I contributed last week to an event in London which was designed to imagine how the notion of the museum might change. The current model, which is about 150 years old, basically consists of a building with some stuff in it, arranged according to some organising principle. It is changing already in the face of [...]
I’ve meant to write before about the Transition Initiative, which is in my view one of the most radical things happening in the UK at the moment - radical because it is local and community-oriented, radical because it is a thought-through response to both impending energy shortage and climate change. (If only the government was [...]
The death of Arthur C Clarke at the age of 90 reminded me of a post I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks now, about our certainty in the 1950s and 60s that in the future we would have interstellar travel and colonies in space. That future may still exist, although to my mind [...]
Arthur Clarke’s death at the age of 9o prompts the opportunity to re-post his three laws, evolved between 1962 and 1973. They seem to have some relevance for futures:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably [...]
Guthrie, not Allen. I was listening to his song “Talking Columbia Blues” today, and heard this verse - a future vision from the 1940s of how hydro-electricity would transform America.
There’s a moment in Terry Pratchett’s most recent novel, Making Money, which will bring a smile to anyone who’s ever been put through the Futures 101 intro which ends: ‘This is not about prediction’. [No important plot points are given away in the writing of this post].
We’ve recently finished some work for Yorkshire Futures on how Yorkshire and Humber might look in 2030. The reports - summary and full - have just been published, and there has been coverage in the Yorkshire Post. For various reasons, YF wanted a core scenario which represented “what if the prevailing trends continue to prevail [...]
One of the things you notice when you work with stakeholders on futures projects is that some professional cultures seem to find it harder to engage with than others. Economists in particular seem to find futures anathema. I’ve just stumbled on a plausible explanation as to why.
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 [...]
