Noise Between Stations

Tangible Futures

  • Dream Cars Meet Harsh Reality

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    3 min read

    That’s what Phil Patton at the New York Times thought about the concept cars at the Detroit Auto Show. In the article I found some insight as well as some assumptions we can toss out… But this year, dark economic clouds seem to have cast a shadow even over the designers displaying their ideas at…

  • Interview With Me Discussing Tangible Futures

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    1 min read

    Stuart Candy, researcher at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies and research fellow of The Long Now Foundation, asked me a few questions about tangible futures and published the interview on his blog. While I’m more focused on near-term concept design these days, it was helpful for me to reflect on why and how…

  • Finally, The Iraq War Ends

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    1 min read

    …not really, unfortunately. But that was the headline on a “special edition” of the “New York Times” today. The credibility was in question from the start, as the paper was handed out free at the subway which is never the case with the Times. The production is quite accurate, but a quick glance at the…

  • Agile with a capital/lowercase A

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    2 min read

    It looks like agile software development is having the same growing pains, expressed through semantics, as the design field (or the Design field). It’s the perceived misapplication of language that catches my eye… Jason Gorman argued that the meaning of Agile was ambiguous and was being inappropriately applied to a very wide range of approaches…

  • IDEO’s UMPC Vision Video

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    1 min read

    A nice example of what I call a tangible future. I like how it starts with more conventional examples and then ends with others that have believable gestures but without clear intentions, which could make it a good conversation starter between IDEO (the design firm) and Intel (the client).

  • Idealized Design

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    1 min read

    Idealized design is a way of thinking about change that is deceptively simple to state: In solving problems of virtually any kind, the way to get the best outcome is to imagine what the ideal solution would be and then work backward to where you are today. This ensures that you do not erect imaginary…

  • MSNBC Review of the World Future Society Conference

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    1 min read

    Until I get around to recording my own observations, here’s Michael Roger’s review of the recent World Future Society conference in Toronto.

  • Tangible Futures in Denver, Wednesday, August 16th

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    1 min read

    I’ll be giving a presentation on Tangible Futures in Denver next Wednesday, August 16th. Since giving the talk in Philadelphia I’ve refined the how-to part of the talk quite a bit with more perspective of the people on the receiving end of this work. If you’re in the neighborhood and interested I’d love to meet…

  • Jamais Cascio on the Role of Artifacts in Futurism

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    1 min read

    Jamais Cascio on Artifacts from the Future: “If scenario creation was the poster-boy for futurism in the mid-1990s, artifact creation looks to play that role for mid-2000s futurism…. I can’t imagine doing a major futurist project now without using some kind of tangible element of the future, even if it’s just an article from a…

  • Tangibly understanding your retirement

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    2 min read

    Our retirement is one topic where all of us think many years into the future. In my tangible futures presentation I’ve been showing a typical screen from my online retirement account. It shows how much money I have saved, where it’s invested, the rate of return, my asset allocation, and so on. It’s a great…

  • Creating organizational vision with storytelling and artifacts

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    3 min read

    “The Institute for the Future couldn’t get clients to read its trend forecasts. So it started giving away prescient product ideas instead.” These are great examples of the tangible part of what we’ve been calling Tangible Futures. The IFTF objects seem like good ways to, as they say, ‘start conversations’ about alternate futures. The intention…

  • GE dares to dream of the future

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    3 min read

    In my tangible futures presentation last week, I repeated a statement I’ve written here, that sometime during the second half of the 20th century, American companies forgot how to dream. I’m happy to contradict that statement with a clear example: GE. In Growth as a Process, Jeffrey Immelt reveals the process that led to their…

  • Tangible Futures in Philly on Wednesday

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    1 min read

    I’ll be discussing tangible futures in Philadelphia next Wednesday, courtesy of the nice folks at PHICHI and Colony Interactive. I hope to provoke the audience with a new look at an old practice and hear some feedback. I hope to see you Philadelphians there.

  • WorldChanging images of the future

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    1 min read

    My colleague Zap pointed me to some of WorldChanging’s links to images of the future… Pantopicon’s FFWD>> competition presents a series of themes, and asks for images set in 2005 and 2025 as illustration. (reference) The Onion’s 2056 issue. Alex Steffen — in a post wonderfully similar to MIG’s ideas on tangible futures — itemizes…

  • Concept car dreams

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    2 min read

    Since I’ve been thinking about tangible futures and why companies should envision the future (including car companies) I thought a visit to the Auto Show here in New York was worthwhile. The biggest surprise for me was the Toyota exhibit. While I love their process, I’m usually bored with their high quality but plain cars.…