Stockholm as the cradle of future thinking

Five scenarios for 2030

2008-10-13T14:25:00.000-07:00

The British Think Tank “forum for the future” developed five future climate scenarios. The Think Tank involved around 70 experts reaching from economists, journalists and politicians to environmentalists and social scientists. All scenarios demonstrate different ways how humanity reacts to the climate change. They are called.

- Efficiency First
- Service Transformation
- Redefining Progress
- Environmental War Economy
- Protectionist World

The first three are giving hope and are quite positive. Scarce resources are protected, technology drives efficiency, services are offered by business rather than products and progress and personal success are being redefined. The last two draw a darker picture of a costly fight against the damaged nature and about scare resources.

Physicians demonstrate the invulnerable network

2008-10-10T03:17:00.000-07:00

One basic problem in the technical evolution and networking ever since has been the vulnerability of networks. The military, enterprises and banks are often being hacked. But now physicians presented the safe network to public. It works with quantum cryptography based on the uncertainty principle stating that no object can be watched without changing it. This means, that by hacking a quantum encrypted network, one would change the cryptography and thereby destroy it as well as uncover the bugging.

That is a big step in a society with a megatrend of NETWORKING.

50th anniversary of Cyborg technology

2008-10-09T03:00:00.000-07:00

In the last and ultimate lecture, my compatriot Sven Tollmien, introduced us to many amazing digital trends and possibilities for our future. I have to admit that I am a technique freak. I love everything what is new and I want to try it. What impressed me the most was the “5^th Screen”, our future display for everyday’s life. When I told my father, who is visiting at the moment, about implanting chips into the human eye he could not believe nor would he appreciate it. But the very same day I read an article about the 50^th anniversary of pacemakers. 50 years ago Else Marie Larson convinced the doctors at Karolinska hospital, here in Stockholm, to implant the half-baked technology to her suffering husbands heart. Before becoming the first Cyborg, Arne Larsson had to be revitalized about 30 times a day, whereas now the pacemaker preserved 3 years in his body. The 24 pacemakers he got implanted over the time enlarged his life for valuable 38 years. But since that only little progress has taken place in cyborg technology. Maybe people are scared of mixing up humans and machines. But why not implanting the 5th screen? Brothers’ retinal scanning display is a first step in that direction. I would be really pleased to have all these little helps and hints provided by the Secai camera projected into my retina in my everyday’s life.

Sven’s presentation made me even more curious about the future. Can’t wait to try out all the things he presented.

I think humanity will be way more productive and effective in future as technologies will safe time.

Half of the fiction will come true !!!

2008-10-03T10:37:00.000-07:00

I remember when I read and saw George Orwell’s 1984 in school. It was written in 1948. The movie and I think the book starts off with the following statement.

Who controls the past, controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past.

Technologically everything Orwell anticipated nowadays is possible. Anyone can check out which car belongs to which persons. Cameras supervise traffic and number plates. Chips in passports tell almost everything. And Iceland’s population volunteered to create a huge gen-database.

The movie Matrix of the year 1999 first gave a vision of human and technological immersion. Artificial intelligence is dominating the human race and people live within a matrix, a simulated reality.

The most recent Pixar movie wall-E gives a slightly different future vision. The human population has to leave the planet due to extreme population, while robots are cleaning up earth. These machines as well developed intelligence and feelings. But the people chose voluntarily not to move their bodies anymore and live in a virtual reality not realizing their surrounding and people next to them. In the end it turns out that not all machines are good. In fact the main navigation robot rebels against the captain of the starship the human race had escaped in.

The movie points out current fears and threats to the human population, like the pollution of earth. But as well it gives a real vision of what might happen or is happening now with the evolution of technology. In the future time and place will not matter anymore. Research is done to create virtualized haptics.

Moreover technology immerses with the human body. Blind people get back their eyesight by implanting chips into the body.

Technologies get smaller, networks are available, and graphics get more and more realistic. The data processing is exceeding the abilities of human brains and data transfer is getting faster and faster.

I cannot see any reason, why a virtual reality will not become true. People already do live in a Second Life and make their dreams come true there.

But I really do not fear artificial intelligence. I have not heard of developing process units, bad computers or anything. Machines follow algorithms, we have feelings.

I think in the end it will be up to us if we want to spend the major part of our life in the matrix or in reality. And I am pretty sure there will always be a way to distinguish in which world ones in.

Don’t fear the future - look forward to it!

D-school = B-school and converging system design

2008-10-02T09:18:00.000-07:00

Ronald Jones gave us last lecture a really good impression of the future of designing. A designer should be more interdisciplinary and get away from designing individual items towards system designing. Really interesting is the new concept of D-schools and the great future employment perspectives for D-school majors. My girlfriend just decided to start a business university career after completing an apprenticeship in media design, due to the bad future perspectives in that field. I study Business administration and Engineering and can see thereby the advantages of an interdisciplinary education. And once again a successful businessman and the co founder of SAP, Hasso Plattner, has realized this trend several years ago and gave 35 million dollars to found the Stanford D-school. In the year 2005 yet the “business week” titled “Tomorrow's B-School? It Might Be A D-School”. According to the article the famous business schools are hooking up with design schools or founding their own institutes. As all these made me curious and so I did some research to find out what these interdisciplinary designers came up with in the last years. Here are some interesting things I have found:

Design of Mozilla’s Firefox

A system of SmartCards to optimize the work environment for TV series authors

A digital rental service

Most of these innovations come from the School of Design Thinking of the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany.

All these system design innovations made me curious and I start to wonder if I have chosen the right major. I think a really good career would be a Bachelor in Business Admin and Engineering with a Master in Design. All this fits in the future vision of convergence of technologies.

Converging systems have to be designed not single technologies.

Why always GOOGLE???

2008-09-28T14:14:00.000-07:00

Last session we all had the honor to meet Piers Fawkes CEO and founder of the trendblog psfk.com and he gave us a good impression about his work, some interesting trends and the three important groups who are responsible for new trends:

- The Creators
- The Community and
- The Companies

But what impressed me the most was his last question posed to companies:

“In an era anything will be made by anyone at anytime can you engage and collaborate creators, the community and other companies to make things better?”

This was impressing due to two reasons.

First it expanded my future vision that everything will be available for everyone at anytime to a further level. I realized that everyone will be able to create everything, anytime and anywhere. This means that I am an active part in the future and that I am taking part. I will be more responsible to make things better in the future. Maybe this blog is my first part of creating for the public.

There are yet articles talking about future companies in the context of anytime and anyplace and there is even a book called “ANYTIME, ANYPLACE: The new way of working” published by Microsoft. But up to now I have never heard nor thought of the creating component.

Google started a project for its 10th birthday called “10 to the 10th“ searching for the ten best ideas to make the world better. To implement those ideas Google offers a budget of 10 million dollars. This is the direct answer to Pierses question. Google uses its own community , its own financial power and degree of popularity to make the ideas of creators come true, with the target to make the world better.

Google certainly is a company which is anticipating future trends. If you have a short look on Google’s timeline you realize the success story of the company. This new project together with Pierses question for the future justify this incredible success. Hopefully all the other companies will learn a lesson from Google, so the world can benefit.

Why always GOOGLE?? - Because they support creators!

Schinne

Whole Foods and the Past, Present, and Future of Food

2008-09-25T06:19:00.000-07:00

On last Tuesday Christina Cheng, a very sympatric young lady, presented us her way of trendspotting in the food sector and how she teaches companies to take advantages of the spotted trends.

I really liked her way of subliminal making the world better. She seems to be quite successful in convincing her clients, in an area where packaging should be as cheap as possible, to use packaging materials which are recyclable to its original condition. Impressing was that she mentioned that BPA might have serious impact on our health and by a short research I found a source supporting her statement on the daily news site for food production and packaging.

That is certainly shocking to all of us.

Christina mentioned as well that she would go to Whole Foods in the USA to spot trends in the food sector. I spent one semester in San Diego (California) and there found Whole Foods and further on did not buy at any other store. As food in general is quite expensive in the US, the little more I spent there was ten times worth it.

Whole Foods has an impressive concept. It just sells high quality food, mostly organic. It has banned all plastic bags out of its affiliates and makes shopping an awesome experience. The atmosphere is nice and warm and everything looks fresh and worth the money. You can get the most exotic things as well as the everyday basics.

But what is really trailblazing is the Whole Foods new website concept to communicate with its customers just launched last month.

I browsed the new site myself and found a blog area, where even the CEO blogs himself. There is a video blog area, where I found the Co-founder CEO John Mackey of Whole Foods talks about the past, present and future of foods. Just watch it yourself:

Whole Foods new concept in communication is exactly what I expect it to be for our future. In my vision any one will have a, let’s call it, “mobile device” which works as a browser, phone, pc, game and video console, beamer and so on… and this device will use the fastest network available to communicate itself. So we will be able to make our shopping from the t-banan and just go there to pick it up or we even will get it delivered. But the way of taking feedback from the customers is really new, even back to the top management level. Whole Foods is not anonymous and I do not want the people I buy things from which go through my body to be that. The concept is great and the company is future oriented as they prove with their website. So I think it is just a matter of time until Whole Foods will conquer the European market.

Schinne

Emos and Digital Natives - lack of information methods

2008-09-23T05:14:00.000-07:00

On last Thursdays lecture (I know I did not post for a while… but I did a sea cruise ;-)) Katarina Gaffman talked about social trends. Her most recent study was about 15 to 20 years old people. In order to understand them and the trends in their group she spends as much time as possible with them. She talked about the so called Digital Natives and Emos. The Emos are “emotional rockers” to be recognized by their way to dress.

Just recently the 4 German boys out of a small town in eastern Germany got elected to the Best Newcomers at MTV Video Music Awards exclusivly by an American audience. That is an incredible success and certainly connected with the trend of Emo fashion with in the 15 to 20 years old. In Germany Tokio Hotel empowered the culture and made boys use more make up than any girl since about four years. Somehow this reminds me of the good old Beatles causing half of the world’s male population to get a stupid haircut. And it seems like Tokio Hotels worldwide success has just begun. It is really impressing how musicians and other celebrities can have such an intense influence on trends in the society.

But a way bigger influence has technology on the human society and especially on the group of 15 to 20 years old, as they adapt easily to new technologies. As mentioned above they are called digital natives. Katarina is not the only one who concentrated on digital natives. In fact the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland have a research project about digital natives and their own blog.

Two of the project members even wrote a book called “Born Digital”, talking about this specific group of people which was born in a society where information is digital and always available. “Our economy, our politics, our culture and even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed.” – This book introduces the Digital Natives and talks about future impacts. I want to ask you to read this short excerpt of the book.

There is one thing you know for sure: These kids are different. They study, work, write, and interact with each other in ways that are very different from the ways that you did growing up. They read blogs rather than newspapers. They often meet each other online before they meet in person. They probably don’t even know what a library card looks like, much less have one; and if they do, they’ve probably never used it. They get their music online—often for free, illegally—rather than buying it in record stores. They’re more likely to send an instant message (IM) than to pick up the telephone to arrange a date later in the afternoon. They adopt and pal around with virtual Neopets online instead of pound puppies. And they’re connected to one another by a common culture. Major aspects of their lives—social interactions, friendships, civic activities—are mediated by digital technologies. And they’ve never known any other way of life.

What was really interesting to me is that the authors and Katarina agree that the Digital Natives do nether know neither the traditional way of information accessing nor the modern ones. Katarina said that it was shocking to her how less experience they had in reading and using information websites or get along on enterprise websites to do for instance a web application. The Digital Natives know how to use messengers and blogs, but they do not know how to gather information.

I have mentioned several times that information will be available anywhere and at anytime in future. But all this offer of information will have to be filtered by the users. And this can only be done by experience. But the studies of the Digital Natives project and Katarina’s impression made clear that the new generation is not yet gathering this information. In my opinion the duty of future education should be to show this group how to gather information in a modern way, how to evaluate it on trustfulness and how to filter out the relevant things. And all of this needs to be done in an exciting and interesting way, as Katarina said they seemed to be always bored, the “Bored Generation”.

A future core competence will be to know the methods how to use the omnipresent accessible information in a proper way.

Schinne

Change Management - an essential core competence

2008-09-17T13:47:00.000-07:00

In yesterdays lecture we heard a lot about change and what it needs to make change happen. That was actually very interesting for me as my bachelor thesis was about the Change- and Project Management for an IT-system at a global German automobile manufacturer (I think I mentioned that earlier) and it was even more funny that Gustaf said “don’t do it like the Germans – Warum einfach machen, wenn es auch kompliziert geht”. I had the same impression. The system was too complicated and especially developed for the company although standard solutions were offered. But the bigger problem was that for the launch of the system no Change Management was done at all. Already in 1958 Kurt Lewin defined the three steps model for change with the steps:

Unfreeze – Transition – Refreeze

Until today almost all models of change are based on Lewins’, even the one presented by Frederik had similar steps. But to walk successfully through all these steps Chang Management is essential. That is the main reason why consultant companies nowadays are that successful. They work as change agents. They are expensive and they bring experience into the company, so no one doubts their changes. Big organizations suffer from the potential to change. That is why often major changes are only achieved by major changes in the company’s direction.

The most recent example is the web site of the “Wall street Journal”. For years www.wsj.com was a charged service and its layout 10 years behind the trend. Until today! The new owner Rupert Murdoch’s goal was to exceed the “New York Times” in the web. And today the WSJ facelift was presented to public. The layout is still kind of conservative, probably not to displease the habits of the readers. Innovative are the self disappearing banner ad, the quick links and the community integration.

As change takes place everyday any organization needs to be able to change. As Gustaf said, “nothing is worse, than a fat company not willing to change”. And for me the experience at the German car company was disappointing and demotivating. If the management is not willing to change, the staff will never be.

Future competitive advantage will be based on the ability to change.

Schinne

Megatrends – Watch the Web

2008-09-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

In the last lecture Henrik Blomgren pointed out that he considers the medical and health industry as one of three business opportunities. I am about one month in Sweden now and I had to go to three different hospitals yet. I am lucky as I have private insurance in Germany, which means I can chose any doctor or hospital and my insurance will cover it. So I was searching for a good hospital with immediate and good service, but I could not find any. I am now used to the opportunity to chose within hospitals competing with each other and I started wondering if I would pay more money for better medical service in case I would not have private insurance. And indeed I would. We all pay for good service in restaurants, we pay for healthy food and many more things. But there is nothing more important than our health. So I am sure people will pay for it. Not just plastic surgery but also any for any kind of treatment. So I am sure if there was an opportunity to visit medics of kind of specializations and all medical devices at one appealing place people would surely spent their money for that excellent service. In Germany dentists give their office a chilled ambience, offering coffee, decent music in the background and
beach chairs for the patients to wait in.

Inspired by the presented Megatrends of John Naisbitt I started some research what people consider as megatrends nowadays. And I have found two interesting sources. The first one is a German business consultancy company called “Z_punkt - the foresight company” and they point out the following 20 Megatrends:

1. Demographic change
2. New step of individualization
3. Boom in the health industry
4. Empowered women
5. Cultural variety
6. New mobility
7. Digital life
8. Learning from nature
9. Ubiquist intelligence
10. Convergence of technologies
11. Globalization 2.0
12. Knowledge based economy
13. Business ecological systems
14. Changes in the work environment
15. New consumption behavior
16. Changes in energy and resources
17. Climate change and ecological contamination
18. Urbanization
19. New political world order
20. Growing global threats to social security

And the second one is an article in ReadWriteWeb written about a year ago and talking about the top ten future web trends for the next ten years:

1. Semantic web
2. Artificial Intelligence
3. Virtual Worlds
4. Mobile 5. Attention Economy
6. Web sites as Web services
7. Online video / internet TV
8. Rich Internet Apps
9. International Web
10. Personalization

Although I know the headlines are not all self explaining I do not want to go into further detail as it can be read if you follow the links. But what is really interesting is that we have talked about almost all these trends in class or I picked them up in my blog. And even more interesting is that there is a huge congruence within the web Megatrends and Z_points Megatrends. Does that mean that a big part of our society’s trends can be anticipated from the web?

I think so!

Almost every person in industrialized countries has a web history and profile. We have a second virtual life where we show our behavior. The only difference to the real world is that we do it much faster there and that our behavior can be analyzed. And in the end the result of these analysis again is spread by the web.

So my today’s message is:

If you want to be a trendspotter you have to watch the web! – No web, no state of the art trendspotting

I think it is a great idea to use the blog as a course assignment for a future thinking course.

Schinne