Mindseums: Neurofeedback for Virtual Museums of the Future

Current low-cast consumer neurofeedback technology, such as the MindWave EEG/EOG sensor, headset, and hardware/software technology developed by NeuroSky, will expand our awareness and skills in using and training of our own minds and brain states. Combined with the explosive growth of personal mobile smart phones, the Apple iPad, and other wireless networked tablets and virtual worlds/augmented reality technologies (e.g.,VitaEdu), a new kind of global Virtual Museum of the Future can be created—all co-designed, created, and curated by individuals and teams of students as a way of learning to better use their individual mind states in the service of imagining futures and future careers. The collaborative creation of an emerging “Mindseum” will also be supported by a global open source “knowledge garden” and subsequent other “exhibit pavilions” of a global Virtual Museum of the Future. This panel, including high school and college students (some participating virtually from overseas), will explore early efforts to create the Mindseum.

2020 Media Futures: Practicing What We Preach

Attendees will be challenged to consider and compare creative media strategies in this hybrid session, part case study, part creative workshop.

We’ll gain an insider’s view of 2020 Media Futures, a year-long study of disruptive change in Canada’s creative content industries. Led by Strategic Innovation Lab and students from OCAD University’s Master of Design program in Strategic Foresight and Innovation, this project used scenario fiction, commissioned illustration, HD video, cross-platform on-demand publishing, and other contemporary techniques, not simply to marshal attention but to demonstrate and model its insights.

We’ll demonstrate these media innovations and push further into emergent areas like design fiction and tangible futures. We’ll then engage participants in a hands-on appraisal, debating the right dynamic balance of substance and style, plausibility and provocation. By championing the integration of design thinking, visual strategies, and strategic foresight, we’ll assess new modes of knowledge creation and glimpse the future of foresight.

A Better Way to Assess Trends Literature

Futurists have few problems finding information on trends, but a major challenge is assessing the credibility of published material. In this highly interactive session, participants will be introduced to evidence-based research (EBR), an approach to critically evaluating literature that was pioneered by Carnegie Tech and is gaining favor in management.

Participants will be provided an evaluation tool with which to assess popular and scholarly literature on trends. They will then select literature from one of several online databases and, working in small groups, evaluate the literature selected. Handouts will include a summary of evidence-based research, tools to evaluate trends literature, and additional background information.

Accelerating the Paradigm Shift from Lecture-Centered to Technology-Enabled Active Learning Instructional Methods

Employers around the world are expressing increasing dissatisfaction with the degree to which college graduates can access, evaluate, and communicate information; can use information technology (IT) tools effectively; can think critically; can solve problems; and can work well in teams and with people from different cultural backgrounds. A change of instructional paradigms — from passive to active (authentic) learning strategies, such as project-based learning, problem-based learning, or inquiry-based learning — is clearly needed. However, changing instructional paradigms is difficult. Faculty members are busy, many are not comfortable with using information technology (IT) tools, and most cling to the traditional lecture-based instructional paradigm. This interactive session focuses on approaches to accelerating a paradigm shift. The session rationale and readings are available at http://horizon.unc.edu/projects/seminars/wfs.html, along with a mailing list that attendees can use to discuss the topic prior to and after the session.

Asian Economies over the Next Decade

China and to a certain extent India are rapidly emerging as global economic powerhouses. This session draws a sketch of what that implies for the global economy and for research, technology, and innovation, while at the same time predicting major structural changes for the Asian economies. China is moving into more high-tech production; India is taking over as the center for labor-intensive, low-wage manufacturing. A new and more compact supply chain is emerging. Outsourcing from the United States and Europe motivated by labor costs is fading, but outsourcing among Asian countries (e.g., China to Vietnam) is rising. We will see economic integration among Asian economies driven by market forces. Future economic activity looks to be controlled by human improvement (health), human improvement (education), and human entertainment.

Can Innovation Save the Planet?

The world is bumping up against multiple environmental and natural resource hurdles—climate change, peak oil, freshwater shortages, and rising prices for food, minerals, and commodities of all sorts. At the same time, a growing population and a surge in the wealth of the developing world are increasing consumption. Can innovation keep pace? What are the true limits to growth? How do we overcome the challenges that face us?

Chemical Brain Preservation: How to Live "Forever"

About 57 million unique and precious human beings die every year, or 155,000 people every day. The memories and identities in their brains are permanently lost at present, but may not be in the near future.

Chemical brain preservation is a technique that many scientists believe may inexpensively preserve our memories and identity when we die, eventually for less than $10,000 per person in the developed world, and less than $3,000 per person in the developing world. Preserved brains can be stored at room temperature in cemeteries, in contract storage, or even in private homes. Our organization, the Brain Preservation Foundation (brainpreservation.org), is offering a $100,000 prize to the first scientific team to demonstrate that the entire synaptic connectivity of mammalian brains, where neuroscientists believe our memories and identities reside, can be perfectly preserved using these low-cost chemical techniques.

There is growing evidence that chemically preserved brains can be "read" in the future, like a computer hard drive, so that memories, and even the complete identities of the preserved individuals can be restored, using low-cost automated techniques. Amazingly, given the accelerating rate of technological advance, a person whose brain is preserved in 2020 might "return" to the world, most likely in a computer form, as early as 2060, while their loved ones and some of their friends are still alive.

Will 1% of any society ever choose brain preservation, once it becomes available? Would you do it? If not, why not?

Climate Engineering Technologies: Current and Future Issues

Reports of rising global temperatures have raised questions about responses to climate change, including efforts to (1) reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, (2) adapt to climate change, and (3) design and develop climate engineering technologies for deliberate, large-scale intervention in Earth's climate.

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) would reduce the atmospheric concentration of CO₂, allowing more heat to escape and thus cooling the Earth. Proposed CDR technologies include enhancing the uptake of CO₂ in oceans and forests and capturing CO₂ from air chemically for storage underground. Solar radiation management (SRM) technologies would place reflective material in space or in Earth’s atmosphere to scatter or reflect sunlight (for example, by injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to scatter incoming solar radiation or brightening clouds) or would increase the planet’s reflectivity (for example, by painting roofs and pavements in light colors).

Speculation about climate engineering (also known as geoengineering) dates at least to 1908, according to the Wilson Center. Because climate engineering involves intentional, large-scale interventions in the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, soils, or living systems to influence the planet’s climate, proposals for these technologies have been viewed with skepticism. However, a growing number of scientists have begun to argue that climate engineering deserves a second look.

Clouds, Crowds, and Complexipacity: How We Are Reinventing Science and Education for an Increasingly Complex World

Over the past decade, scholarly journals and the popular press have voiced growing concern that the explosion of new knowledge made possible by computers is making everything more complex, while the flood of data produced by computers threatens to overwhelm our decision-making processes. This has led many to argue that, in the future, all significant problems will become so complex that only computers will be able to resolve them.

However, recent research in neuroscience, mathematics, and cybernetics has raised serious doubts about our ability to create an artificial intelligence that equals human intelligence. At the same time, a confluence of economic necessity and mature technology is leading to the spontaneous reinvention of our basic Industrial Era institutions — starting (appropriately) with science and education — in ways that will enable us to make more intelligent choices in our increasingly complex world without ceding human destiny to the control of computerized decision makers.

This presentation spells out the increasingly complex realities of modern life and describes how a growing number of our basic institutions are using the power of cloud computing and “big data” to reinvent themselves in order to manage that complexity.

Cobia or Barramundi? And Other Choices on Tomorrow’s Menus

Special Event

Ever wonder what food in 2035 will look and taste like? Or what yet-unseen technology will revolutionize the way people make or deliver food? Three years ago, Chicago journalist Josh Schonwald embarked on a quest to explore the frontier of food innovation.

Drawing from his recently published book, The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food, Schonwald’s talk will focus on some of the people, trends, and technologies that could impact the salad, meat, and seafood we eat in the next 25 years. And he’ll address the burning question, What global cuisine will become “the next Thai” in 2035?

Communities of the Future

In the decade after this one, many believe that the impacts of peak oil and climate change will start to be felt. Global population growth will also have an effect, stretching our food and water resources towards their limits. We have it in our capacity to prepare for this future and to mitigate some of the possible negative effects.

That is the theme of this session, whose purpose is to outline how a community based in rural England might respond to these challenges and to highlight some of the policy decisions that could be implemented today to give us a better tomorrow.
Drawing upon the WFS Europe Chapter’s 2011-12 program, this session will outline a broad sketch of how things might develop to 2030, how the impacts of change were mapped out in a set of scenarios, and what actions are currently being taken in order to foster resilience for tomorrow.

Crowdsourced Weak Signal Collection in Corporate Foresight

In Finpro, a Finnish nonprofit trade promotion association, foresight is used as a method in internationalization consulting. It is used as a tool for anticipating forthcoming changes in the global markets and spurring companies in exploring new business ideas or concepts.

The approach is based on crowdsourcing, where every employee of the organization is involved in observing weak signals. Finpro employs nearly 400 people in over 40 countries. A collaborative online tool, TrendWiki, is used to collect the signals. Subsequently, a dedicated foresight team is responsible for sense making.

This session will be a presentation of the working methods, and examples from concrete client cases will also be presented. The purpose is to raise discussion about weak signal collection and trend constructing.

Cultural Shifts Among Global Youths: Part III

For the past two years, Erica Orange and Jared Weiner have covered a wide-ranging list of trends pertaining to the future of global youth. Based on the popularity of these sessions, they are returning to do a Part III.

At the 2011 Vancouver conference, they highlighted global employment and unemployment trends, shifting workplace skills and competencies, the pressures for educational excellence in a hotly competitive world, and how the long-lasting financial crisis is reordering the world for today’s youth, among many other hot-button issues.

Join them again this year for another robust discussion on an entirely new set of social, technological, economic, political, demographic, and environmental trends that are currently impacting the future of young people around the world.

Cyberbullying and Privacy Issues in Social Media

Social media have exploded in influence in the past decade, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, along with weblogs and wikimedia. They reflect the dream of close and immediate contact with individuals worldwide, a form of personal broadcasting. These media have also served to collect massive amounts of personally identifiable information from citizens and consumers, often including information that has locational data.

This presentation provides a discussion of privacy-related issues involving social media and demonstrates specific approaches for privacy protection online.

Cyberbullying has become a widespread social problem as well as an immediate concern for academic institutions that want to integrate social media into classroom delivery systems. Privacy concerns are tightly coupled with cyberbullying, as the strategies through which cyberbullies can be identified often require close surveillance. This presentation projects future legislative trends as well as corporate approaches toward these issues.

Designing Business for the Sustainable Future

This session will explore the effect that sustainability is having on consumers and how industry and designers must adapt in order to profit. Consumers in North America are increasingly knowledgeable on sustainable products and services, from their food to the facilities where they live and work. Companies promoting sustainable practices are surging ahead in profits, while those unwilling to acclimatize are falling behind. Society is taking responsibility for our effect on the environment, asking questions about the origins of their products and the steps they take to get to them. This accountability is falling to manufacturers, designers, and developers. The steps from a material’s origin to its destination are increasing and we must have responsible answers to stay ahead. With industry goals of zero-carbon buildings throughout construction and subsequent usage, no material, process, or byproduct remains unexamined.

Digital Bootstrapping: Future Technologies for Today's Digital Outcasts

Despite our growing potential to augment human capability through technology, the innovation curve sometimes leaves behind people who could most benefit. These “digital outcasts” then take it upon themselves to improve, empower, and sustain their success in life, mostly through personally customized solutions that otherwise would not exist. For such an important (and growing) demographic, this represents a cultural sea change of increasing significance.

This presentation will detail three case studies of digital outcasts—members of disenfranchised populations who transformed their communities through a grassroots approach to technological innovation. Individual examples will include the following: a young man living with traumatic brain injury whose customized iPad app aids his treatment; the use of virtual reality as a form of pain distraction among people with multiple sclerosis, and a nutritional support program assisting community leaders living in urban “food desert” neighborhoods.

Futurists’ Views from Around the World

How do futurists from different continents view local and global future prospects? What is on the minds of these futurists? As the world continues its accelerating interdependency, futurists are wise to take into account the insights from other futurists around the world.

Chairs and co-chairs of The Millennium Project Nodes from Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America will share their views about what is important to understand today about the foreseeable future. Each panelist will discuss issues he/she thinks are important to understand, including what is not well known or is misunderstood, and what is important to know to help improve the future of humanity.

Escaping the Matrix: Designed Scenario Strategies

When facing a foresight tsunami (ecological, demographic, economic, technological, and political change), how should institutions respond with due care? New methods offer true diligence in foresight, so no matter what inevitable outcomes occur, stakeholders can know they acted on best available knowledge. OCAD University’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation program has produced groundbreaking work that rethinks the stable paradigms of established scenario practice. Venerable scenario processes fail to address inherent individual and group biases of under-conceptualization, over-abstraction, risk blindness, and lack of variety and expressiveness.

Three breaking methods will be presented: Scenario fiction, which extends scenarios with rigorous narratives and dialogic structuring; creating strategic pathways from multi-stakeholder dialogue scenario modeling, modeling risk, and mitigating bias; and reasoning about the unknown results of known processes.
Following a brief expert panel of invited OCADU faculty and graduates, participants will engage in a rapid foresight workshop adapting simple techniques drawn from these advanced scenario methods.

Exploring the Future Arts: Graphic, Sonic, Kinetic

Art began as magic. In Western cultures, so-called “fine art” has for centuries been systematically dis-enchanted, and its practitioners classed as licensed professionals. But elsewhere the link between life and art, between everyday existence and extraordinary sensation, has remained much stronger. Thanks to the Internet and electronic media, a host of new possibilities, already at hand or just over the horizon, are about to transform traditional arts throughout the world. Even as artists long outside the Western tradition become more technologically savvy and more commercially focused, Western audiences are learning to accept and enjoy unconventional assemblages of sound, graphics, and patterned movement. In this session, small guided discussion groups will examine specific future possibilities, draw conclusions for themselves, discuss these collectively, and leave with new questions to explore independently after the conference ends.

Foresight Methods for Strategic Intelligence

United States military and intelligence organizations have recently issued several Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant solicitations that signal the need for futurist methodology and systems that accomplish the following objectives:

Develop contextual awareness and weak-signal detection to assist decision makers with the correlation of a variety of socio-cultural, environmental, and geospatial data.

Forecast likely future outcome possibilities.

Develop a combination of human and computer processing techniques and visual representations that enhance a person’s cognitive ability to fuse and assimilate multiple sources and types of information for new insights.

Participants will experience an interactive presentation with experiential exercises supported by graphic visualization software that addresses these futurist intelligence objectives of “connecting the dots.” They will apply these techniques to a real-world intelligence case study using tools and techniques from the Institute for Innovation’s Strategic Foresight methodology, including a live demonstration of their recently developed mobile application called TrendSearch.

Futurist Media for Improved Crisis Scenario Education

Scenario techniques used for training first responders and policy analysts are being transformed by the Web and media, thus influencing global politics and national security readiness. The panelists will present one example, the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR) scenario “Red Death” of a biological attack on the U.S. that was transformed into a 15-minute video by Argonne National Laboratory, available free on the Web. The panel will then engage audience discussion about the value of scenario development transformed into media and the real and potential impact it can have on training first responders and policy analysts at all levels of government, including the president of the United States. How will this new media trend impact futurists and their audiences now and in the future? The panel’s multimedia approach will explore this issue with discussion, a real-world example, and audience engagement.

Global Futures Collective Intelligence System

How should futures research be integrated to improve global, national, corporate, and local decision making, while taking into account the many contradictory views and methods? Collective intelligence is an emergent property from the synergies among human brains, information, and software that continually learns from feedback to make better decisions than these three elements acting alone.

The Millennium Project is integrating its State of the Future reports, futures research methodology series, State of the Future Indexes, futures matrix, discussion groups, real-time Delphi, and other software into a global futures collective intelligence system. Drawing on its experince in creating collective intelligence systems in South Korea, Kuwait, and Malaysia, The Millennium Project has created a new platform. Futurists, think tanks, and others will be invited to participate.

After a short global briefing drawn from the 2012 State of the Future, results of other research — such as the future of the food industry — will be shared as an example of how that can be added to the emerging global collective intelligence on the future.

Global MegaCrisis: How Bad Will It Get? What Strategies?

Special Event

Imagine a “category 5” hurricane churning toward the eastern United States. The experts agree on its size and ferocity, the alternative paths that it might take, and when it will hit. Politicians and the public accept the warning and take preventive action to save lives and reduce damage. In contrast, consider a possible/probable “Global MegaCrisis” — an emerging “perfect storm” of climate change, economic crises, joblessness, growing inequality, corruption, terrorism, and more. Few experts attempt such a synthesizing overview, there is little agreement on terminology or indicators, and, where there is some consensus, there is little agreement on whether — or if — the MegaCrisis will be resolved or alleviated, how, and when. If we are headed toward MegaCrisis, is there something basically wrong with our thinking — the need for a new master paradigm about the role of futures-relevant knowledge in our information-drenched society?

Veteran macro-thinkers Michael Marien and Bill Halal have been engaged in a debate for the past three years, publishing four scenarios “Decline to Disaster,” “Muddling Down,” “Muddling Up,” and “Rise to Maturity” in The Futurist and several journals to provoke comment. Halal argues that many new technologies on the horizon will probably make things better; Marien worries that, overall, the new hyperabundance of information will largely make things worse. Using other indicators, Richard Slaughter has been warning of a planetary emergency for several years—the greatest wake-up call in history.

This Special Event, following up on a somewhat similar MegaCrisis session held at the 2010 World Future Society conference in Boston, will focus on what we have learned in the past two years about “wake-up” calls and shared understanding, not only of the emerging MegaCrisis, but also of the new paradigm of paradigms that may well be needed.

Hackerspace Movement: Hacking the Future

In 2007 there were a handful of hackerspaces. Now there are over 900 existing or forming throughout the world. All this has happened without a central organization, and with very little money. This growing movement has exploded because individuals started these supportive communities where people can explore and do what they love. We all need community, and we all need to express ourselves creatively. Hackerspaces provide a physical space for exploring and supporting these two powerful, deep, inner needs. Hackerspaces also provide a very real alternative to the failed education systems in the US and elsewhere. This session will show how anyone can benefit from a hackerspace, as well as how to start a hacker space anywhere. The future of humanity rests on the ability of individuals creating opportunities for themselves and those around them to live lives that we, individually and collectively, want to live.

Healthspital 4.0: Re-Visioning the American Community Health-Care Experience

Thomas Kuhn taught that an anomaly is needed to engender a paradigm shift. Medical/surgical treatment costs are unsustainable and, therefore, represent that anomalous predicament currently. Superlative outcomes are not consistently delivered for the money expended. There is no system for true health-care delivery. This session will expand on The Futurist article and explore five major drivers of ineffectiveness in the now non-system:

• Appropriate levels and providers of care-entry and use.
• End-of-life care and dignity.
• Complex care and multiple and chronic conditions: integrate and coordinate.
• Wasteful, fraudulent, redundant, duplicative care with rework and variation.
• Preventive, alternative, maintenance strategies to maximize health, wellness, well-being, and flourishing.

This interactive session will then encourage attendees to critique and improve upon the ideas.

How to Turn Teenagers into Environmental Futurists!

Experiments and demonstrations enable young people to appreciate the structure of the Earth, the fragile nature of our air and water resources, and the importance of energy. Students are empowered to save Planet Earth.

Dr. Hutton will show some of the highlights of his “Going Green” program, with audience participation, and provide outlines and video resources. Audience members will be encouraged to adapt the material and present the Environmental Future message to young people in their own communities.

Innovative Entrepreneurs Execute Big Ideas

Special Event

Entrepreneurs play an unmatched role in our world, and they each share at least one distinguishing characteristic. Entrepreneurs don’t just recognize problems and come up with ideas to solve them—they execute those big ideas. It is a differentiating quality that merits recognition — and one that will be addressed.

Jain will discuss numerous endeavors as evidence that thinking differently is the only way to solve the world’s biggest challenges. He encourages entrepreneurs to push the boundaries of what common wisdom says is possible and will offer inspirational words about the need for entrepreneurs to capitalize on the same innovative spirit that ties our world together and leverage its best minds to innovate our way out of the massive challenges we face as a civilization.

This spirit is evidenced by Jain’s having proclaimed the Moon to be “just another continent” and unveiling a privately funded lunar lander to tap the long-term economic potential of the Moon for resources essential to Earth’s energy future. His Moon Express venture is a favorite for the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE competition, which challenges privately funded teams to put a robot on the Moon to transmit high-definition video, images, and data back to Earth.

He will discuss why the world’s entrepreneurs need to deliver uncommon answers to the world’s largest problems. From hunger and disease diagnosis to environmental sustainability and educational breakthroughs, certainly, there is someone in Slovenia or Serbia, Memphis or Malaysia, who can create the next innovation to solve many of today’s most difficult problems.

Lessons from Three Decades of Futures Research

This will be a kind of summing up three decades of futures work, ranging from Stanford Research Institute to the Global Business Network and all the books and foresight clients in between, that began here in Toronto with the talk on the Emergent Paradigm that Peter Schwartz and Jay Ogilvy gave in 1980. The presenter will summarize what he has learned since — such as that dark, negative scenarios are easier to write than light, optimistic scenarios — and he will also revisit the Emergent Paradigm work after 30 years of refinement in cooperation with a wide range of companies, governments, and nonprofits around the world.

Networked Government: The 21st Century Agency

Four futurists from the Futures Working Group will present a vision of governance in the Information Age. They will integrate insights from existing literature, experience, and independent research to describe how a future government agency can leverage the potential of net-centric organization, self-organization, and nurturing neighborhoods to provide governance in the 2020s.

Incorporating still and motion imagery, the panel will describe the dream of the net-centric organization. Using the concrete example of a local police department, the panel will demonstrate a design for an organization that operates using net-centric principles and interacts with society from a network perspective to help build strong and crime-resistant neighborhoods. From this foundation, a conversation with attendees will address issues in development of the cultures and public expectations necessary to deliver the dream.

Attendees can comment on Twitter using the #FWGNet2012 tag. GoogleDocs will be used to “crowdsource” implementation points with the audience.

Our Role in Shaping the Future

Futures work depends on identifying patterns of change, understanding data and systems, determining forces, and drivers shaping an organization or a society. These are important. Less often explored is the idea of human agency. Human agency is our own ability to be actors and shapers of our own future and that of others. Our decisions and actions make a difference beyond ourselves.

Sometimes a decision is fateful because it opens a vision to the future far wider than the individual’s own path: Rachel Carson’s decision to write Silent Spring, for example. More often, it is an everyday act, such as taking a job, helping someone clarify a decision, or leading a group.

In this session we explore the idea of human agency and how to use it in shaping more positive futures in small and large ways. Attendees can participate in an online survey (at www.leadingfuturists.biz) of how and why people think about the future, their motivations, and, potentially, their changed behavior.

Poverty of the Imagination: Using the Future to Avoid a World War

This panel session will look at how futurists might be able to contribute to overcoming “poverty of the imagination” by detecting “changes in the conditions of change” that could offer an image of a better, even if radically different, future. Here is where the creativity of futurists and their ability to detect paradigmatic changes in the present might make a fundamental difference for avoiding war.

Primary Care 2025

By 2025, primary care will have experienced great changes in the United States. While there is uncertainty about how much of the health reform legislation will be put into effect, there will be disruptive advances, including telemedicine, virtual care, enhanced biomonitoring, digital health coaches (Dr. Watson from IBM serving as the health advisor), and altered primary care teams.

The Institute for Alternative Futures produced Primary Care 2025 scenarios, with support from the Kresge Foundation. This session will present the scenarios as well as the recommendations identified by national leaders using the scenarios.

Reimagining the Future of Global Health, Wellness, and Health-Care Delivery

Special Event

Global crises in health-care delivery, management, and financing have spotlighted what in many ways are broken systems. Rather than engineering incremental changes to largely outmoded processes and institutions, we must imagine entirely new possibilities to build a more positive future. If we examine current trends in health and wellness, and remain on the same trajectory, where is the world going? If we challenged that trajectory and reimagined the future of health and wellness, what could the world look like in coming years? What are the respective roles of private institutions, governments and regulators in this reimagined future?

Innovation in medical technology, evolution of design, growth of medical tourism, improved understanding of aging and demography, advancements in brain imaging and sensory science, and greater consideration of spiritual factors have led many to reconsider what the new products, services, and systems of the twenty-first century could and should be. A panel of the world’s most influential experts in health, medicine, and wellness will lead this multidisciplinary discussion.

Reinventing Life: A Guide to Our Evolutionary Future

Based on the new book, Reinventing Life — A Guide to Our Evolutionary Future, this session will explore the future of evolution and the decisions that each of us makes to drive it. Humans are currently dominating the evolutionary process in mostly unconscious and destructive ways.

Attendees will be challenged to consider the advantages of a paradigm shift to conscious evolutionary stewardship. Will we restore ecosystems or continue to degrade them? Could regenerative medicine allow us to live for hundreds of years? How might we enhance ourselves through genetics or robotics? Should we resurrect extinct species? Will we spread life to other worlds? What should be our role in nature?

Scenario Analysis in Public Health

This session will have presentations highlighting the use of scenario analysis in the public health realm. The focus will be on demonstrating the use of evidence-based futures planning at several levels of implementation: national, provincial/territorial/state, and community. The presenters will provide examples and outcomes of the use scenario analysis or foresight as applied at different levels of administrative scale. Examples include scenario analysis techniques investigated by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) to test practicality and usefulness in planning and preparedness for public health issues at a national scale. At the community level, PHAC is providing expertise to empower members of an Inuit community by implementing scenario analysis for practical health applications in the context of adaptations to climate change.

Scouting the Future with the Implications Wheel

In this highly experiential workshop, participants will explore a current issue of global significance using the latest version of Joel Barker’s Implications Wheel. Participants, working with the online software in teams, will clarify the issue, generate “first-order” implications, and then scout the possible implications, both positive and negative, using the software’s contributing and scoring features. Finally, participants will evaluate their work, identifying key issues and looking for opportunities to increase the likelihood of positives and address the risks of negatives.

The Implications Wheel experience is designed for a diverse group of participants representing all levels of experience, education, and interests. Based on a “Wisdom of Crowds” approach, the process welcomes experienced “scouts” and curious beginners who want to experience scouting the future of time.

Singularity University: Team Projects to Positively Change the World

Singularity University is a new interdisciplinary university whose mission is to “assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges.” With the support of a broad range of leaders in academia, business, and government, Singularity University hopes to stimulate groundbreaking, disruptive thinking and solutions aimed at solving some of the planet’s most pressing challenges. Singularity University is located at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley, California, and it is based on the ideas of futurist Raymond Kurzweil, thanks to the financial sponsorship of companies like Cisco, Google, Nokia, AutoDesk, and ePlanet Ventures.

The team projects prepared by the third class of graduate students include the following areas: education, energy, health, poverty, security, and space. Each project is expected to take advantage of exponential technologies in order to positively improve the lives of one billion people during the next 10 years. A big challenge, but urgently needed as we move closer to the “technological singularity.”

Speed Futuring

Speed Futuring is a participant-driven meeting that will provide a unique environment for WorldFuture 2012 attendees to learn from one another, grow networks, discuss issues, and connect across generations and geographies.

At the beginning of the session, we’ll create the agenda. Everyone meets together in the room and posts topics they would like to present, see, or discuss. We start with a blank wall and, in a few minutes, through a highly participative process, create a 90-minute, multi-track conference agenda that is relevant and inspiring to everyone there. This creates a rich assortment of agenda items and makes for an exciting day of learning.

From there, we go to separate areas for 15-minute break-out sessions assigned to each topic. The session can be a presentation, an inquiry, or discussion about an issue or technical field. One participant volunteers to record the proceedings, and afterwards, the notes from each breakout session will be compiled and shared with participants.

Systemic Solution to Achieving Green Economic Growth and Sustainable Development

Achieving green economic growth and sustainable development requires comprehensive and coordinated strategies for entire regions as a complex system fully considering global drivers and local actions. Relying solely on green technology cannot achieve a green economy or communities. A systemic solution must include green business models and a quadruple-bottom-line measure of conditions and performance; a new conception of communities, consumption, and conservation; and new conceptions of core process and supply chains of our socioeconomic systems.

We need to fully recognize that local governments and enterprises regularly make investments in community design, infrastructure, and facilities with 30 to 50 year life-spans through their medium and long-range planning processes that do not systemically consider important global drivers and shapers. Therefore, we need a comprehensive and systemic approach to strategic management — embedding a long-term strategic management system into medium and long-rang planning — for achieving sustainable development and a green economy.

We will discuss selected cases to illustrate the need and approaches, including water systems, such as river basins and urban water systems; urban systems design and housing; solid waste management systems; addressing the ozone and soot emissions problems; and more.

Technology and Ideology: Its Effects and the Future

This session will look at the role of technology on ideology as not only an accelerant but also the instigator of a new ideology born out of the creation of the Internet. Drawing in elements of psychology, emergence, philosophy, networks, economics, and politics, the talk will look at the intersections and influence of each in the fracturing of society as we see it currently.

The Best of Houston

The University of Houston offers a leading master’s degree in Futures Studies. For the past 11 years, the faculty have selected the best products from their most talented students, many of whom are professional futurists themselves, to offer attendees of the annual meeting of the World Future Society. Topics and methodologies vary across the whole range of futures studies, though all are current, having been developed in the previous year.

The Dream-Do Nexus

A university’s academic mission is traditionally dedicated to student success through academic excellence within individual courses taken in specific student degree plans. This session focuses on processes followed, insights gained, and lessons learned to date in creating and establishing a Dream-Do Nexus anchored in a long-standing learning experience that enables students to develop their imagination, creativity, innovation, design, and entrepreneurship skills and abilities to dream and envision futures and to define and take the necessary steps to make them happen.

A student-centered accelerator for business startups complements this nexus and transcends this mission. It also will create a culture, an environment, and an infrastructure for making dreams come true, serving as a place offering students (1) an applied creativity hub to generate ideas, (2) a business incubation center to make those ideas business realities, and (3) access to key stakeholders in evaluating marketplace challenges and opportunities for those potential businesses.

The Evolution of Integral Futures

Since its introduction to the Futures community in 1998 by Richard Slaughter, Integral Futures has evolved through three distinct phases (perspective, methods, and sense making) and has emerged currently as a subject of vigorous debate and controversy.

The session is a follow-up of the published article in World Future Review in June/July 2010, “The Evolution of Integral Futures: A Status Update,” which was written by the presenters,(Terry Collins and Andy Hines) and will include a history and presentation of the evolution of the Integral Futures phases. There will also be an exploration and interactive experiential exercise of what might be the next chapter in its development.

The Future of Crime Prediction

Predictive analytics has received a substantial amount of attention in the media. However, it is only recently that predictive analytics in policing has gone mainstream. Four futurists from the Futures Working Group will discuss current applications of predictive analytics and related advanced statistical and computational techniques, how they may be applied to predicting not just future crime patterns, but also recidivism, areas in danger of becoming crime hot spots and other applications.

Insights from existing literature, experience, and independent research will be used to describe how these methods may be used to create a plausible and preferable future in which the ability of the criminal justice system to provide for public safety will be enhanced. Following their presentation, the panelists will engage the audience in discussions about future applications of these technologies to the problems of public safety. The audience will be able to post questions using Twitter and GoogleDocs.

The Future of Global Drug Safety

Recent controversies over the safety of approved drugs such as rosiglitazone, rofecoxib, and the bisphosphonates have created the critical need for sound analysis of accumulating data on drug safety. Unfortunately, there is currently no organized way to collect data on patient adverse events on drugs and transmit risk information to physicians and patients. Instead, analyses appear in the literature that can easily be attacked on methodology and produce nothing more than anxiety on the part of patients.

This talk will show early signals that indicate that the Internet and patient communities together will use software provided by insurance companies and doctor groups to continuously advise patients on safety based on their own characteristics.

The Future of Shopping: An Immersive Experience

The retail landscape is morphing into one of whimsy, fluidity, and customization. Each transaction equates to a unique experience. The buyer-seller market is focused on value in addition to profits. Tablet computing and open APIs (application programming interfaces) give merchants the ability to innovate solutions. Rotiquing — rotating boutique retailing (pop-up and mobile retail spaces) — uses integrating technologies, creative materials, and new forms of payment to create an ever-shifting mobile retail bazaar, wholly engaging consumers during their shopping experience.

Join us and be immersed in this stimulating retail scenario. Heather Schlegel and Emily Empel will transform this session into a routiqing bazaar with alternative currencies, products and services, and virtual incentives. Attendees will earn a virtual currency by participating at the conference and via social media, which can be exchanged for real goods and services at the session. Don’t expect to sit back and listen to the future, but directly experience the combined impact of rotiquing, alternative currencies, and open APIs on the retail experience.

The Hackerspace Movement: Hacking the Future

In 2007, there were a handful of hackerspaces. Now there are more than 900 existing or forming throughout the world. All this has happened without a central organization and with very little money. This growing movement has exploded because individuals started these supportive communities where people can explore and do what they love. We all need community, and we all need to express ourselves creatively. Hackerspaces provide a physical space for exploring and supporting these two powerful, deep, inner needs. Hackerspaces also provide a very real alternative to the failed education systems in the United States and elsewhere.

The future of humanity rests on the ability of individuals creating opportunities for themselves and those around them to live lives that we, individually and collectively, want to live. Together, we can create more opportunities for more people to lead more fulfilling lives. One person can initiate this change!

Tomorrow Is Promised to No One: The Inevitability of Change

Change is inevitable, but what causes these changes? Demographics? Technology? Changes in status? The speaker will discuss long-term business cycles and watersheds, as well as where we are in these cycles and where we are going. New industries in food, water, and energy will be in the forefront of our economy, as will changes in education and medical delivery.

Town Hall Meeting: the Future of Governance

What will government of the future look like at the local, regional, state, national, and international levels?

A panel of practitioners at various levels of government will participate in an open dialogue with the audience on the potential futures of government. What will be the role of the individual in all levels of government? How will the current layering of local, regional, state/provincial, national governments look in the future? What services are likely to remain with government at some level, versus those that will be nongovernmental? In the global neighborhood, how will governmental jurisdiction be determined? During fragile economic times, how will government be sustained fiscally?

This session promises to be a freewheeling discussion in which the government practitioners will set the table for the audience to feast on. By the conclusion of the session, the dialogue will yield some interesting trend analysis and forecasts about the future of governance.

Transcultural Roundtable 2012

How will people in your part of the world live, work, and think in 2025? Which values, lifestyles, and structuring institutions will prevail? Will lifestyles be more complex or simpler? Which professions will be the most highly valued, and which personality types will best adapt? What culture-based hidden assumptions define the boxes in which you think and your notion of personal identity? What can we learn from other peoples and cultures of the world that can help humankind meet the challenges of the future? In what ways do different peoples view the future? What countercultures may arise in your part of the world or elsewhere? And what is the future of cultural diversity itself, including values and lifestyles?

These questions are among the topics that the presentation will explore.

Unleashing Fundamental Change: Transforming Economic Development for an Economy That Does Not Exist

The ongoing economic challenges have raised questions among economic leaders regarding how long this time of great volatility will continue and when things will return to normal. For economic developers, however, there is a more fundamental question: “When recovery occurs, will we be back to business as usual or are the core dynamics of the economic system changing?” Our answer to this question is that we are in the midst of a systemic change. The idea of developing a new type of economic resiliency in our communities is at the core of preparing for a different kind of future that will require us to learn how to adapt to constant change.

We are now moving rapidly into an age of dynamic connections and disconnections, where the economic vitality and sustainability of any local area or state will be based on how well its leadership, workforce, capital availability, educational system and methods, and governance decision-making processes are designed and organized to be able to adapt quickly and effectively. There must be nothing less than a transformation of approach that focuses on total “comprehensive community transformation” for our local economies to be vital and sustainable in an emerging era of constant change.

Participants will be introduced to a new framework of thinking and action for economic development for local communities in the twenty-first century by a panel of national economic development leaders.

Waking Up the Algorithm

Opening Keynote

For too long, computers, computational power, and even software have been thought of as cold mathematical pursuits, when in reality, the digital world is just an extension of human existence. With increasing generation of data through human activity and interaction, more complex processing and technologies are needed — but they must also be accessible. Building data processes for the future requires a more human design to interpret and deliver information in the right context, relatable to and understood by users.

Johnson will discuss how Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is crafting algorithms and processes that will better understand what it means to be human in 2025.

When Ivory Towers Fall: The Emerging Education Marketplace

Throughout history, education has been formed around the concept of “place.” Build fancy buildings, attract world-renowned scholars, and you have a college or university. This model works well in a culture based on teaching. Over the coming years, with our hyper-connected world, we will be shifting to a learning model. While “place” will still matter, it will matter differently.

Teaching requires experts; learning only requires coaches. The two primary variables of time and money will drive the new education marketplace, and the four primary trend lines will involve:

1. Shortening the distance between students and experts.

2. Rewriting the social context of learning. (People will matter.)

3. The emerging courseware industry.

4. Experimental emersion camps.

The steady shifting of technologies, attitudes, and lifestyles demand that a symbiotic relationship be formed between a place of learning and its students. And this relationship will never be static.

Working Abroad as a Career of the Future? Taiwanese, Japanese, and Korean Expatriates in China

The rapid speed of globalization, especially the economic globalization, brings not only the rapid growth of foreign direct investment but also the effect of flows of people. More and more people move across the territorial boundaries and search for a job outside of their home county. Studies on the flows of people to date have tended to focus on the unskilled or semi-skilled migrants from developing countries to well-developed areas.

However, the movement of expatriates with an opposite direction, usually from a developed country to developing areas, has remained much less explored. This is not because this type of movement lacks academic importance or research interests, but is mainly due to expatriates being viewed as “privileged migrants” who lead “boundaryless careers.” This session tries to challenge the above notions of the highly skilled and analyzes migration experiences of Taiwanese expatriates in China, arguing that skilled migration is not about the mobility of boundaryless careers (nor can these migrants be seen as cosmopolitan), but rather it is a mobility with its own costs and constraints.

Instead of the perspective of cosmopolitan, this session argues that Taiwanese expatriates would be better described as “transmigrants,” whose main character lies in their transnational lives; most of them stay “permanently temporarily” in China. In comparison to Taiwanese expatriates, however, Japanese and Korean expatriates show different types of transnational carrier and social embeddedness in China.