Here’s an interesting early arrival in the coming boom of 3D printing. The Dubai-based company Precise Concepts is offering a service called This Is Me, which sells 3D scanned and 3D printed copies of yourself. A 6-inch, full color statue costs about $300 – $400 USD, which they scan and print off-site. The statues are [...]
Three Examples of Good Design Fiction
February 5 12
My last post, “On Glass & Mud: A Critique of (Bad) Corporate Design Fiction“, generated a lot of discussion about commercial design futures. Mick Costigan suggested I was being too “high-horse” in my criticism. He (and several others) suggested that we should focus on the positive aspects of doing futures work in a constrained organizational [...]
On Glass & Mud: A Critique of (Bad) Corporate Design Fiction
February 2 12
Asperger’s Design Fiction I am a huge fan of design-based futures work (a.k.a. “design fiction“). Videos, in particular, can be a very effective way of engaging people in complex, subtle and nuanced explorations of the future. I always applaud companies that give it a shot, especially when it represents a big step away from “business [...]
Back to the Futurist Interview
January 27 12
Alexander Phillips was kind enough to interview me for the very cool “Back to the Futurist” series over at URBNFUTR. The series highlights some interesting ideas on the future of cities and those who think about them. Many thanks to @MelissaSterry and the entire URBNFUTR team for the recommendation. PS – Their bio is a bit outdated [...]
Dubai, Science Fiction City
October 19 11
I recently moved to Dubai, where I snapped this shot this morning. Rolling fog in Dubai this morning looking beautiful #SciFi http://yfrog.com/h7ql5kqj Soon Chris Nelder and Alexis Madrigal picked it up, which led to over 60 RT’s and coverage in The Atlantic and Gizmodo. Alexis said, Wow. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a city look more like “the future” than [...]
Complete PhD Online
October 10 11
I finished my PhD at MIT this August, on “Large Scale Participatory Futures Systems: a Comparative Study of Online Scenario Planning Approaches”. I’ll write more soon, but here is the full PDF (11.4 megabytes) and the slides from my defense, below. From the abstract: This dissertation explores the role that participatory online collective intelligence systems [...]
“A depression where people are afraid of the sky…”
July 25 11
I was just listing to an old DJ mix I did with Bruce Sterling as part of my NerdHouse Podcast. It’s from his famous Reboot 11 closing speech back in 2010. The speech is full of crushing lines, but the following ones really made me smile. Here is what the future looks like for your [...]
Guest blogging at Cognitive Edge, Updated
July 14 11
I finished guest blogging at Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge site recently. Go have a look and see what you think. So far I’ve blogged about: Foveal and Peripheral Vision Threats: What Kind of Threats Do We Face in the 21st Century? Learning to See the Unseen New Movement, New Mastery: Perceptual Dexterity in the 21st [...]
Resource Bubbles & Commodity Prices: Lessons in Optimism & Pessimism
July 14 11
I recently contributed to an interesting white paper on the future of resource scarcity and commodity prices at GBN. Check it out here; it’s called, “Winners and Losers in the New Commodity Price Regime” (PDF). Part of what I found so interesting about this exercise was that the project began as a heated debate over whether [...]
The Future of Public Services; Innovations in Online Scenario Planning, Part 2
April 24 11
The following mini-scenarios were created using the SenseMaker Suite Scenarios approach developed for my PhD with Dave Snowden and Wendy Schultz. They were auto-aggregated using narrative fragments contributed by over 265 participants from around the world. In other words, participants submitted stories of the future, tagged them, and then the system clustered them based [...]