We first went to Stanford in order to attend a presentation from Chuck House, director of Stanford MediaX. He gave a general talk about Stanford.
Importance of diversity and being open to new domains:
The famous garage as the symbol of the birth of Silicon Valley:
Stanford being a mix of entrepreneurship and technology transfer.
The knowledge revolution according to Chuck House:
We then went back to Palo Alto to hear about the Institute for the future “making bets on the future”. IFTF.com
Goal: 10 year forecast. From planning to sensing. Environment changing. The institute for the future is a spin-off of RAND corporation founded in 1968, a ThinkTank.
Sensemakers: this is how they describe themselves. Foresight, forecast, not prediction. Making a sense of all the information, what insight, actions. An image: 20 years ago, people said: “paper is dead”. If you were a journalist, what would you do? do blogging, website, hire blog journalists, BUT do not completely STOP paper journal.
IFTF is methodological agnostic. Trends are abstract, very difficult to grasp. Artifacts from the future, tangible. Architect of the future. They (try to) shape the future. Example of project: Fate map: emotional map of San Francisco: what are the parts more stressful, and the relax one, by street.
Big shifts: context aware environments: smart environments, 1980 computing, 1990 communicating, 2000 sensing. Adding tiny sensors, information come to you in real time, sense your emotional state. Life casting. Seeing and hearing, smell, touch., filtering , contextual search. Visualization: how do you represent data? Sensory-rich data interfaces. Artist-science teams. Ambient interfaces, visible world, from planning to sensing.
