matsuda's Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop

The possibilities afforded by a world with pervasive Augmented Reality has been a topic of great interest to IFTF for many years now (go here to read...

China uses Internet policy to shape "mainstream public opinion"

The current public pronouncements from the China government regarding Google's assertions of government penetration into Google services has been...

Intelligent Bike Design in Copenhagen

The city as a persuasive technology is a theme I plan to return to throughout the Future of Persuasion's research process. By raising or lowering the...

Spaces of Lightweight Innovation: What Can Companies Learn From Coworking?

Last night, I had the opportunity to participate in an informal workshop on "What Can Companies Learn From Coworking?" held at New Work City, one of...

Investigating future of persuasion with Fogg Behavior Grid

Stanford professor BJ Fogg has recently developed a framework for classifying types of behavior change called, appropriately enough, the Fogg Behavior...

Smart dinner plate urges you to slow down

The best kind of feedback occurs in the context of the activity that you're seeking feedback about. That's how a control system works -- real-time...

God Bless You, Mr. Corporation?

The recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. FEC has received more attention and soul-searching commentary about the nature of our...

Why Real-Time Video Matters to Health

On Wednesday, January 19, IFTF released the report The Future of Real-Time Video Communication. This report addressed the question: What is the...

Forget the carrot, I need the stickK (or do I?)

Quit smoking, lose weight, get in shape. Now that we are three weeks into 2010, how many of us need help sticking to our New Year's resolutions? ...

Shopping for Your Genome

I spent the last couple days at the Personalized Medicine World Conference and one of the most intriguing companies I encountered was a small startup...

Mining reality for persuasive feedback

Nadav Aharony, an MIT Media Lab graduate student, studies how that data that's passively collected by mobile devices can be used to predict the user's...

Using nature and gaming to persuade for productivity

Nathan Verrill, an interaction designer, applied gaming guru, and usability expert who among other things was a key figure in the development of our...

Is the Web drowning out your future self?

Every year The Edge organization asks a "world question" and Edge members answer it in short essays.  Question 2010 is: How is the Internet changing...

Why replacing hormones seems different from replacing ankles

Readers of the New York Times received an odd juxtaposition over the last couple days that can be roughly summed up as: A small but growing number of...

Brain health is on my mind

Even as I write this, the Health Horizons team is in the middle of participating in the SharpBrains Virtual Summit, which you can follow on Twitter at...

Persuasion, Coercion, and MLK

For many years now, serious academic researchers have been looking closely at the concept, technologies, and implications of persuasion. This Spring,...

Avatar maximization: a future skill?

If you use an avatar to communicate with others, you might want to consider how your avatar is priming others to respond to...