Designing Your Own Future!

Carrying the rather magnanimous title of “Strategic Futurist”,  I try to always clarify that I have no crystal ball, no special powers for prediction of the future (nor any other special powers for that matter!), but I do believe that “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” as Alan Kay said.  However, I have become somewhat skilled at discovering and observing trends and patterns that I believe will help us to shape and design our futures to be bright and positive ones.  Today I’d like to highlight some recent examples that add credibility to this model of designing your own future, and I for one could not be happier with the progress and trend. 

It seems that the topic of the future is particularly popular of late.  In my recent posting “Inventing the Future?” I wrote about the fascinating new joint venture between Jane Congeal and the Institute for the Future called Superstructure, "the world’s first massively multiplier forecasting game" which is about to start September 2008 . With a tag line of “Superstructure! Play the game, invent the future”, you can see why I was immediately attracted.

Rather than fatalistically accepting that the future as something that happens to us, I believe that we can both individually and collectively invent and design our own!  I also see this as part of using serendipity as a serious strategy for success.  More on that later.

Web of Fate; NOT!

Mark Alert recently (July 16, 2008) did a good job of highlighting several of these new examples of what I would see as “designing your own future” in his e-Clippings: Learning As Art blog post called Forecasting the Future:  Prediction Markets & MMOG's.  In particular, check out the Web of Fate(Wof).  Despite the title, I see WoF as serendipitous and by design rather than fatalistic. It is, in their own words:

“.. a social experiment that harnesses the collective intelligence of the web to visualize and uncover hidden relationships among future and historical events."

They do this by providing everyone (yes you too!) the opportunity to add their own thoughts in a variety of ways. You can make your own predictions, quote a prediction from someone else you agree with, set a future goal, or create a time capsule.  Web of Fate also offers another way of looking at this with their “Semantic Future: explore the meaning of everything”,  accomplished by their semantic analysis engine that extracts meaning from historical, present and future events and draw connections among them.

Since I'm a very visual thinker, I particularly liked the way that WoF is synthesizing all of “our” input to create the Web of Fate visualizations.  Given enough input, I think these will go a long way towards helping us spot trends and patterns that I find so enlightening to the process of designing your own future. 

World Mural Project:  Youth is Not Always Wasted on the Young!

But I’ve saved the best for last.  Chris Dawkins, another blogger I recommend, wrote a terrific summary of the “Intel World Mural project - just what will the next 40 years bring?”.  Chris is behind the Ziff Davis blog on Education and I’ve written more about him and his blog in my previous post “Scan, scan, scan as fast as you can”. I recommend that you subscribe to his feed, if you don’t already.

But the treat today is to direct your attention to the World Mural Project, which is part of Intel’s celebration of their 40th anniversary as a company (July 18, 2008) when they will unveil what they describe as:

“...one of the world’s largest web based digital murals designed by youth.  More than 530 young people from 21 countries around the globe share their vision on what computers will allow us to accomplish in the next 40 years.”

To see for yourself, just click the “View Mural” link on the World Mural site. I hope you will have as much fun as I did exploring the various visions from the young contributors.  The interface is fun and whimsical, and it allows you to move around to different countries and regions and then click on the individual contributions.

Chris pulled out this quote from Intel spokesperson Agnes Kwan, which gives a great glimpse into the future that some of these “kids” see:

"Some of the themes that the kids have expressed are: having multi-function, wearable computers, achieving a greener environment on Earth, greatly improved healthcare, vastly improving our brain power, experiencing virtual education, communicating through holograms, teletransport, living more relaxed, peaceful lives, and living on Mars.”

Also worth checking out is the Intel Computer Clubhouse through which the mural project was developed.  This network is an after-school community-based technology learning program that enables youth in underserved communities to acquire tools necessary for personal and professional success.  The Clubhouses were an ideal way for youth to collaborate on the mural and create a dynamic and unified piece of art that represented a global world view.

I think this is also a great example of another trend that I highlighted in my post “Future Sources of Innovation, Discovery and Design” where I see more and more innovation and ideas coming from the underdeveloped and underserved groups and regions of the world (many of them located inside otherwise very “developed” regions and countries, I might add!).  In any case, a very good use of your time would be to check out both the World Mural project itself and the Computer Clubhouse project.  Consider getting involved yourself as a volunteer, mentor or trainer in these projects.

Who better to involve directly in designing our future than those who are going to spend the most time in it and who likely have entirely new and fresh ideas and perspectives than those of us who may be more often shaped by the past?

I particularly liked the line and the link found in the Web of Fate site:  “The Solution:  You have the solution”    OK, OK, so it’s a form and you know I subscribe to the “all forms must die” attitude, but in this case the potential for the benefits of your input outweigh the format and I’d strongly encourage you to add yours to the collection and check back regularly to see how our future is shaping up!

Make This Personal!

I hope you too find some of these new examples inspiring and insightful and that you will check them out.  However, all of these are acting at a very high level. Most change occurs much closer to the ground and with more specific applications.   Therefore perhaps most important and valuable is the potential for YOU to adopt some of these examples to your own work and areas of interest.  What is to stop you from creating your own game along the lines of Superstruct to drill down on designing the future on a much more focused level of your own industry, profession, hobby or other areas that you are passionate about?  It “only” takes a good initial premise or scenario to cause some of that incendiary “Spontaneous Creative Combustion” in your own organization. How could you involve younger minds in helping to see and shape the future of these worlds you are a part of?  How could you instigate an outbreak of input and feedback within your groups and utilize the semantic analysis from something like the Web of Fate to spot trends and directions that will help you direct and design the future?

At the risk of beating this theme to death, let me restate that I am NOT interested nor optimistic about these examples I’ve highlighted for their predictive capabilities, but rather for their assistance in helping each and every one of us to play a part in designing a future that is both bright for all and is one we can be proud of and part of.

But most importantly I’d like to know how do YOU see the future shaping up?    You know where I stand but how do you see it?  Bright or dark?  Is the future fatalistic of serendipitous?  Done to you or something you have a hand in?

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