Skip to main content

40 posts tagged with "Future"

View All Tags

🔵 FS 🌀 DTech

It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.

Read more

🔵 FS

When we imagine “the future”, what do we conjure up? Some may think five years ahead and struggle to imagine a world much different than today. Others may dream of a better world and wonder how it could be brought into being. Alas, these ideas focus on the content of the future. But what about the very shape of the future itself? Is it linear? Branching? Circular? Throughout history, people have tried to give shape to the future.

Read more

🟠 Des-fi 🔵 FS

A century ago, a little-known series of books about the future tackled everything from science to religion to monogamy. Max Saunders argues that it deserves to be rediscovered – and not just for its striking prescience.

One hundred years ago, towards the end of 1923, the geneticist JBS Haldane published a short book imagining the world that lay ahead. Fewer than 100 pages long, Daedalus, or Science and the Future was an extraordinary whistle-stop tour of all the sciences, taking in everything from the future of human reproduction to energy generation.

Read more

🔵 FS

The foundation of generative AI is data from the past. This raises a question: how does the past generate a future? The human answer to this is embedded in ideologies. We arrive at a set of values, and engage in social arrangements that reflect those values. We sustain these beliefs by confirming those values through the films we watch, the media we consume, the conversations we have and who have them with.

Read more

🔘 Arch

The rapid ascent of electric vehicles has presented designers and carmakers with an intriguing opportunity to rethink the service station. And while most current EV charging facilities are more infrastructure than architecture, a radically new type of service station is on the horizon that takes advantage of the time gap people spend waiting for their cars to charge.

Read more

🔘 Arch

Phoenix has been 110 degrees Fahrenheit—or hotter—for nearly a month. Sanbao, China, reached a record high of 52.2 degrees Celsius (126 Fahrenheit). In Iran, the heat index hit 66.7 degrees Celsius (152 Fahrenheit), near the limits of human survival. This isn’t the new normal—as climate change progresses, the world will get even hotter. Here’s how cities are racing to adapt.

Read more

🔘 Arch 🟣 SC 🟠 Des-fi 🔵 FS

IDEO decided to take the 100+ stakeholders through a futuring process designed to help them envision desired futures that might feel out of reach based on their day-to-day experience. As part of this, the team wanted to create a tangible visual experience that felt both nostalgic and forward-looking. And so we looked to the retrofuturism of the View-Master.

Read more

🔵 FS 🌀 DTech

The mixing of ‘Art’ and ‘Progress’ makes for a curious potion. When we consider the latter term, we tend to associate it with technological advancement, or perhaps the promotion of liberal values within society. Yet with art it seems a bit harder to decipher. From one perspective, we can examine the capacity of art as a tool for making social and political progress. Artists can often serve as powerful voices for social causes and help to make vivid the most sobering of truths. Another way of combining art with progress may encourage us to consider the notion of whether art, as a discipline, improves upon itself. A rather contentious narrative, given the fact that art seems to represent a pocket of nostalgia, with many people longing for the classical composers, old masters, and epic poets of bygone times. I began by asking Eno where he stood on the latter of these two.

Read more

🔘 Arch

Extreme heat disasters like this are becoming increasingly common in regions where high heat used to be rare. Blackouts during severe heat waves can also leave residents who believe they are protected because they have in-home air conditioners at unexpected risk. To prepare, cities, neighborhoods, companies, and individuals can take steps now to reduce the harm.

Read more