Smarter Homes: How Technology Will Change Your Home Life by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino Apress, 2018, 168 pages Examine the history of smart homes, how technology shapes our lives, and ways you can think about the home when developing new products. This book presents the opportunities in the homespace that will come from understanding the history and […]

Leslie K. John, a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, is specialized in the psychology of privacy decisions. In this excellent cover story for the Harvard Business Review, she analyzes why people are so bad at making decisions about their private data (“They misunderstand both costs and benefits. Moreover, natural human biases, interfere with their […]

Moments when the experience of a blistering day turns public attention to the expertise of climate scientists brings Hannah Knox, associate professor of anthropology at University College London, to explore some of the thorniest of questions we face in the global, modelled, connected world in which we live: How does knowledge about phenomena we experience […]

Jim Hunter, chief scientist and technology evangelist at Greenwave Systems, predicts in TechCrunch that the next big game-changer in technology interface is ambient contextuality. “Ambient contextuality hinges on the idea that there is information hidden all around us that helps clarify our intent in any given conversation. Answering the simple questions of who, what, where […]

To illuminate current attitudes about the potential impacts of online social interaction over the next decade, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large-scale canvassing of technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders. Some 1,537 responded to this effort between July 1 and Aug. 12, 2016. Many experts fear […]

Future Agenda, a non-for-profit UK-based foresight initiative, has just published a new 38-page paper entitled Future of Healthcare Provision: Opportunities for Patient Engagement. Many believe the healthcare sector is ripe for a digital transformation. The escalating challenges it faces are putting increasing stress on the system just as better understanding of the possibilities of effective […]

As societies face increasingly complex problems, design is emerging as the tool to solve some of Asia’s biggest issues. Through field trips with designers skilled in human-centered design, the team behind Ethnographers’ Field Guide to Innovation, a new series on Singapore’s Channel NewsAsia, see how meaning is found in everyday surrounds and how people are […]

From a Nissan press release (dated August 10, 2016) One profession you might not expect to find at the design table — anthropologist — is playing a key role in developing Nissan’s next generation autonomous vehicle, analyzing human driving interactions to ensure that it is prepared to be a “good citizen” on the road. “Car technology is continuing to […]

Over the last five years Ericsson’s Networked Society Lab has been exploring what social life in 2025 might mean. How have 20th structures of industrialization been challenged? What is happening with life and lifestyles right now? In what direction are we moving? How are values and attitudes changing? And what clusters of different lifestyles do […]

Instead of asking ourselves which jobs will be replaced, writes Brooks Rainwater, we need to shift the conversation to answer the question: what jobs do we want humans to do? We must move the policy discussion away from job retraining towards job rethinking. This begins with embracing the power of human-centered work. Human-centered work is […]

Applying Design Approaches to Policy Making: Discovering Policy Lab Written by Lucy Kimbell Illustrated by Holly Macdonald Published by the University of Brighton September 2015 This report reviews what design-based approaches bring to policy making. It results from an academic fellowship in which the author was embedded for one year in Policy Lab, a specialist […]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is forecast to be one of the most far reaching and fundamental shifts in how people interact with technology and their environment since the advent of the Internet. But, the rush to create new commercial prototypes, products, services, systems and stacks often means culture, custom, needs and desires are overstepped […]

In 2009, W Brian Arthur published a remarkable book, The Nature of Technology, in which he formulated a coherent theory of what technology is, how it evolves and how it spurs innovation and industry. Technology, he argued, “builds itself organically from itself” in ways that resemble chemistry or even organic life. And implicit in Arthur’s […]

This year, the research focus of the Institute for the Future (IFTF) is on Human+Machine Futures, the blurring lines between human and machine, natural and artificial. What happens when technology allows us to automate just about anything? What happens when our bodies become the next frontier of technology adoption? How is technology is transforming human […]