Signtific
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Originally known as The X2 Project, Signtific provides an innovative medium for discussing the future of science and technology. This work will identify major trends and disruptions in science, technology, and the practice of science over the next twenty years and their impacts on the larger society. Making use of the Institute for the Future's 40-year experience, we have created this platform to facilitate the types of discussions that are critical for generating insights into possible futures.
On Signtific, users can engage with fellow members of the global scientific community – individuals who are interested in the future of science and technology. The project will employ bottom-up forecasting methods, making use of the collective intelligence of people with different backgrounds, domains of expertise, and geographic locations to synthesize larger patterns and trends. The new Signtific was launched in January 2009 (http://www.signtific.org/).
Signtific Year 1 Report Update
What is Signtific?
The Signtific Project is designed to engage the global scientific community in anticipating the most important innovations and disruptions in science and technology—and understanding their implications for the future of science and of society at large. It stands at the leading edge of several trends that will reshape the practice of science over the next few...
SciBarCamp
The Institute played host to SciBarCamp on Wednesday and Thursday. On my personal blog I've posted some thoughts about the event, and what makes for a successful camp.
Scientific databases, tacit knowledge, and the limits of federation
I was at the first day of SciBarCamp today, playing local host / fixer / keeping an eye on the furniture. Sean Mooney (a former professor at Indiana University, now relocated to the West Coast) gave a very interesting talk about current challenges in bioinformatics.
A fair amount of Sean's talk dealt with the technical challenges of...
The architecture of the future
The New York Times has a piece (Future Vision Banished to the Past") about the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, a "rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence." It's a piece that...
Space gaming takes a step closer to reality
On conversation and extremism
It's conventional wisdom that groups generate ideas and plans more moderate than those of individuals. Groups and discussion encourage compromise, smooth out extremes, and guarantee moderation. It is also one of the unspoken assumptions of facilitation and group-oriented scenario work. Facilitation and scenario-building, the thinking goes, builds a sense of collective spirit by helping groups...
Tinkering and the future
My latest article, on the nature and future of tinkering, appears today in issue 22 of Vodafone Receiver:
Almost forty years ago, the Whole Earth Catalog published its last issue. For the American counterculture, it was like the closing of a really great café: the Catalog had brought together the voices...
Pentagon investing in energy research
The Washington Post reports on new Pentagon-sponsored research on energy efficiency, and the hard realities that now make it a priority:
[A]bout half of the U.S. military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are related to attacks with improvised explosive devices on convoys,...
Richard Posner on preconceptions and anticipating disasters
Richard Posner writes in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education about the current financial crisis, and why experts didn't take early warnings about it seriously.
The financial crisis, when it finally struck the nation full-blown in September 2008, caught the government, the financial community, and the...
New on IFTF.org: IFTF Workshop Listings
IFTF has just posted a menu of workshops based on our most recent research, facilitated by IFTF staff. In today's volatile, uncertain world, it seems impossibly difficult to forecast the future. Yet now is also the time when forecasting can be most valuable. It's a time when looking long can give you perspective, when thinking about the future can...
From the Signtific Blog: Heading to China
One of the most interesting parts of the Signtific project for me has been the opportunity to do interviews and workshops with scientists around the world. Last year was a particularly active year, with trips to Malaysia, South Africa,...
Interesting question
One of the things that can powerfully affect the future is the radical decline in price of a currently expensive good or service. The invention of the printing press made books (and later newspapers) exceptionally cheap; the Industrial Revolution did the same for a whole host of manufactured goods; and more recently the same thing happened with information technologies.
It's easy to see...
IFTF Update: Winter 2009
2008 was an inspiring year for us and despite external forces in the world today, we are moving into 2009—our 41st year—with new vigor. As Distinguished IFTF Fellow Bob Johansen puts it, 2009 "has great potential to be a springboard year." Across the world now more than ever is the time to invest in looking at what lies in the coming decade and beyond. We...
The Launch of Signtific!
After many months of hard work, we are proud to announce the official launch of Signtific! Signtific.org is an innovative and dynamic collaborative web-based platform designed for engaging scientists and technologists from all...
John Kay on financial models
John Kay's recent piece in the Financial Times is a useful warning to people doing financial—and other kinds of—forecasting: understanding the historical limitations of your model, and how badly things can go when the assumptions built into your model no longer hold:
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On the intersection of design and futures
For some time I've been thinking about how trends in computing and design might affect the way that futurists work: how they could be used to sharpen our research methods, create new ways of interacting with audiences, and help people see and act on the future more effectively.
I've pulled these thoughts together in an...
Time on After Shock
From Time:
[S]tarting at 10:02 a.m. on Thursday, you can play a sprawling, multiplayer collaboration game called After Shock to see what happens on the other side.
Behind all this flash and exuberance is a stark reality. The southern section of the San Andreas Fault hasn't moved in about 300 years. We...
Ophelia Chong on After Shock
Los Angeles-based writer and designer Ophelia Chong (one of a handful of people who've made me think more positively about Southern California) writes about After Shock in her 404 City blog.
I am sitting at my desk listening to my...
Lurching Towards Open Science
Openness is rocking the scientific world. Accept it or proceed at your own risk. As an article last week in Nature points out: scientists are posting unprecedented amounts of experimental data online in “open notebooks”.
But wait.
Science in academia is becoming more closed...
Timo Hannay on Web 2.0 and science
At a recent conference on Science in the 21st Century, I was lucky to hear Nature.com's publishing director Timo Hannay talk about Web 2.0 and the future of science. He recently gave a talk at the British Library with the provocative title "Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social Not Working?" The whole piece...
