About the Institute for the Future

About Future Now


  • IFTF's Future Now draws on research and forecasting at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, CA think tank specializing in the future of technology, health, and organizational change. It began in September 2003.

Who is Future Now?

  • IFTF's Future Now is a group weblog, founded by Institute research director Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in September 2003. Its contributors include IFTF researchers interested in emerging technologies, the future of Asia, and the social and economic impacts on new technologies; IFTF corporate affiliates; academic partners; and members of the Innovation Lab, a Danish futures group with offices in Aarhus and Copenhagen. A complete list of contributors is available here.

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September 27, 2003

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.

Comments

Within Philips, Philips Design is leveraging this understanding of what consumers desire to create ideas and scenarios around which retail can develop. Through design and research, it is helping show what is possible, providing achievable visions, three to ten years out into the shopping horizon.

See Philips Future of Shopping teaser ideas and comment
http://www.futureofshopping.philips.com/"

Read the positioning paper
http://www.futureofshopping.philips.com/Philips_FoS_positioning.pdf

Read more in a recent Philips article by their Semiconductors division on the topic
http://www.semiconductors.philips.com/markets/identification/articles/success/s97/

Does your research also delve into future polar cities for survivors of global warming events in the year 2500 or so? Or is that too far afield for your bailliwick. If interested, see my website here or email me at danbloom GMAIL. I am serious. In Taiwan.

http://pcillu101.blogspot.com

it's a kind of adaptation strategy worth discussing now. I don't think anybody is doing this yet. Why not? 500 years is not so far away.

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