What will the future be like?
Last Friday I went to a very interesting lecture led by Erica Orange & Jared Weiner at Parsons called The Future Begins Now. Erica and Jared are both futurists that work at The Future Hunters. They shared with us the content of a white paper called Metaspace Economy, where they identified 10 major growth areas that they believe will increasingly shape, define and influence the future. One of the many things that caught my attention during the lecture was the opportunity to learn what is the role of a futurist. Understanding how a futurist operates is a great way for us to start thinking about the future too, and this is an exercise that I think we should all practice. To help you start, here are some of my findings:
A futurist:
- Recognizes patterns.
- Reads and analyzes content.
- Understands the human behavior, how it operates.
- Learns about operation systems, what drives them.
- Works with conversion and layering up of data.
- Thinks about what is truly new, what is going opposite to what's usually done.
- Doesn’t get stuck into regular vocabulary to study the future, they create new words/terms.
As a strategic thinker, I can easily relate to these methods of thinking and approaching problems, however, what’s most interesting to me is the main ingredient that foments this process: the curiosity to know what will happen in the future.
Nowadays we tend to rely on big tech companies like Apple, Google and IBM to set the standards and define how we will communicate, listen to music and make searches online in the future. They try to understand how we behave and decide which is the technology that will be available to us and when is the best moment to give us access to them. Sometimes they get it right, like when Apple first launched the iPod in 2001 and than introduced the first iPhone in 2007, but sometimes they get it wrong. Apple chose to first introduce a device that stores around 1,000 songs and later on launch a cellphone that incorporates this function and many others that we were already used to, such as a calculator and an alarm clock, while also introducing the touchscreen. The fact that they made the releases in waves not only helped consumers to get used to one innovation at a time, but it also allowed them to make multiple interactions of a product in a short period of time.
But even the tycoons of tech can make mistakes, like Google with the Google Glass. In 2013, when Google launched the Explorer program, they quickly learned that consumers were not ready to wear a headset that looks like a pair of eyeglasses to display information, especially if it will come with many bugs. We were not ready to move into the smartphone hands-free era — yet. However, it’s not only these companies’ job to understand how we behave and how we are going to evolve, but ours too.
When thinking about the future it's important to consider how technology will keep on impacting us because, whether you like to admit it or not, it plays a huge role in our lives.
As we think about how our relationship with technology and technology itself will advance, there is another factor that needs to be valued: TIME. From the Agricultural revolution to the Industrial and finally the Digital transformation, we can see that time shrank — and this boost from one major cycle to another was mainly due to technology. When the Digital era arrived everything changed, especially the perception of time. Today everything is happening simultaneously and time is not linear. The gap between generations is smaller and time is the new luxury.
