Institute For The Future

Technology Research Agenda

Reality is up for grabs. Emerging technologies are transforming everything that constitutes our notion of “reality”—our ability to sense our surroundings, our capacity to reason, our perception of the world. The wireless Web, virtual worlds, augmented realities overlaid on physical ones, advanced simulations, and networked knowledge promise to transform our everyday experiences into a symbiotic blend of analog and digital experiences of human and machine. “The Network” will finally become intertwined with the fabric of our lives. Even our minds will be augmented with the wisdom of the global brain.

Research Tasks

Realities are what you Make of Them
Our personalities are becoming multiple and portable. We’ll soon be able to carry our avatars from one context to another, from conventional games to user-created worlds like Second Life and even into reality-based environments like Google Earth. We’ll be able to create imaginative 3-D environments and overlay them on the real world, creating a new kind of blended reality. What will the user experience be like? How will this future of blended realities affect our psychology and sense of self?

The Future of Engagement
As powerful new technologies for participation emerge, daily demands on our engagement are growing exponentially. The result of these rising demands is a new “economy of engagement” in which technologies seek to do more than merely capture and capitalize on attention. Instead, they must trade in compelling feedback loops, intense immersion, and meaningful community in order to create a return of passionate individual participation in much larger systems. This research explores the newest participation platforms and emerging best practices of the economy of engagement, many of which are growing out of the fields of leading-edge game design and game research.

Emerging Markets: Stories of Lead Mobile Users
As the mobile phone evolves from a communication device to a personal interface to the world, more open infrastructure and business models are being designed to unlock future value. Due to the cultural, regulatory, and economic conditions and unique technology, the rise of open mobile ecosystems creates the possibility for the kind of cross-fertilization and global scale that we have seen with the Internet and the Web. This research will examine key drivers of innovation and obstacles in the open mobile world—the potential nature of diffusion, economies of scale, and collaboration among competitors.

Mapping Knowledge in a Networked World
In today’s augmented world, the Dewey Decimal System is making way for folksonomies and the wisdom of the crowds is often more trusted than the opinion of credentialed experts. The Semantic Web, recommendation engines, the scanning of entire libraries, and natural language processing may lead to a redefinition of wisdom, and a reevaluation of what it means to be an expert.

The Future of Making
In the realm of design and manufacturing, two intersecting trends—one mostly social, one mostly technical—will soon converge to transform how things will be “made” in the near future. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of lead users, new forms of grassroots innovation and unbridled R&D, flexible manufacturing technologies, and new “programmable” materials all point toward a major transformation in how we will design, prototype, and produce goods over the next decade.