September 14th, 2009
19:53
A press release dropped into my mailbox, with very interesting content. The title is only in Finnish, sorry, but I’ll try to translate the essential bits for you.
There’s a new future scenarios handbook been published tomorrow on the 15th by TNS Gallup & Design Agency Kuudes Kerros. The work is based on research by Risc Monitor (Research Institute on Social Change) research programme, which has been running from 1978.
The contents include 8 different scenarios for future consumers in Finland, with titles: “Peace, Accustomisation, Network, Freedom, Power, Feeling, Light and Quality”
They claim that the scenarios shouldn’t be “super-futuristic”, which sounds good. Like most people know that in future scenarios the assessments are often taken over the top with flying cars á la 50’s.
Just passing on the info, I’m definitely going to check out the material in person.
February 14th, 2009
17:50
The recent economical situation in the World has many of us thinking twice about bigger investments and overall about where our money goes. We pay close attention to news forecasts on where we are heading and how fast. Some people like the Finnish investor / bank CEO Björn Wahlroos, have given promising predictions stating that the panic is over and the tide will turn before Autumn 2009. I wonder how much consolidation that brings to those who have already been laid off during Q1.
One that has a tad gloomier view is Gerald Celente (self-proclaimed World’s #1 trends forecaster). Unfortunately he does have quite a good track record in his predictions. Therefore it’s interesting to see what he has to say for 2009 and beyond. Well, judge for yourself but I didn’t find it very funny.
December 3rd, 2008
20:14
Image by Kauko Helasvuo / Finnair
Once again a single finnish company has gotten more publicity and brand value for Finland than the great finnish brand team that was mentioned in an earlier post.
Finnair had been discussing the future of flying with a finnish designer Kauko Helasvuo. Finnair and Helasvuo decided that creating future visions of flying would be great way to celebrate the 85th birthday of the company.
You can check out the outstanding results in here.
The interesting thing about the concepts is that when the engineers saw the concepts, they were surprised by their technical correctness. Helasvuo described that he had used a great deal of time to make sure that the concepts were actually viable, and not just some insane sketchings that could never be true.
It’s great to see some good design news for a while, with all this bailout/inflation/deflation/whatnot thing going on. I just hope that not all companies cover in fear at the approaching financial apocalypse. I just hope that more companies would realise that this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to pull away from the competition. These ideas are just what companies need to show that they can create and innovate!
October 22nd, 2008
19:22
..the subject of future that is. CNN website has opened a section called “Just imagine… what will life be like in 2020″. It contains articles on various areas such as future office space, public space, home interiors etc. I’m still rummaging through the pages but so far it feels like a better waste of time than watching reality tv shows. I’ll get back if something particulary interesting can be found.
On a sidenote: I remember that HUT in cooperation with some other schools or organizations had a project creating various scenarios for Finland’s near future. If anyone can remember details on this or knows of a link to it, please post it after the jump…
September 25th, 2008
21:40
The office of the CTO at Nokia has published a vision for the year 2015. This research agenda sees physical and virtual worlds fusing in peoples lives with big technological advancements ahead.
The research is divided into 8 areas of interest including an ‘Internet of Things’ that connects nearly everything to each other, ‘Physically Personal Devices’ which includes mobile devices that can adapt to their users and which involve the use of nanotechnology (although I thought this referred to David Levy’s predictions) and ‘Mixed Reality’ which must mean that we are all sucked into a world of Terry Gilliamesque virtual reality games that completely mess up our understanding of what is real and what is not.
Even though visionary glimpses of the future by mega corporations such as this one are fun to read - it’s good to keep in mind how dumb we look in retrospect every time we try to imagine the world of tomorrow. On the other hand it’s a relief, perhaps there won’t be robots knocking at my door at 2029.
In any case I welcome our future overlords whoever they are. If you want to learn more about Nokia’s research, you can read the agenda at http://cto.nokia.com/files/Agenda_2015.pdf. I found it interesting in all its ambiguity.
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