“Things are moving so fast today”, a friend told us recently.

“I feel like I know nothing. Like I’m out of the loop. And it still seems like huge waves of newness are threatening to smash into my life and carry me away”. His age? 39. His occupation: Famous journalist.

Maybe we are all confused today. Maybe all of us think it’s hard to get started with “creating the future”. Maybe our expectation with what we can achieve alone, without guidance and help are too high.

This Hotletter sparks the beginning of a walkthrough of Future Based Ideas Development™. The next three months we will invite you to join us in a mini crash course on “Creating the Future”. We will still feed you with Good Energy to fuel the process but tools are a basic necessity for the creative craftsmen and women of tomorrow. However this time we will bring you a potpourri of insights and anecdotes to prepare your mind for what’s coming and also give you a few conversational topics.’

Dear friend of the future. Let’s go on a mental journey. Let’s fly away together. Picture yourself on an airplane. Are you sitting well? With a newspaper and a freshly brewed cop of coffee? Lean back, breathe slowly and take a look around. From your seat you have a pretty good overview of the world. Not just literally, but also technologically, culturally and socially. The newspaper brings you the latest national and international news, and the coffee you are drinking might have been harvested in Brazil but probably imported via Germany – the world’s third largest coffee exporting country. The milk could be packaged in Swedish Tetrapak and the chocolate could be from Norway. In your bag, which could be designed in Denmark and produced in Poland, there might be a Finnish mobile phone with Korean technology and American software. It helps you organize your personal and professional contacts from around the world. The mobile phone is so important in everyday life that you would probably go back and get it if you forgot it somewhere – a privilege which previously was reserved for wallets and keys. Around you women, men, kids, teens and elderly are reading, sleeping, talking, stretching and blowing their noses while time is passing. They could be from anywhere in the world but just by looking at them it is impossible to guess where they live, where they are going, and what they do. Culture, religion and social patterns don’t glue us together the same way as it did only 50 years ago. And flying has become so common that you no longer put on your best clothes and it is considered a bit silly to applaud when the wheels hit the ground.

“In the airplane of the future the cockpit will seat both a man and a dog” sounds a futurist joke. “The man is there to make the passengers feel safe; the dog to keep the man away from the buttons”. (billede) Most airplanes today can fly themselves, but people don’t like to enter an airplane without pilots. The same is true for the future in general. There seems to be very few boundaries to what we can do. But do we like it? Does it make us feel safe and warm? Is it meaningful? And what is the point in general?

Signs of the future
The future is already here. It is part of everyday life. Going to the supermarket will soon be a fully designed experience where the smell of freshly baked bread, candy, ice cream, and chicken will tempt us to buy more. Intelligent packaging will react if touched and RFID chips will make payment automatic, and send bar codes off to its well-deserved retirement. No more waiting in line. No more waiting for your turn to pay. Also, the so-called Barbie-pill is already on the market. The pill is intended to make you suntanned without the harmful effects of too much sunlight. But it turned out to have two side effects. First, it makes you loose your appetite and second, it makes you sexually aroused. Happy, horny and suntanned! Wooha! Some pills improve you memory while others can make us forget e.g. lessen the effects of a traumatic experience. The “forget-it-pill” is intended to improve conditions for rape victims or people who work with cleaning up in disaster areas.

European farming can reinvent itself by planting biotech crops, which can grow medicine or plastic. If your cat dies then order a new: among the cloned animals today we are already counting Ralph the rat, Cc the Cat and Snuppy the dog. Batteries will soon last a lifetime, newspapers will be read on digital paper that feels like real paper but is updated via the internet and your sensor-rich airplane seat will tell you when it is time to get up and stretch your legs – or warn that if are a potential terrorist – if you are the type that sweats or moves around a lot. The toilet of the future will be able to analyze if you are eating enough fibre, if you are pregnant, have diabetes or should drink more liquids during the day. Smelly feet will become a thing of the past when nano-socks become common while it will be increasingly difficult to prove when athletes cheat to achieve better performances, because genetically engineered doping cannot be identified and tracked the same way as medical counterparts.

If the future seems dangerous and confusing, then please don’t forget, dear reader, how much science fiction is already around you. How many times has your life been saved by medicine, how many children doctors, have helped to life, and how little the church, faith and traditions control your life. To find yourself in a metal box 10 kilometres above planet earth is pretty out of this earth. The New York Times emphasized this when flying was discussed as a probable future scenario. “Any fool can tell himself that it goes against all common sense” was the official opinion at that time. The following day the Wright brothers had their first successful flight.

History repeats itself
It is a popular cliché that it is hard to predict the future. It is probably the reason that it is so much more fun when someone takes a crack at it. In 1838 the Irish astronomer, philosopher and professor Dionysius Lardner proclaimed: “trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a steam ship would be like planning a trip to the moon”. Transportation probably was not one of his strongest areas because he is also well known for stating “travelling by train at high speeds is simply impossible as the passengers will not be able to breathe and will therefore suffocate”. Another classic is from the 1940s when the head of IBM expected a future market for 5 computers. Each weighing as little as 1,5 tons and therefore not viable in private homes. “Sorry son you better go back to driving trucks again”, said the head of Grand Old Opry in Nashville, Jim Denney sighed after having listened to Elvis Presley audition in 1954.

It is interesting that those who know a lot within a specific area often are the worst at predicting what will happen. Therefore it is also a general rule that you have to “think outside the box” – think about what you don’t know. But that is really not quite right. If the purpose by thinking new is to take advantage of the changes and possibilities of the future then you have to “think in other boxes”. The future should not be predicted but rather created. In the 70’s and 80’s futures studies were focused on forecasting while the focus nowadays has changed to what you might call proactive creation of the future. A key aspect is ability to make decisions about what you want to do. Even the wrong decisions can become the right ones if you work consciously with creating the future. “Future” is just a good synonym for new possibilities but possibilities have to be integrated in a technological, social and cultural bouquet before they make any sense. The future might seem unsure, but it is the best foundation for making decisions. Especially if you see “the unknown” and what you don’t know as a space of opportunity to build new value – at the right time and the right place. It is common myth that technology changes the world. Maybe because technology is so dominant in our lives. But it is not technology that drives development. It is the use of technology. The use of knowledge, ideas and physical objects, which can be manipulated and build together – technologically, culturally and socially.

Tampax and text messaging are two very good examples of products, which have created a new future. Text messaging created its own need. It was originally developed so that technicians could check the connection on phone lines, but was driven to enormous success by private users for whom text messaging is a new social ritual. When the first tampons were introduced in the 1930s they satisfied an unspoken need. No woman had ever proclaimed that they wanted a tampon, but despite that the industry successfully created a market, which potentially counts half the people on earth. The tampon became a substitute for old rags, plastic aprons, awkward belts, and “travel ovens” (the kind where you could burn your unmentionables). And simultaneously tampons tell the story of the liberation of women.

When the art of printing saw the light of day in the industrial age it lead a bigger revolution than the advent of the Internet. But a machine such as Gutenberg’s printing press would be meaningless if we gave it to the natives in the Amazon. The printing press was a product of its time and gave meaning through the way it was used. Another revolutionary machine – Fords assembly line – did not fall from the sky either but was also a product of its time. It borrowed knowledge from other industries such as sewing machines, slaughterhouses, and breweries, and despite the fact that we are often told otherwise, Edison did not invent the light bulb. He saw the meaning of the light bulb; to bring the light to where it was dark (so that people could work nights). He did this based on his insights from the gas suppliers of his day. The kids show Sesame Street became a giant success because it was the first time that puppets and people where combined with studies of how TV can be used for educational purposes. The creators of Sesame Street opportunistically combined trends within new technology (the TV had become trivial) and social and cultural changes (busy parents and interest in new knowledge). The Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter books both “borrow” from the bible, scientific research, mythology, and from other books and spice it with imagination and easy to read language. And Elvis Presley lay the foundation for a new musical era based on a mix of country, gospel, R&B and bluegrass.

The heroes of the future always stand on the shoulders of giants and the art is partly to know what giants to stand on and partly to have the guts to get up there. We do not need to be world champions in new technology if we are fairly good at creating its meaningfulness. If we are good at combining, building bridges, finding new needs and learn from the success of others. If we create value and meaning we also create the future. If we make it original enough we will also be remembered by our descendants.

Those who create the future “see what everyone else is seeing, but think what no-one else thinks”. Because the future is already here. It is just unevenly distributed. You can see the signs of what is to be all around you. And YOU, dear reader, are the most important part of it.

The next three months we invite you to join us in a mini crash course on creating the future. We will still feed you with good energy to fuel the process, but tools are a basic necessity for the creative craftsmen and women of tomorrow.

We call our method Future Based Ideas Development™. And it consist of three interacting parts which we will present to you over the next three months:

March – New Perspectives
What is an idea? And what is a good idea? When do you know that you are doing the right things? For us an idea is a new perspective on something that we knew already. Success rarely comes by pulling light bulbs out of the clear blue sky. It is much more about combining existing factors in a new and surprising way – “by seeing what everyone else is seeing, but thinking what no-one else is thinking”. The golden idea might already be right in front of you. You just need a new perspective to see it.

April – Value Creation
Any success starts with a good idea. An idea is good when it creates value for the customer or user and can be realised. That you yourself feel that what you do is great and cool is of course nice, but customers, users, clients and partners should have the same experience. Value is about creating meaning for people and if you want to create value that is hard to copy and imitate then it is crucial to work with the resources which are scarce to people and their unarticulated needs. Because the customer is often not able to put their needs and wants to words and they seldom “know what they do when they do what they do” (Quote: CPH design)

May – Reality Check
“The knowledge that you don’t want” and “what you did not know that you did not know” are blind spots when it comes to development. Often the future and the smart solutions lie just in front of you. We will lift the curtain to the land of possibility by mapping scenarios, trends, rituals and behaviour. A reality check is about confirming what your reality really looks like both in terms of possible strategies and concepts but also in terms of challenging “the way things always have been done”.

Wow. Spring is looking bright and clear now isn’t it? Stay cool until we meet again. You never know when the next hotletter slips into your inbox

Authors
Anne Skare Nielsen &
Liselotte Lyngsø