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Mass Localism
A new report by NESTA, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, shows “how we can work better with communities to unlock ingenious solutions to complex social challenges....
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Article series on futures thinking
Jamais Cascio, who covers the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation for Fast Company, is in the process of publishing an ‘occasional’ series of articles “about the tools...
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Your life in 2020
Forbes Magazine, in collaboration with Frog Design, has been looking at what the future in 2020 might look like in a range of areas: computer, choice, classroom, commute, home, job, diet, health and...
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Machiavelli 2.0
Alexander Schellong, a senior consultant with CSC’s public sector management practice, and Philipp Mueller, director of the Center for Public Management and Governance at the Salzburg University...
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Toward a read/write urbanism
What might we gain, asks Adam Greenfield, if we begin to conceive of cities, for some limited purposes anyway, as software under active development? What if we imagined that the citizen-responsiveness...
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The future of news
The Spring 2010 issue of Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, is dedicated to the Future of News. Front Matter Introduction Loren Ghiglione, Professor of Media Ethics...
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BeAware – Boosting Energy Awareness
BeAware, an EU-supported research project, has created a solution to motivate and empower citizens to become active energy consumers, by offering them the opportunity to raise awareness of their own...
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Towards a read/write urbanism
Adam Greenfield, Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user-interface design, is the author of this week’s Urban Omnibus feature. In the piece, he uses software design as a base to talk...
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The web means the end of forgetting
Legal scholars, technologists and cyberthinkers are wrestling with the first great existential crisis of the digital age: the impossibility of erasing your posted past, starving over, moving on....
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Vodafone’s Future Agenda forum
The Future Agenda, sponsored by Vodafone, is a not-for-profit, cross-discipline programme which aims “to unite the best minds from around the globe to address the greatest challenges of the next...
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Data visualisation as an actionable tool in our lives
This week I watched the excellent online documentary “Journalism in the Age of Data“, which is a video report on data visualisation as a storytelling medium that Geoff McGhee created during a...
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Bruce Sterling interview by Rhys Hughes
Last week, La Stampa newspaper of Turin, Italy published an interview with Bruce Sterling, conducted by Welsh writer and essayist Rhys Hughes. The complete English version of the interview has now...
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When augmented reality hits the Internet of Things
Wired.co.uk contributor Anna Leach examines how augmented reality and The Internet of Things could impact each other in the coming years. “Both the Internet of Things and augmented reality (AR) are...
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The enabling city
Italian social researcher Chiara Camponeschi has written a fascinating Creative-Commons licensed publication, The Enabling City: Place-Based Creative Problem-Solving and the Power of the Everyday...
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The Morrow Project and futurism at Intel
Intel’s Chief Futurist, Brian David Johnson, is a big advocate of using science fiction narratives as a jumping off point for a discussion between management and engineering about the future of...
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Report calls for radical redesign of cities to cope with population growth
The Megacities on the Move report says authorities must start planning their transport infrastructure now for a future when two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. The Forum for the...
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The sharing economy
Thanks to the social web, you can now share anything with anyone anywhere in the world. Fast Company profiles Neal Gorenflo who, after quitting his job as strategist for a division of shipping giant...
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Forever online: Your digital legacy
Your photos, status updates and tweets will fascinate future historians. Will these online remains last forever? In this special report, newscientist.com editor Sumit Paul-Choudhury reports on life,...
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Designing Connectivity notebook available
On 15 March 2011 the DeST Research Unit of the INDACO Department of the Milan Politechnic together with the British Consulate General organised Designing Connectivity (pdf), a seminar on building and...
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Achieving long-term sustainability at a Belgian expo centre
A road(map) to sustainability: How an Expo centre can become low-impact The Event project, funded by Flanders In Shape, a Flemish design promotion agency, created a framework for the Kortrijk Xpo...
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Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?
Hivos (The Netherlands) and the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book...
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The end of motoring
Highly recommended read in The Guardian on the end of the golden age of motoring (or for non-Brits: car travel): “The most radical change [according to German entrepreneur Stefan Liske] is that “in...
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From mass consumerism to mass change: Hope for sustainable consumption
In an article for Shareable, Caren Holzman presents trends that signal “a reversal in the way that consumers value and use products and services”: “A global culture of consumerism has firmly taken...
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BlackBerry Future Visions
Research in Motion seems to have commissioned a pair of videos envisioning portable technology in the not-so-distant future, writes PocketNow: specifically, they focus on interactions among employees,...
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Why Microsoft’s vision of the future is dead on arrival
A viral clip produced by Microsoft is–like almost every video on this subject–amazingly polished. It’s also inane and completely lifeless, says FastCo Design. “Futuristic interfaces are supposed to...
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Another Life Is Possible – Homage to Catalonia II
“Homage to Catalonia II” is a documentary, a research project, a story of stories about the construction of a sustainable, solidary and decentralized economy. The video, which is a project of Joana...
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Connected homes for connected people
The French think tank Fing (who was also behind the LIFT France event last year) collaborated last year with VIA, Promotelec, Renault Group, La Poste, Minatec Laboratory (CEA), CNR Santé, ESIR...
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Futurescapes – imagining what the world will look like in 2025
FutureScapes, an open collaboration project by Sony and Forum for the Future, aims to bring together a range of expert thinkers, designers, futurologists, writers (including those from The Economist’s...
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Wearable devices: the next battleground for the platform wars
Wearable devices, or “wearables” for short, have enormous potential for uses in health and fitness, navigation, social networking, commerce, and media. In a new report out today, Forrester argues that...
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Brave New City
Metropolis Magazine asked seven visionary design teams, both established and up-and-coming, what they predict a fully accessible city might look like (and better yet, how it would function). “We broke...
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Transforming Bodies & Lifestyles: Insights into Inspiring Behavior Change
Transforming Bodies & Lifestyles: Insights into Inspiring Behavior Change Institute For The Future 2012 Inspiring people to change their behaviors in order to become healthier remains one of the...
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How a simple smartphone can turn your car, home, or medical device into a...
The day is not far off when the manipulation of medical devices will be done routinely by punching keys on a smartphone, writes Charles C. Mann in Vanity Fair, putting an individual’s internal organs...
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Helsinki Design Lab closing in June 2013
Marco Steinberg, who directs the strategic design efforts of the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, announced last week that Sitra’s Helsinki Design Lab will close in June 2013. Helsinki Design Lab is an...
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London exhibition explores alternative Britain governed by four extreme...
Belching cars made of skin and bones, nuclear-powered trains in the shape of mountains and arrow-like formations of joined recumbent bicycles are just some of the ways we might travel around the...
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Without opt in, Google Glass will generate hostility
“Google and friends should not be trying to make these things acceptable in polite society,” writes Roger Kay in Forbes. “If they persist, they can expect a wave of hostility the likes of which they...
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Technology puts power in the hands of the Millennial Generation
This week the Financial Times has run two reports on the Millennial Generation. Part Two (pdf) came out today, whereas Part One is from June 3. Part Two’s leading article is definitely worth exploring,...
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Prism is the dark side of design thinking
In this first of two columns about the impact of digital culture on design, Sam Jacob asks what America’s Prism surveillance program tells us about design thinking. “Prism tells us something about...
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Cities are being redrawn according to Google’s world view
In the second of two columns exploring the impact of digital culture on design, Sam Jacob looks at how Google Maps is reshaping cities while Apple, Facebook and Amazon are reshaping the natural...
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What’s lost when everything is recorded
Who wouldn’t delight in hearing Lincoln at Gettysburg in the same way we can go back and witness President Obama on the campaign trail? But with so much data capture and storage, which is preferable...
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Does big data have us ‘fooled by randomness’?
Being surrounded by data makes it easy to see the noise rather than the signal, and the trees rather than the forest, writes Andre Mouton in USA Today. “Nassim Nicholas Taleb achieved notoriety with...
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Book: Status Update by Alice E. Marwick
Last year, I posted about the very interesting PhD dissertation by Alice E. Marwick (downloadable here). Based on ethnographic research of the San Francisco technology scene, she explains how social...
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Sustainable living and behavioral change
Below a selection of pieces from The Guardian’s sustainable living hub: The power of behavioural design: looking beyond nudging Christoph Burmester – 10 September 2013 Beyond nudging lies the world of...
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Publication: Smart Citizens (by FutureEverything)
Smart Citizens Edited by Drew Hemment and Anthony Townsend Future Everything 2013, 96 pages This publication aims to shift the debate on the future of cities towards the central place of citizens, and...
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Human+Machine Futures forecast map
This year, the research focus of the Institute for the Future (IFTF) is on Human+Machine Futures, the blurring lines between human and machine, natural and artificial. What happens when technology...
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We are ignoring the new machine age at our peril
In 2009, W Brian Arthur published a remarkable book, The Nature of Technology, in which he formulated a coherent theory of what technology is, how it evolves and how it spurs innovation and industry....
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Thingclash: putting human values in the IoT
The Internet of Things (IoT) is forecast to be one of the most far reaching and fundamental shifts in how people interact with technology and their environment since the advent of the Internet. But,...
View ArticlePrototypes capturing new user experiences for bicycles
Back in May 2015, the Urban Futures team of the Future Cities Catapult (based in London, UK) completed a design research project around cycling. This short project uses film to sketch out some...
View ArticleEzio Manzini talk at the RSA (London)
Excerpt (above) – full replay Abstract How do we nurture conditions in which a diffuse creativity can flourish and evolve through collaborative organisations and, in so doing, realise meaningful...
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[Report] Applying design approaches to policy making
Applying Design Approaches to Policy Making: Discovering Policy Lab Written by Lucy Kimbell Illustrated by Holly Macdonald Published by the University of Brighton September 2015 This report reviews...
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Can human-centered design help people prevail over machines in the workplace?
Instead of asking ourselves which jobs will be replaced, writes Brooks Rainwater, we need to shift the conversation to answer the question: what jobs do we want humans to do? We must move the policy...
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