The Jetsons promised we would all be using flying cars by now. While that business tech is on the verge of finally being realized, it isn’t overshadowing a lot of other cool ideas that are on the drawing boards. When it comes to scouting trends in future technology, there is a nice new resource available to help the search.
Future Scanner scans the web for future-focused content—expert predictions, impactful discoveries, product prototypes, industry forecasts—and categorizes everything by future year and general topic. Future Scanner is also a social community, where members can add resources, tag them accordingly, and vote on the content they find most useful. The membership also improves the connectivity between content items by augmenting or correcting the default associations.
Future Scanner is a search engine categorized by reference to future dates.
Future Scanner is a nice tool when focused specifically on future events, rather than what is going on right now. I can easily take a peek at what Carter’s adulthood might be like. It is equally easy to browse by domain: biotechnology, business, communications, culture, education, energy, entertainment, environment, government, health & medicine, information, metaverse, relationships, security, social issues, social media, space, technology, the home, the web, and transportation.
Some of the items one might find on the Future Scanner are being tracked by DVICE, a Sci Fi channel web site. DVICE posted a list of top ten devices that don’t yet exist. The list included Vlady Spetkovsky’s superhero suit (ok, “wearable power suit”) that would turn any Joe Schmoe into industrialist Tony Stark. The technology is also around to create customizable shoes, where the visible design can change on a whim. Further off is the Frog Design concept of Dattoos, a sustainable combination of style and interface that turns the human body into a data platform.
The devices, though, are only part of the consideration. Another highlighted concept is Solovyov Design’s TimeFlex, a gummy sticker that replaces the traditional watch. This might be a great thing for me, personally, since watches die on me. As a result, I’ve adjusted my life to avoid reliance on time checks. Or, more precisely, my time checks are done on the computer, in the form of a daily calendar, the digital clock in the OS, and an audible alert at the top of each hour. Would returning the time to my wrist change that? Would I again become hyper-conscious of the time to the point of increasing stress about being late? TimeFlex might solve many technical problems, but it also changes social routines that may not be accounted for by the designer.
Fischbowl, an educational blog interested in getting our schools up-to-date with practical technology training, recently posted a video clip of a Telenor ad. In it, a little girl in some years-ago classroom is reading her essay about what the future will look like. She describes the miracles that are now possible through mobile networks, but the contemporary reaction has her seeing counselors and psychiatrists. It is a very effective bit of ad work, but it is also a nice metaphor for how great our hindsight is as compared to our vision.
Telenor has a great ad about past predictions of the future.