The first post I wrote on this blog, in April this year, was on the arts and technology consultancy Proboscis and their Snout collaboration, designed to help communities develop “environmental authoring” tools to monitor their local environments. Now Nokia has trialed a phone which would do some of the same things, including some environment monitoring, [...]
If you’re interested in how the future is portrayed in the past - or in transport - this is certainly worth nine minutes of your time. From 1958, a section of a Disney show on the future of transportati0n. Or, as it turns out, the future of highways and cars.
Trends and futures are related, of course, but they are used in different ways. Trends-watchers tend to be looking for short-run innovation opportunities in products and services. Futures is longer-term, or ought to be, and more about structural shifts, and should be more connected with strategy. The same underlying divers of change can lead to [...]
I blogged earlier this year on the toy industry and Chinese production, and on the idea of ‘toxic consumption‘ - that the things we buy are bad for our health. Christmas seems a good time to come back to it, and Core 77 (thanks) points me in the direction of a long article by Jonathan [...]
The magazine Resurgence has a special edition to mark the 60th anniversay of Gandhi’s death in 1948. On the inside front page it includes a note written by Gandhi to his grandson, Arun, a few weeks before his assination, on the ’seven blunders’ which promote violence. It seems as a good a way as any [...]
Obviously the winter outdoor ice skating rinks which increasingly crowd the UK’s public spaces are right on trend. Just tick them off: the shift from services to experiences, the rise of shared social meaning, and the commercialisation of parts of the public realm that would otherwise be commons. But - having just come back from [...]
A day when the so-called ‘Big Four’ of English football met on what Sky was promoting as ‘Grand Slam Sunday’ seems a good time to post on the declining competition in the English Premiership. Every fan knows it’s happening - I wanted to demonstrate it for a client for whom it was relevant.
According to new figures from Ofcom, 4 out of 10 of British internet users now use social networking sites - and those that do spend more than 5 hours a month on social networking sites, and return 23 times a month. Usage is heavier than elsewhere in Europe, and above the USA, but behind [...]
A team of researchers at Oxford University has recalculated Britain’s carbon emissions since 1990 - and found that they have increased by 19%. (News report here.) The official figures - calculated according to the UN’s method - say that emissions have fallen by 15% over the period. However, the researchers, led by Dieter Helm, included [...]
I was at a play last night in which the fact that a character smokes cigars is important to the characterisation, if not essential to the plot. Now, since July 2007 in England it has been illegal to smoke in a public place, but it turns out that there’s clause in the Act which allows [...]
