IFTF's Future Now

What is Future Now?

It is often said that journalism is the first draft of history. It is also the first draft of the future: hidden in the daily flow of information coming from newspapers, magazines, scientific journals, conferences, books and blogs, are articles that can be read as signals from the future, signs of what the future could be like.

As part of their research, all forecasters scan newspapers, popular magazines, and professional journals. When we do this, we're doing two things: keeping up with fields that we know are important and deserve our continuing attention; and looking for interesting, offbeat, or inexplicable events that might signal some new trend or innovation. Normally, this work remains private, the prelude to the "real" products-- the position papers, thick reports, etc.-- but it can generate vast quantities of notes, Internet bookmarks, reprints, etc.. Blogging offers a platform for turning this private resource into a public one. There are several reasons for doing so.

First, the Institute is a non-profit research institute, commited to communicating our research and thinking to the public at large. White papers are one way to do this; but it can also be useful to have a more modest but regular scan of the horizon.

Implicit in the Institute's mission is a mandate not just to release findings, but to share something of its way of thinking, and to encourage others to think more regularly and systematically about the future. Publications are often like buildings with the scaffolding removed: you see the finished object, but can't see how it was built. In contrast, the informality of blogs makes them a great venue for authors to share works in progress, or to think out loud. My hope is that Future Now can provide a glimpse of the process underlying futures work, and in so doing help some readers do their own thinking about the future.

The informality of blogs also means that they can serve as a cross between research notebooks and venues for testing ideas. One of things I plan to do on Future Now is write about things that aren't part of the Institute's core research, but could become important later. Most of those won't pan out. A few will.

Future Now Contributors

This is a list of current Future Now contributors. It was actually last updated in December 2006. Various other contributors have come and gone; I'm trying to keep it to people who are currently posting to the blog.

Mike Liebhold is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for the Future, focusing on geospatial infrastructures for pro-active, context-aware and ubiquitous computing, as well as social implications of a geospatial web. In the 1980s at Apple's Advanced Technology Labs, Mike led the Terraform project - an investigation of cartographic and location-based multimedia. He has also worked as a senior consulting architect at Netscape, and as a visiting researcher at Intel Labs. Most recently Mike has helped design and stage collaborative mapping workshops with the Locative Media Lab, a loosely affiliated network of geospatial hackers and artists. Mike publishes his occasional thoughts about microlocal and geospatial computing on his Starhill blog.

Mike Love is a research assistant for the Technology Horizons Program at the Institute for the Future. In addition to supporting research efforts at the Institute, Mike works on the application social software tools to futures research, and to improve communications between IFTF researchers and between IFTF and its members. Mike has a degree in mathematics from Stanford University.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is a research director at the Institute for the Future, founding editor of Future Now, and the Institute's blogger in chief. He holds a Ph.D. in history and sociology of science, and before joining IFTF taught at Williams College, Stanford University, U. C. Berkeley, and U.C. Davis. He also spent several years as managing editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Alex is the author of essays in popular magazines and newspapers, numerous scholarly articles, and Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions (Stanford, 2002). While not at his day job, Alex is writing a book on the end of cyberspace. His personal blog is Relevant History.

Jason Tester is a product designer at the Institute for the Future. He received an undergraduate degree from Stanford University, and an MA in interaction design from Ivrea University in Italy. His Accelerated Democracy Web site examines the intersection of technology and democracy, and his work on computerized voting has been featured in a number of venues.

Anthony Townsend is a Research Director at the Institute for the Future. Anthony has been researching the implications of new technology on cities and public institutions for over a decade. At IFTF, Anthony's work focuses on several inter-related topics: pervasive computing, the urban environment, economics and demographics, public and nonprofit organizations, and the media industry. Prior to joining IFTF, Anthony enjoyed a brief but productive academic career at New York University, where he directed research sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security. Anthony is active in international futures research networks, and received a Fulbright scholarship in 2004 to study the social impacts of broadband in South Korea. He was one of the original founders of NYCwireless, a pioneer in the municipal wireless movement. Anthony received his Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003.

Emeriti

Franz Dill is a futures technologist at a large consumer package goods manufacturer. He has worked with IFTF as a collaborator and customer since 1980. Franz has introduced and implemented a number of new technologies for commercial use and has written and spoken widely on the subject of both the value and impact of emergent technologies. Trained in astrophysics, applied mathematics and computer science, his current interests include artificial intelligence, retail technologies, visualization and virtualization.

Steve King is a Senior Advisor at the Institute for the Future and a partner at the early stage advisory firm Emergent Research. Steve has over 20 years of industry experience and has held a number of senior corporate general management and marketing roles, including Vice President of Corporate Marketing for Macromedia, Vice President and General Manager Asia-Pacific for Lotus Development Corporation, and Vice President of Marketing for Isys Corporation. Steve's current research interest is how marketing and the marketing function are being impacted by the Internet and related technological change.

Coming soon

Future Now will make its debut next week. We're still finalizing the design, running some tests, etc. Please check back soon!