This is an adaptation of an interview recently done for the Norwegian fashion website Melk og Honning. What is a “trend”? It depends. When a climate scientist or an economist talk about trends they obviously use the word differently than s fashion journalist would, but there are still commonalities. All trends are effects of underlying driving forces,…
Do you lead a group of children and want to engage them in future thinking in an effective and meaningful way? Please fill out the contact form for workshops and futuristic game play. You never know what future they will reveal to you, but it can make your job leading them make much more…
It’s hard to believe that we have finally entered the second half of the second decade of the new millennium. So much has changed only in the past 5 years: cloud computing and mobile are mainstream, 3D printers can be bought at the local office supplier and Uber is a verb. (When a noun becomes a…
I have been busy with SXSW lately and taken a pretty long break from writing. Unlike so many in the professional and personal blogosphere I’m too overwhelmed with sessions, pitches and expos at SXSW that I can’t really find “the thing” that broke out or defined the mood of the conference. If I had to mention particular…
Ford’s recent report on Generation Z fails to mention the most obvious elephant in the room: Teens don’t care about cars anymore. Statoil recently published three scenarios for energy use in 2040. Not even the most low-carbon scenario envisioned the possibility that fossil fuels could constitute less than 75% of total energy consumption in 25 years. It…
Last year we made some Generation Z predictions for 2014. How did these hold up? “1. They will bring at least one household item out of obscurity.” While nothing is really holding the same momentum as rubberbands and duct tape did, DIY is still a strong trend. A pretty hot trend these days is the decorating…
The White House recently released a report where they labeled the youngest generation the “Homeland Generation”. A storm of speculations hit the internet soon after. How could the U.S. government choose such a paranoid and xenophobic-sounding epithet? Was this a creepy joke? Some claimed the White House took the name out of thin air. Others…
45 % of today’s jobs will disappear by 2035. Sure, job titles have come and gone over the centuries as we progress technologically, but this time we’re dealing with an entirely new animal. Computers are starting to replace us in jobs we thought were only human and pressing down the marginal cost in production…
There is much chatter these days about the next generation of workers and whether they are technologically better equipped to face the changing job market. Many seem to think that by growing up with touch-screens, Siri and social media, the iGeneration will have a leg up in the future workforce compared to their less digitally native predecessors. This…
Since my post Scenario’s With Children – How a Class of First-Graders See Life in 2026 has received some interest, I thought I would share another piece from another scenario session with a girl scout group. This group too consisted of very young elementary school age girls. The format is a little different. We talked about…
