The 2008 Technology Horizons fall event, Blended Reality: Reports from the Digital/Physical Future, immersed attendees in a new blended world, a place where people weave together digital and physical environments as they go about their daily lives.

IFTF is pleased to release the latest research report written by Alex Pang and Mike Love, Knowledge Tools of the Future. The report takes an in-depth look at signals, drivers, and trends shaping how organizations will utilize knowledge management in the future, particularly how humans will drive knowledge creativity and innovation.

IFTF is pleased to release the latest research report written by game designer Jane McGonigal. In Engagement Economy, McGonigal turns her attention to the pressing problem facing leading organizations today: how to actively engage users. She writes:

In the economy of engagement, it is less and less important to compete for attention, and more and more important to compete for things like brain cycles and interactive bandwidth. Crowd-dependent projects must capture the mental energy and the active effort it takes to make individual contributions to a larger whole.

On May 3 and 4, 2008, more than 75,000 people from all over the country descended on a fairground in Silicon Valley to see a glimpse of the future through a lens on the present. This was the annual Bay Area Maker Faire, a celebration of do-it-yourself culture where more than 500 “makers” showed off their robot pets, home-brewed 3D displays, biofuel-powered vehicles, and extreme crafts.

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.