Welcome to the Future of Making! We are on the verge of a transformation of how products are designed, manufactured, and distributed. The entire supply chain is undergoing reinvention and the impact will be felt not only by manufacturers but also by individuals, households, communities, even entire regions. Driven by the need to innovate faster than ever before, green aspirations, and a quest for authenticity, new paradigms for “making things” are emerging.

Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences—the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of “makers” is boldly voiding warranties to tweak, hack, and customize the products they buy. And what they can’t purchase, they build from scratch. Meanwhile, flexible manufacturing technologies on the horizon will change fabrication from massive and centralized to lightweight and ad hoc.

The Chinese-language Internet is part of the transformation of contemporary China and the emergence of China as a world power in the 21st century. As it has been in other places, the Chinese-language Internet is a platform for new kinds of connection, collectivity, and expression.

The Institute for the Future’s Abundant Computing Map is an introduction to the technologies and applications that will shape a world of digital abundance. Because the landscape will be shaped not just by new technological innovations but also by innovative uses of existing technologies, a comprehensive list of every future application would be simply impossible to create. What we present instead is a guide that will serve as an outline of key directions of the evolution.

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A new language is emerging that will transform how we conduct business, make life decisions, and interact with our world over the next decade: it is the language of simulation. At the most basic level, a simulation is an imitation of a real thing, experience, or process. But in recent years, it’s become possible to create computer simulations that are much higher fidelity and more accurate than ever before. In the next decade, the best simulations won’t be judged by how realistic they are but how real they are.

The Technology Horizons Program’s research on the Future of Work comes at an exciting time for the intersection of work and technology. Technology has become integrated into virtually every aspect of work. And because we spend so much time working, work really is the place where we most directly feel the impact of developing technologies.

Do you have what it takes to become your company's Data Whisperer? To work with your organization's new Affinity Agent? Or to manage your firm's new Neurological Trainer? Through a series of creative "job interview" challenges, you'll find out firsthand exactly what it will take to succeed in new innovation roles and leading-edge management positions. In the process, you'll learn about the key trends shaping work and the myriad impacts they will have on workers, organizations, and leadership.

Information overload has become a cliche. We use the phrase half-jokingly to describe the stress associated with the onslaught of media that digital technology has unleashed on us. The sobering reality is that we ain't seen nothin' yet. The vast majority of new information technologies are either built for data acquisition (e.g., sensor networks and camera phones) or information dissemination (e.g., blogs, RSS, location-enhanced media, and aware environments).

Over the next 15–20 years we will overcome limits in availability of our computational resources. While today, high-performance computing applications are mostly limited to capital-intensive industries like petroleum exploration, aircraft and automotive design, and pharmaceuticals, over time these capabilities will migrate to mass markets and eventually into the hands of consumers. In this world of abundant computing, our interactions with computers will no longer be constrained to laptops, desktops, and handhelds.

Everywhere we look today, the rules of innovation are changing. In Innovation in the Urban Wilderness (SR-1050), we investigate how the growth of megacities and slums is creating new crucibles of innovation that combine lightweight technologies and cooperative strategy to solve problems. In this report, The Mobility Explosion: Shaping Innovation and Technology Needs (SR-1052), we turn to the other great driver of change in today's global economy—the explosion of personal mobility of all kinds across the world's largest markets.