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"Another perspective that I believe is missing from Bruce Nussbaum's critique of the design thinking movement is a deeper analysis of why design thinking was believed to be a compelling process in the first place. If we think about its popularity as a design solution to a societal problem, we can critique it as we would a prototype. I believe design thinking attempts to respond to a series of current societal aspirations. This week's blog will look at aspirations on a collective basis and part two will look at those on an individual basis. "

"The 2012-2013 School of Design lecture series features a renowned group of transdisciplinary thinkers and practitioners who are working on complex social and environmental problems. This is a rare chance to hear thought leaders who are creating narratives that are shifting attitudes in our society."

"They are computer scientists, statisticians, graphic designers, producers and cartographers who map entire oceans of data and turn them into innovative visual displays, like rich graphs and charts, that help both companies and consumers cut through the clutter. These gurus of visual analytics are making interactive data synonymous with attractive data. "

Vitaliy and Elena's implicit answer: art will survive, as it always has, even if there is nothing left of the society that bore it. The important thing is that humanity's fixation upon the apocalypse--which they think is viewed in the modern world as an inevitability--does not paralyze us to stop designing and creating new things. Even after we're gone, Vitaliy and Elena imagine Earth as a dead world in which museums play time capsules to humanity's all too ephemeral creative spirit. Because art survives, and it will be all that is left of us when we're gone.

2 million photographs are uploaded to Facebook each day. As of this week, every new image will be processed by automatic face recognition software, designed to identify the people in the photographs. It's not the addition of this new function that has caused the creeping sense of unease, but the covert manner with which it has been activated

2020 Media Futures is an ambitious, multi-industry strategic foresight project designed to understand and envision what media may look like in the year 2020; what kind of cross-platform Internet environment may shape our media and entertainment in the coming decade; and how our firms and organizations can take action today toward capturing and maintaining positions of national and international leadership.

IN library - Open-source foresight project on future media 2020 Media Futures is an ambitious, multi-industry strategic foresight project designed to understand and envision what media may look like in the year 2020; what kind of cross-platform Internet environment may shape our media and entertainment in the coming decade; and how our firms and organizations can take action today toward capturing and maintaining positions of national and international leadership.

"This year's Slush conference in Helsinki has been a terrific event, with a very high standard of startup and a disproportionate number of great ideas floating around. One of the most intriguing has been that of Futureful, a sort-of-browser app that's going to be made available to iPad users in the U.S. in January. Futureful has been under rather stealthy development for two years, and the team is backed and mentored by Skype co-founder Janus Friis. It's a bit like StumbleUpon, in that it's an app that contains a browser (as opposed to being a browser - you can't enter a URL) and is designed to help the user find new content. However, Futureful is all about semantic tagging and artificial intelligence. As you browse, the app presents subject tags in a row at the top - click on a tag, and you get taken to another related page with its own set of tags. So, clicking on a 'Silicon Valley' tag may take you to a tech story, with the fresh tags above it including something like 'Moore's Law'. It basically provides an intelligent chain of content discovery."

What do you imagine the world will look like in 2025? The FutureScapes project brings together a range of expert thinkers, designers, futurologists, writers and you - the public - to explore the opportunities and challenges of life in 2025, and to consider the potential contribution that technology and entertainment can make in shaping a better, more sustainable future.

FutureScapes, a new collaboration of thinkers, designers, futurologists and writers, is encouraging us to imagine the future - to consider how technology and entertainment can shape a better, more sustainable world

Conducttr has been around for a while as a tool for automating the telling of a narrative over several platforms - online, text messages and so on. This seems like the very logical next step, to take it out from the laptop or tablet and into the world of mobile. A three-part ecosystem, where the audience takes part of a mobile app which lets them take part of different "Worlds", each belonging to a separate story or story world, the designers of the narrative get a "cloud-based network intelligence" and the developers get an API to play around with.

Imagine a 3-d printer so large that it can spit out entire buildings made from stone. Sounds science fiction-y, right? But that's exactly what designer Enrico Dini created with his prototype D-Shape printer. Dini hopes to use the printer to create buildin

wow, looks totally insane.

"AAM's Center for the Future of Museums (CFM) helps museums explore the cultural, political and economic challenges facing society and devise strategies to shape a better tomorrow. CFM is a think-tank and research and design lab for fostering creativity and helping museums transcend traditional boundaries to serve society in new ways."

Great article on participatory budgeting and gov 2.0 from my good friend Darren Sharp.... "The Gov 2.0 network Gov Loop and Personal Democracy Forum recently launched a special series on 'Designing Digital Cities' that explores ideas for how to meet the demands of 21st century citizens in an era where doing more with less has become a priority. GovLoop founder Steve Ressler kicked things off in a blog post asking what ingredients go into a true digital city in 2011 in the context of emerging tools, technology, processes and assets."

" Welcome to the Sigma Scan - a searchable repository for horizon scanning papers, designed for government users. To create it, the Horizon Scanning Centre has collected 'evidence of the future' from more than 6000 document sources and interviews with 300 leading thinkers, and condensed this into 250 short papers to challenge assumptions and spark ideas. "

Are you ready for designer biohazards, an end to Middle Eastern dominance of the oil business, and a United Nations with a lot more countries sitting at the grown-ups' table? What about a robot chauffeur, Iranian smart bombs, or a United States desperate to encourage immigrants from south of the border, not keep them out? Welcome to Foreign Policy's first-ever predictions issue. We asked some of the world's most bleeding-edge thinkers to look at the planet in the year 2025-and those are just a few of their remarkable, and at times startling, projections. Most of all, what they told us is that The Future Is Now; the big trends and inescapable developments dictating our next few decades have already been set in motion, and though of course we can't begin to predict the unknowable, we actually already know an awful lot about how the world will look in the coming years.

UnCollege is a social movement designed to help you hack your education.  This manifesto will show you how to gain the passion, hustle, and contrarianism requisite for success - all without setting foot inside a classroom.

ABOUT FIND THE FUTURE Find The Future at NYPL brings visitors to the Library together with players around the world to tap into the creative power of the Library's collections. It is the first game in the world in which winning the game means writing a book together - a collection of 100 ways to make history and change the future, inspired by 100 of the most intriguing works of the past. Starting May 21, 2011, visitors to the Stephen A. Schwarzman branch of the NYPL can play the game with their personal smartphones or on Library computers. Global players will join the game with any computer that has access to the Internet. The game is free to play. The game is designed to empower players to find inspiration for their own extraordinary futures by bringing them face-to-face with the writings and personal objects of people who made an extraordinary difference in the past. The game starts with a special, invitation-only event on May 20, 2011. As part of the Centennial celebration weekend, hundreds of gamers will earn the chance to join a special once-in-a-lifetime event: an "overnight lock-in" at NYPL's Stephen A. Schwarzman building. This "write all night" lock in will serve as the official kick-off for the Find The Future game. All visitors to the Library or the website nypl.org/game will continue to be able to play Find The Future through the end of 2011.

Developed with the IFF foresight engine "What is Breakthroughs to Cures?Breakthroughs to Cures is an online idea-generating game designed to garner new ideas for how we can change the medical research system to develop treatments and cures for patients faster. Imagine a future scenario (watch the video below) that takes place in 2020. A widespread contamination has triggered a neurological disease that is expected to infect as many as 100 million people in the U.S. Government leaders have convened a panel to investigate ways to accelerate the pace of research and find treatments or cures for this disease before it strikes. Over a 24-hour period, players will be sharing ideas and collaborating to build better ideas to help this panel uncover the best ways to change the current system of medical research and drug development."

"ZGF Architects and PoSI teamed up to provide a concept submission for the International Living Future Institute's 2011 Living City Design Competition which has been recently awarded a People's Choice Award voted by the attendees of the Living Future 2011 conference. Their submission entitled Symbiotic Districts: Towards a Balanced City explores the symbiosis between five EcoDistricts in Portland, Oregon as well as regional systems and examines how strategies in a single district contribute to the city's overall performance. "

Facing declining visitors and uncertainty about what to do about it, library administrators in the new town of Almere in the Netherlands did something extraordinary. They redesigned their libraries based on the changing needs and desires of library users and, in 2010, opened the Nieuwe Bibliotheek (New Library), a thriving community hub that looks more like a bookstore than a library. Guided by patron surveys, administrators tossed out traditional methods of library organization, turning to retail design and merchandising for inspiration. They now group books by areas of interest, combining fiction and nonfiction; they display books face-out to catch the eye of browsers; and they train staff members in marketing and customer service techniques. The library is also a Seats2meet (S2M) location where patrons are empowered to help one another in exchange for free, permanent, coworking space, and they utilize the S2M Serendipity Machine to connect library users in real-time. They also have a bustling cafe, an extensive events and music program, a gaming facility, a reading garden and more. The result? The New Library surpassed all expectation about usage with over 100,000 visitors in the first two months. It is now considered one of the most innovative libraries in the world.