Closer Than You Think

Robert Morse, Jannarie Gaston, Elizabith knerr Alex Rubio

2025
COMPUTERS:
Your Computer In 2025

Mark Rolston , 04.08.10, 06:00 PM EDT Traditional computers are disappearing; human beings themselves are becoming information augmented What's the most fascinating shift that computing is creating in our lives? You might think it's just "smaller, better, faster," but there is an even more dramatic story about how computing is changing who we are as people and a society. Thanks to the wonders of technology, the idea of managing two distinct lives has become common for many of us. We have always had the first life--our physical existence, the one we can't escape until we die. But today many of us have also adapted a second life. We have long had the opportunity to invent ourselves through media, historically through writing. We could invent a new self. Yet our first lives remained dominant for most of us. But today this second life has grown with such scale and ubiquity that it now competes with our first life. We do this using all of the digital tools that keep us connected with people we don't actually connect with--using Facebook, e-mail, texting, Twitter, IM and the myriad of other digital media. We can deliberately create a unique version of our self in the digital world. What's profound is that this new self can take on an outsized importance and fidelity. Most of us know people in these digital worlds that we have never met. Yet we feel as if we know them and are connected to them. The balance between these two lives is rapidly shifting as technology offers ever-richer second life experiences.

This increasing importance of our second lives is making computing even more central to us. Computing no longer means "that PC in the den." Instead computing is an intimate extension of ourselves--something people feel naked without. This phenomenon is being driven by radical changes to the human-computer interface. We've been using a method for interacting with computers that was invented in the 1960s, but over the next 10 years we will see a dramatic change.

What started this trend was a breakthrough in touch-screen technology. Touch allows us to interact with computers in the same way we've been interacting with physical things for millions of years. It's the original interface. Unfortunately using a computer currently requires a proficiency and immersion in the computer's own interface; we must learn to work in the computer's world of scroll bars, list controls, push-buttons, mice and keyboards. But we don't live there. We exist in a three-dimensional world. Why can't the computer come to our world rather than us to its? The problem with computing today is that it still requires computers. Even with the iPhone, with its beautiful interface, we are still interacting within its world on its terms. Computers are essentially blind. They are a resource for mountains of information, yet they lack even the most basic context to our physical space. They don't know where they are, who's sitting in front of them or any other basic information about their surroundings. Looking ahead, we will teach a computer to understand and interact with us in our world. S Stanley Kubrick introduced us to this concept with the intelligent computer HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The space travelers interacted with HAL not by sitting in front of a workstation, but by just being in the room with the computer. All fears of computers taking over the world aside, today HAL remains a truly provocative idea: the computer having an awareness of itself and the people who interact with it in the 3-D space we live in. Microsoft's ( MSFT - news - people ) upcoming Project Natal is a powerful example of this. Based on a camera that sees into your living room, the technology lets players control games with their body movements without holding on to any hardware. It allows us to converse with the computer and drives a new idea of mobile computing: not merely smaller devices, but no devices. That is true mobility. Would it be a stretch to say that this shift is as big as the Internet itself? The Internet was an explosion in the availability of information and connectivity. The other half of the story is how we get to that information, how we use it. This is computing in context, a world where we interact with computers in our own native space, using our own native language--the full range of our verbal and physical gestures and emotions we have spent 60 million years perfecting. This leads to the notion of the body becoming what computer nerds would call a "node," an active participant in the computing landscape. Many of us already post our physical location online for everyone to see--an obvious example of the potential "nodeness" of people. But apply this to health and we can see a dramatic effect. There are mass-market examples today, like AirStrip (a product we at Frog Design helped create), which remotely monitors patients in the hospital and sends vital information directly to a doctor's or nurse's smart phone. This is part of a growing market of devices that are attached to the body for monitoring purposes, allowing you to transmit your health data to your doctor or a Web site. Within 10 years, it will be as simple to publish and monitor what's going on with your body as it is to share your Facebook status with the world. What it means to know something or someone is changing. Picture a world when we can have all the information available about someone on the Internet accessible instantly, not merely through a computer screen, but as a sort of heads-up display, as an overlay to what we normally see. This kind of display has long been the domain of jet pilots and Terminators, but we can easily imagine a future when information-augmented vision is applied to ordinary life. Just recently an employee relocated to our Austin office from New York and was looking for a home. And like most of us, he was not merely looking for a nice house, but trying to find the right neighborhood, the right street. In the past we would get in our cars and drive to see each of these locations. But he did his exploring through Google Maps--using essentially satellite images and street--to view photos, to virtually fly around the city and walk up and down streets to get a feel for the area. He was, in essence, house-hunting via satellite. How long will it be before we can see through satellites, no longer having to sit in front of our computers, but by using our very eyes, perhaps choosing alternate views as a sportscaster chooses camera angles for a game. Fundamentally these changes represent not only evolutions in computing, but changes in us--in our notion of what it means to be human. When computing becomes deeply integrated into our knowing, our thinking, our decision processes, our bodies and even our consciousness, we are forever changed. We are becoming augmented. Our first and second lives will be forever entwined. What Will Media Advertising Look Like In 2025

In just eight years, we will enter the third decade of the 21stcentury. What will the media advertising industry look like then? Who will be running the media agencies? Will media buying be completely automated? Here are some prognostications: Clouds, screens and agents. By 2020 the media industry will be have moved to cloud-based computing platforms. A few of these platforms will become dominant and manage most of the screen-based based buying. To exist as a major media company or technology vendor will mean plugging into these platforms. Screens will come in all shapes and sizes but it will be the devices not yet on the drawing board today that will be the most exciting. Augmented reality software will offer new kinds of advertising opportunities. Virtual agents will increasingly become a part of our personal and professional lives. Brands will take the first steps toward sponsoring some of the activities of our agents. Women rule. By 2By 2020 many of the men who built and have led the media advertising industry for the past 40 years will have retired. The thousands of women who joined media agencies straight out of college in the 1990s and 2000s will be in their late 30s and 40s and will be ready to step up. Within the next ten years upwards of half of all media agency CEOs will be women. Also, sometime in the 2020s we may see a woman break through to run an agency holding company. Buyers will be geeks. The buyers of the future will have a formal background in predictive analytics. Some of the people who cut their teeth buying pay-per-click keywords on platforms like Google will provide essential leadership on these teams. Others will come from the existing analytics groups inside the agencies. Increasingly, with so much data to process, human buyers will be assisted by virtual agents. Fewer media sellers. While some level of human-based media sales and strategy will always be necessary, by 2020 the majority of ad deals will be struck silently inside of machines. The practice of large teams of junior sellers hitting the streets and pitching banner ads to agencies will be as dated as 1960's Mad Men. In fact, by 2020 there will be a period drama or movie based on the online ad industry circa 2004. It will be rather humorous. More technology sellers. Many of the people who were previously selling media will move over to selling media-related technology and they will be very good at it. As software increasingly eats the human-based ad sales business this trend will only accelerate. The Web is old. The banner ad will be 25 years old by 2020 ,and the business will be mature in more ways than one. With the younger demos all on mobile devices, games and augmented reality apps, Web sites will be used to target people over the age of 40. Surfing the Web will seem as quaint as reading a physical newspaper is today. Talent investment. Someday we may look back and cringe at how poorly the media advertising industry managed its human talent during its first few decades. Through a combination of training and technology, media advertising will move beyond its roots as a kind of guild to become as professionalized as the consulting, finance and technology industries. Left behind. While technology will continue to transform media, there will still be pockets of non-digital media. Some areas will continue to be served by local newspapers. But the economics of remaining non-digital and thus outside of the realm of the major trading platforms will be increasingly difficult, particularly for national publications. Many papers and magazines will either make it as digital-only properties -- or, sadly, decide to wind down operations. Those are some of my predictions. What do you think the world of media will look like eight years from now?

SCHOOL:
The Classroom In 2025 George Kembel, 04.08.10, 06:00 PM EDT The next decade will bring an end to school as we know it.

Our education system is not broken, but it is becoming obsolete. We're still running an educational model developed for the industrial revolution, designed to prepare workers for factory jobs. Picture the experience in most of today's college classrooms: a vast amphitheater where a wizened professor drones through a long lecture about what he knows. Three weeks later, students remember only a tenth of what they learned. Bored students and executives hungry for talented young leaders know this is not the way to produce the next generation of innovators. In 2020 we will see an end to the classroom as we know it. The lone professor will be replaced by a team of coaches from vastly different fields. Tidy lectures will be supplanted by messy real-world challenges. Instead of parking themselves in a lecture hall for hours, students will work in collaborative spaces, where future doctors, lawyers, business leaders, engineers, journalists and artists learn to integrate their different approaches to problem solving and innovate together. In schools around the world this transformation is already underway. At the National Institute of Design in India students learn to understand customer needs by working closely with companies like Hewlett Packard ( HPQ - news - people ) and Autodesk ( ADSK - news - people ). In Toronto, students at the Rotman School of Management take classes at DesignWorks, an experimental workspace where students work on projects like reinventing the retail banking experience. Here at Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design--known on campus as the "d.school"--students from engineering, medicine, business, law and the arts come together to tackle real-world projects. They've worked on everything from reinventing the morning radio experience for a century-old station in New York City to helping JetBlue serve customers during massive weather delays. Students develop empathy for those who will be using their solutions, collaborate with teammates who have vastly different problem-solving approaches and understand what it takes to make new ideas viable. Along the way they learn a methodology that equips them to tackle major, complex challenges far beyond the classroom. Students have used these projects as a springboard for entrepreneurial leadership. Embrace, a company that makes warming devices for premature infants in the developing world, started as a class project at the d.school. The team--an MBA, two engineers and a computer scientist--worked with a nongovernmental organization that wanted to make cheaper incubators for rural developing countries like Nepal, where thousands of premature babies die each year. The team started by getting direct experience with mothers and doctors in Nepal. They discovered that mothers are rarely able to make the long, expensive journey to a hospital, so cheaper hospital incubators wouldn't solve the problem. Instead they developed a small, portable warming device women can use in their homes. Its costs is 1% that of a traditional incubator. That's a learning experience you can't get in a traditional classroom. And the shift toward these kinds of hands-on experiences is happening far beyond universities. Educators have long seen a paradox: Children enter school with innate creativity but rarely leave that way. Sir Ken Robinson, a British researcher, illustrates this with a study of 1,600 children between the ages of 3 and 5. Tested on their ability to think divergently--generating ideas by exploring many possible solutions, a key to innovation--98% scored at genius level. Ten years later the same children were given the same test; only 10%scored at genius level.

Schools around the country are moving aggressively to rethink their memorize-and-test approach. At a charter school in one of the Bay Area's poorest and most violent neighborhoods, teacher Melissa Pelochino took what she learned at a d.school workshop back to her classroom and saw measurable leaps in literacy and critical thinking skills. Meanwhile, the Henry Ford Learning Institute is scaling models developed at a successful small high school, removing the boundaries between learning and the real world. For executives, the increasing pace of information is making the ability to keep learning more imperative than their expertise. To keep pace they will remain students of innovation throughout their careers. John Keefe, executive producer for WNYC radio station in New York, came to the d.school to develop his own process for innovation. He went back to his station and used it to tackle their most vexing problem: During breaking news events, stale and inaccurate information was making it's way onto the air, although no one was sure exactly why. He ran a short simulation with his staff, using Post-It notes to represent what information each person had and how it moved. The breakdowns quickly became obvious, and with a few tweaks the team was ready to get the freshest news on air when a plane crashed in the city the next day. Keefe's diagnosis of information breakdowns was a successful innovation--something companies are increasingly hungry for as the pace of global change accelerates. But what's really valuable is his transformation into an innovator who can continually produce great ideas and turn them into reality again and again. In an era of global competition, these shifts in education will be key to developing the next generation of leaders.

TRANSPORTATION:

Airports of the Future. By Mike Steer LONDON, England (CNN) -- Space travel, security threats and increasing passenger numbers are forcing major changes in the way airports are designed. Elegant space: the interior of the proposed Virgin Galactic spaceport in New Mexico more photos In fact, when discussing the future of the airport it is now appropriate to consider both conventional air travel hubs we are familiar with, as well as the imminent 'spaceports'. The rush of interest in setting up 'space tourism' companies has seen proposed spaceport projects in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and California, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Florida, Virginia, Alaska and Wisconsin in the United States. Russia, Australia, Sweden and Portugal have also been rumored as potential spaceport locations. Meanwhile, the air travel industry is continuing to expand operations despite the challenges facing some airlines. And there are some radical new ideas being developed for future air and spaceports. See a picture gallery of futuristic airport and spaceport designs The adventurous views of Dave Evans, chief technologist at business solutions company Cisco Systems, highlight the types of changes we could soon see in airports and indeed the new features we may witness in spaceports. Speaking at a FAA/NASA/Industry Airport Planning Workshop in 2006, Evans suggested that pilots of the future could fly without hands and from the comfort of their own home (using brain-machine interfaces, in which the human brain actually exchanges electronic signals with a computer). He also said future airports would have virtual intelligence personnel to perform the jobs of many airport workers; and that people would be able to check-in remotely using a cell phone embedded with a RFID (radio frequency identification) chip. But what will these new airports and spaceports look like? Graeme Johns, who is an architect at British airport design company, The Design Solution, believes airports of the future will continue to expand, with bigger security and commercial areas. Johns, who is involved in projects in London (the new Heathrow T2 terminal), Delhi, Mumbai, Doha, Abu Dhabi and Oman, said many new airports were being more adventurous with designs. "I think there is definitely a move towards more avant-garde designs. People are trying to do things more site-specific rather than keeping to the same old formula. "Definitely in the Middle East they throw everything at it, also in the Far East there are some large developments. They are all vying for transit passages," he said. Johns said one of the biggest challenges was balancing commercial space with operational space. "There's lots of pressure to make larger security areas ... but a big thing for us is trying to move up the commercial side of airports."

Future airports would likely include a better range of shops, he said. "We are definitely looking at broadening the offering of shops and bringing in things that haven't traditionally been in airports," John said. If all of this isn't exciting enough for you -- then of course there are spaceports. Internationally renowned design company Foster and Partners won a competition to build Virgin Galactic's spaceport in New Mexico. Company founder Lord Norman Foster said the project was one of the most exciting and futuristic he had been involved in. Article submitted by Alex Rubio Steve McCallion, 04.08.10, 06:00 PM EDT In 10 years, your commute will be short, cheap and, dare we say, fun. America is a culture of mobility. Geographic and social mobility have always played a critical role in our nation's promise-they are part of our DNA, tied to the American Dream and our values of freedom, independence and exploration. For the last 100 years this dream manifested itself in the automobile. In the last 50, the airplane played a critical role. But things are changing, as the auto industry undergoes radical transformation, fear of terrorism makes air travel a chore, and uncertain energy supplies destabilize the world. These shifts are reshaping American attitudes about mobility. In 2020 a new generation will emerge from a period of frugality into one of resourcefulness and resilience. Americans will start searching for transportation solutions that are smarter, healthier, slower and more social. Smart will be the new status. In 2020 blatant overabundance will go from being a symbol of status to one of ignorance, as people actively seek new forms of transportation to match specific travel needs. Driven by increased living costs and shifting social values, behaviors once confined to the mobile fringe will begin to spread, displacing the SUV as the suburb's emblematic transport mode. In its place, a network of smarter mobile solutions based on trip length and purpose emerge. His and hers cars become near and far cars--an electric city car for short-range commutes, for example, and a clean diesel car for road trips--as energy sources align with travel needs. People in 2020 are more open to sharing mobility resources, as pride of ownership gives way to smart utilization of resources, effectively and cheaply increasing mobility options. Forget loans and leases. New business models will emerge, including mobility memberships that provide access to a range of vehicles when and where they're needed. Ride sharing, fractional ownership and neighborhood fleets will comprise this new smart mobility lexicon, making the No-Car Family a reality. In 2010 sharing programs like SmartBike and ZipCar show the way; by 2020 they're ingrained, and joined by a host of similar mobility services, creating an entire mobility ecosystem. Health and mobility will reunite. No longer the default for all activities, the car persists in 2020, but is augmented by alternative modes of transportation that provide bonus benefits for health and well-being. Driving five houses over to pick up our kids from a play date now feels absurdly excessive. Walking and biking to work are considered smart, healthy alternatives to the car-plus-gym-membership solution. Kids walk to school (some through the snow, uphill both ways, like their parents did) or ride their bikes as a means to reduce greenhouse gases, obesity and the cost of education. Even in 2010, such tendencies are manifested in parent-organized "walking buses" (a curious need to leverage the metaphor of a bus to reinvent the idea of walking to school), and the occasional city-dweller in London, San Francisco or New York running or biking to work, backpack in tow. Slow will displace speed and power. Yes, there will be space tourism in 2020. But most of us will follow in the footsteps of Slow Food, become more localized and seek better travel options within 20 miles of our home. People will continue to urbanize (a projected 75% of the world will live in cities by 2050) to be closer to work and play, and to eliminate the detested 20th-century commute. Localization will drive demand for new types of light vehicles that make local travel convenient, efficient, and fun, and put pressure on cities still struggling to integrate them into infrastructures once optimized for cars. Bike avenues and light vehicle paths will proliferate, as cities compete for creative talent and economic prosperity by promoting these alternative modes of transport. By 2020 this new approach to getting around locally drives a market of single-seat cars, electric bikes, scooters and maybe even a P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility vehicle) or two. Not quite the jet pack, but close. The journey will be more social and connected. In 2020 people will look for mobility experiences that are enjoyable and social, not just convenient and efficient, as a new class of connected vehicles offers value propositions beyond performance and power. Social technologies migrate from desktop and mobile applications into cars, making cars connected devices that enhance the user experience. Talking safely on the phone while driving is just the beginning, as vehicles' abilities to inspire, share and record experiences deliver what Ford is calling "the American Journey 2.0." The road trip in 2020 is an entirely new experience--social, engaged, and memorable. The new internal combustion. Our need to discover, explore and be independent will never go away, but the technologies that enable it are changing. Which will succeed and which will fail? During the next 10 years, how Americans get around will see a transformation equal to that ushered in by the internal combustion engine. And just as those early

days were marked by a dizzying array of options and explorations, 2020 will bring an abundance of players competing to dominate newly defined categories. Those that succeed will deliver solutions that are resourceful and resilient; solutions that tap into changing attitudes; solutions that are slow, healthy, social and smart. What will race cars look like in 2025? There's something about car racing that grabs the imagination. The speed and the danger make the sport seem romantic and glamorous while racing designs and technology have made their way into everyday life. The sleek shape of an oldfashioned toaster mimics the rake of the 1950's Formula One cars, while fashionistas wear jackets with mandarin collars and sneakers with rounded heels -- both designs originally developed for race car drivers. Auto racing has influenced everyday products, but it has also influenced, well, car racing. Designers and engineers are constantly pushing toward that next record, toward even greater speed and control. While there are many types of car racing, and each has produced its own technical and design innovations, much of the innovation in car racing has come from the most popular forms of the sport, including stock car racing and Formula One racing. Of course, it makes sense that the most popular, and best-funded, types of car racing gave rise to some of the best known innovations. Some of the things that we take for granted in everyday car design, like aerodynamics, were developed from the early days of car racing when teams discovered that a car with a smooth and sleek body could cut through the air more easily, posting faster lap times. Even though racing is all about speed and handling, a number of safety innovations came directly from car racing, too. After all, if you're going to be going that fast, you need a good strong safety system in the event of a crash. This thought gave rise to such safety features as shoulder seatbelts and the concepts of safety cages and crumple zones. Even components that we now consider basic equipment on modern cars, such as disc brakes, also came from auto racing. Yet the sport of auto racing continues to innovate. Today's race car engineers and designers are experimenting with lightweight materials, like carbon fiber, to make racecars safer and stronger while innovators interested in alternative fuels and propulsions systems are beginning to race cars that function completely different from the cars on the track at Talladega. It's tough to say where all of these new ideas will take racing, but the 5th Annual L.A. Auto Show Design Challenge offered a glimpse at the types of racecars some automotive designers are envisioning for the future. Keep reading to see what some of the industry's most innovative thinkers believe race cars will look like in the year 2025.

HOME:
Marianne Cusato, 04.08.10, 06:00 PM EDT Goodbye, McMansions. In 2020 we'll build for the triple bottom line: people, planet as well as profit.

Free-flowing jumbo loans enabled the overconsumption of jumbo homes, creating jumbo expectations of jumbo lives. Then the bubble burst and the jumbo house of cards came tumbling down. Today one in four mortgages is upside-down, housing starts teeter at record lows and housing prices are projected to fall 40% from their 2006 peak before bottoming out later this year, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Index. Despite the doom and gloom of the Great Recession, over the course of the next 10 years we will stabilize and recover. Things might be bad today, but the scope of this crisis begs the question: Were things really ever as good as we thought The lending practices and overconsumption that led to our current crisis were not fiscally sustainable. But the failure was more that just financial; it was also environmental and social. Recovery must encompass the triple bottom line: people and planet as well as profit. Over the next 10 years our collective hangover will subside. By 2020, the face of housing will emerge more livable and sustainable, and fiscally within our means. In 2020 cost per square foot will be abandoned as a metric. Homeowners will instead weigh the total monthly costs of living in a home. More stringent construction requirements coupled with higher homeowner expectations will make performance the key indicator of a building's value. Sales listings will be required to include the projected monthly costs to heat, cool and maintain a home. The home of 2020 will be closer to work, school and shopping. Until recently, in almost every U.S. city, homeowners drove deep into suburbia to get the most bang for their buck--hence the "drive 'til you qualify" craze. Now they are left holding the bag. Sprawl depends on cheap oil, and recent $5-per-gallon gas proves that has come to an end. The volume of construction required to build roads and fossil fuels consumed by long commutes is no longer sustainable. That's not to mention the effect on quality of life--road rage, anyone? Failed suburban sprawl will become the new frontier for development. Cities grow like rings of a tree, expanding out from a center. Until now the typical pattern of growth is to build more rather than retrofit. New rings of sprawl are cancerous; as they expand they kill previous growth. For reasons both economic and environmental, we will see patterns of growth fold back on themselves as foreclosed sprawl is retrofitted into mixed-use communities. Towns like Stapleton, Colo., where an airport was converted into residences, shopping and offices, all built within walking distance, will lead the way. We will witness growth in mid-size cities such as Austin, Texas; Charlotte, N.C.; and Portland, Ore.; rather than in larger cities like Dallas, Atlanta or Los Angeles. Cities that offer transit-oriented development, job opportunities and a better quality of life will see high demand. "Currently we are tied to a 19th-century approach, which isolates the big city unto itself, without taking advantage of the connections and opportunities it could enjoy simply by planning and linking to smaller nearby cities," says Dr. Catherine Ross, an advisor to the White House Office of Urban Affairs. According to Ross, in 2020 we will see what she calls "megaregions" emerge--areas that are rich and vibrant as a result of pooling the most critical and valuable resources from nearby towns, rather than trying to stand alone and compete as independent towns and cities.

In 2020 homeowners will crave fewer symbols of gratuitous wealth. Americans will stop trying to keep up with the Jones. (In fact, chances are the Jones' home was foreclosed upon in 2010.) With average homes shrinking down to size, we will see a heightened awareness of how and where money is spent. Mr. Potatohead, lick-and-stick architecture will give way to budgets you can touch and feel. People will stop spending money on gaudy entryways and gables for the sake of gables. They will instead build windows for the sake of cross-ventilation and lower utility bills. Houses will live--and breathe--better. The perceived value of a home will be completely redefined. Realtors will stop selling homes based on resale ability and start selling on livability. Homes that boast the highest price tags will be those that are able to adapt to several life phases and comfortably house multiple generations. Shifting demographics will continue to reinforce the need for smaller homes that are adaptable, sustainable, livable, conveniently located and, most importantly, within our means. These attributes are sorely missing in America's existing housing stock. The challenge for the next 10 years will be to adjust how and what we build to meet our changing needs. The homebuilding industry may be suffering today, but it is also undergoing creative disruption. It will be those that adapt to future realities now that will lead us to a successful and sustainable recovery.

WORKFORCE:
Martin Ford , 04.08.10, 06:00 PM EDT In 2025 you will fight to keep your job.

The greatest economic challenge the United States faces in the coming decade will be reversing its dismal unemployment situation. The past decade has been an unmitigated disaster for job creation. To keep pace with population growth and prevent the unemployment rate from rising, the economy needs to consistently create between 1 million and 2 million new jobs per year. Yet private-sector employment has actually fallen over the last 10 years; the U.S. now employs at least a million fewer people than it did in 1999. Work Environments of the Future. By Mark Tutton LONDON, England (CNN) -- Work stations with a built-in treadmill and portable meeting rooms are just some of the developments that may become commonplace in the offices of the future. Offices of the future may include more informal team areas, like this one designed by Perkins + Will. more photos Workplace technology has changed dramatically in recent years and the offices we work in are finally set to catch up. The advent of laptops, wi-fi and BlackBerries means that high-tech workers are no longer tethered to their desks, and the office of the future will be designed to let workers roam. Dutch designer Michiel van der Kley has come up with Globus, a stylish spherical "podule" that looks like a piece of art, but is actually a mobile work station. Open it up, take a seat, switch on your laptop and you're good to go. If you need to see a colleague you can take your laptop with you and talk shop at a ScooterDesk, an ultra-mobile mini work station by Belgian design firm Utilia. See what the offices of tomorrow will look like Another Belgian company, Living Tomorrow, predicts that as we become increasingly able to work from home, workplaces will spend more time unoccupied. It says flexibility will be the key to filling unused space, which means that as well as mobile work stations, we'll be seeing mobile meeting rooms. The Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics (CBPD) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has built the Robert L. Preger Intelligent Workplace -- a functioning workplace that is also a 'living laboratory' for researching office design. In an effort to increase energy efficiency, much of the heat in the Intelligent Workplace comes from solar thermal energy and recaptured heat from generators. Daylight sensors and occupancy sensors mean lighting isn't used when it's not needed, but workers are also given a huge amount of control over their own environment, regulating air temperature and flow, and lighting levels and direction, from their own work station. The point of all this, says the CBPD, is to show you can improve quality of life in the workplace while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As businesses are coming to realize that the best ideas are often generated in casual conversation, designers such as Perkins and Will are incorporating informal team areas into office environments, to encourage chance encounters and impromptu meetings.

Obesity has become a hot topic as we lead increasingly sedentary lives. One solution, envisaged by Dr James Levine of the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis, is for us to burn more calories at work. With that in mind, his team has developed a treadmill desk that lets you walk while you work, and it has already been tested in real workplaces. So you'll soon be able to work off that lunch-time blowout while you work on your big presentation. Article submitted by Alex Rubio

fNUTRITION:
Dan Kraemer, 04.08.10, 06:00 PM EDT In 2025 you will finally start taking care of yourself.

Just checked out with the grocery cart of the future? Heres your digital receipt scoring the nutrient richness of your trip. Heading home for dinner? Your smart fridge has scanned all the food in your kitchen, compiled a menu of the healthiest meal combinations (tailored to your food preferences and allergies, of course) and has started preheating your oven. In 2020, all the things we've always been told to do--eat better, exercise, get some sleep, see your doctor--will not only be easier, well do them in spite of our best efforts not to. Making healthy choices will be done for us. Take nutrition. Imagine if todays nutrition labels--with their user-friendliness of tax forms and the informational consistency of a Madoff prospectus--were replaced by a universal icon that ranked all food with a brilliantly simple combination of a color and a 1-to-5 rating based on a database of nutritional information. Making a healthy choice becomes as simple as picking a color and the highest number rating you can find. Video: 2020 Medicine For the last several months my colleagues and I tagged along with strangers on their grocery trips and even invited ourselves to their family dinners, all in the name of understanding how Americans decide what to eat. What we learned is that people unwittingly develop basic principles or philosophies about what to eat, based on a buffet of often conflicting sources: morning shows, celebrity nutritionists, cereal boxes, a best friend and (at best) five minutes of conversation with their doctor. The result is an incomplete and often inaccurate understanding of nutrition that leads to unhealthy food choices and, ultimately, poor health. When it comes to food, our research found that all 300 million Americans typically fit into just four distinct types of eaters: Convenient, Comfortable, Confused and Convinced. A persons Food Personality is based on how heavily influenced they are by a particular situation, and whether they have a defined or undefined approach to nutrition.

To help Americans eat better, we must create a universal nutrition information system that is both intuitive and easily adopted. This is no small task. The USDA, FDA, Food Standards Agency, supermarket chains and food producers have made attempts at standardizing and simplifying consumer choice, yet none have improved Americas eating habits. Why? We found that no approach takes into account the entire user experience. Package labeling--the predominant focus of most systems--is only one consumer touch point. In 2020 well be able to leverage interconnected devices that go beyond a fire hose of nutritional information. Well be able to collect and aggregate food choices and their nutritional impact over time, ultimately driving behavioral change through integrated experiences. Digital interconnectivity will link together every food decision--imagine having an instantly updated nutritional rating that is omnipresent in your life. Purchase a salad for lunch, watch your rating go up. Eat those buffalo wings, watch it plunge. A universal icon will be the core to realizing a universal understanding of nutrition. By creating one intuitive system, we can help everyone effortlessly identify and track the nutrient richness of what they eat. With this vision in mind, we have proposed an icon combining a number score and color value that is easy enough for even a 5-year-old to grasp.

In our future vision, a simple choice of a 3-value loaf of multigrain bread over a 2-value roll sparks the urge to reach a 4-

value shopping trip. The icon is definitive enough to score every food combination from a single vegetable to a month of meals. Its flexible enough to help every Food Personality regardless of the decision before them: salad vs. fries, pretzels from brand X vs. brand Y, or spaghetti dinner vs. mac-n-cheese. And, ultimately it encourages consumers--and food manufacturers--to make decisions on the basis of health first. The alternative is a technology-fueled, convenience-charged world of overmarketed, indulge-now-take-a-vitamin-pill-later foodlike products, each less healthy than the next. But if we start today with a universal system for making food choices, by 2020 well have a world where nutritional value defines the competitive food marketplace. The tastiest benefit? We'll change the world whether the average consumer realizes it or not. Arna Ionescu, 04.08.10, 06:00 PM EDT Passive patients will become empowered participants.

Put aside the politics and the heated rhetoric. On this point we can all agree: Health care in the U.S. is fragmented at best. Inefficiencies abound. Stakeholders rarely communicate. Tasks better suited to computers are completed by hand. Providers have little time and incentive to adopt new technologies, many of which significantly change established workflows and often lead to fewer reimbursable visits. Now, change is finally afoot in the health care industry. By 2020, the status quo will give way to personalized health care. More care will be provided remotely. Patients will become empowered participants. Technology will help coordinate care results and yield consistently better outcomes. Our growing knowledge of genetics will lead to personalized therapies. Patient adherence to treatments will improve. Outcomes will be measurable. Hospitals will leave less room for human error--and doctors will refocus on patient care. Existing technologies make it possible to provide more services outside traditional settings. Telemedicine systems like Bosch's Health Buddy allow clinicians to consult patients electronically, view abnormalities in data streams and adjust medications before they end up in the hospital. Research at Japan's Showa University showed that remotely monitoring asthma patients reduced hospital visits by 83%, over a six-month period. Results like these offer hope that, in 10 years' time, remote care will keep patients healthy and at home. People will engage more meaningfully with their health. Carefully tailored social-networking platforms, like PatientsLikeMe.com, will allow otherwise isolated patients to find emotional support, gather information and make decisions with help from others. Online resource centers that provide accurate and comprehensive information about health conditions, such as WebMD ( HLTH - news - people ), will help patients make informed choices. Health care companies will learn from other industries: They will speak in plain English, regain trust and ultimately empower patients. By 2020, medical decisions will be based on better data. Technology will improve clinical decision-making. New body sensors that capture continuous physiological data streams during daily routines--as opposed to discrete data captured at isolated moments in time--will provide clinicians with greater context and enable them to diagnose based on robust evidence. Diabetics are already measuring their blood sugar continuously; other continuous sensors, such as Corventis "smart bandages," which measure seven vital signals, including heart rhythms, are en route.

As scientists learn more about the human genome, the medical community will be able to use DNA coding to select the most effective therapies for individual patients. Researchers recently correlated a genetic marker to the success of certain chemotherapy drugs in breast cancer patients. Such discoveries will continue as genetic databases grow, and by 2020 scientists may even be able to customize drugs for their patients based on their genetic make-up. In 2020 patients will finally start taking their meds on time and in correct dosages. No small feat considering that today, only half of all patients take their medications correctly, according to the World Health Organization. In the future technology will help crack the adherence challenge by providing patients with the support, knowledge and feedback they need to follow their care plans. Proteus Biomedical already has an ingestible microchip in the works that can be embedded in every pill to let patients, caregivers and clinicians know exactly when each dose is taken. This data could power a host of carefully designed services to drive adherence. Outcomes will be increasingly measurable. Today few systems can identify which therapies or doctors achieve the best outcomes. As electronic medical record use spreads, statistics about diagnoses, therapies and outcomes will be readily available via wide-reaching databases. Patients will be able to determine not only which treatments have proved most successful for various conditions, but also which physicians are most adept at treating particular ailments. Medical decisions will be based on solid performance data. In 10 years, hospitals will leave little room for human error. According to a recent Institute of Medicine report, 1.5 million people are harmed by hospital errors each year. Preventable hospital deaths--nearly 100,000 a year, by some estimates--could be reduced by a simple checklist. In the near future, expect to see increased investment in hospital infrastructure that reduces human error. That will leave hospitals with more time to refocus on patient care. New technologies can relieve the enormous administrative burden on our clinicians. Consider a typical hospital scenario: Physical therapy must happen after a nurse has administered medication, and housekeeping must change the sheets while the patient is out of bed. And everything must be documented. Currently hospital staff painstakingly manage everything manually, often revisiting patients because of administrative mishaps. Technology could help coordinate staff and manage documentation so clinicians can spend more time caring for patients. These technologies together will help America's health care system run more smoothly. Expect to see innovative thinking, new incentive models, clinicians refocused on practicing medicine and patients who enjoy better outcomes.

By Michelle Chan

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A serious injury leaves a loved one in a coma. Relatives may face the hardest decision of their lives: to wait it out or turn off the life-support machine.

The program may help families decide what action to take if a loved one is critically ill

But now, that critical decision may be turned over to a sophisticated computer program. New software should soon be able to predict more accurately than loved ones how comatose patients would choose to be treated, if they were able to make the decision themselves.

Bioethicist David Wendler at the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Washington D.C., and his colleagues, used very elementary past research to build up patterns in patients' choices. "There was very little data available and the approach we used was incredibly simplistic," Wendler concedes. "But even

with a little amount of data, we did very well."

The study compared how accurately their computer-based tool predicted a patient's preferred treatments compared with what loved ones said. Results showed both methods got it right around twothirds to three-quarters of the time.

Wendler hopes to build up a broader data bank of personal profiles, which will include age, gender, religious and ethnic background, to advance the software. He is confident that will enable more accurate patient predictions. "We have very good reason to believe we can get significantly better results," Wendler says. "Maybe ten or fifteen percent more accurate than (next of kin)."

Patients have gained more control over their medical care in recent years but many still fail to sign a directive looking to the future. Few discuss treatment preferences they would elect if they lost the ability to make decisions. Without a self-directed advance medical plan for a patient, relatives are often asked to step in and act on a loved one's behalf.

"We've always gone with the idea that people who know the patient best are also best positioned to make the decision about treatment," Wendler says. "My concerns were that this process puts a burden on families. I wanted to develop an alternate approach."

Wendler is acutely aware of the problems a software program like this might pose for the community at

large. "Some people say, 'of course this is good' and others think 'this is crazy'," Wendler says.

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Irrespective of medical advances, some relatives may, on principle, always want to make end-of-life treatment decisions for incapacitated relatives. Others may prefer to see the computer-generated results to help them come to a decision. "We could give them supplementary information like: 'people

like your father want this kind of treatment," Wendler says. That extra information might diminish doubts or offer support to an overwhelmed family member. "Results will be different depending on if they're twenty or ninety years-old," Wendler adds, "or if the treatment they face is a tasteless pill versus painful chemotherapy or invasive surgery."

The computer tool could also potentially replace the relative or next of kin. Patients could choose this option in advance of their degeneration instead of turning over the decision to a loved one. Some may see it as unburdening family or simply more accurate. There is also the segment of patients who do not have surrogates who can act on their behalf.

For Wendler and his team, the next step is a broad poll and to refine the computer model. As the head of the Unit on Vulnerable Populations in the Department of Bioethics in the NIH Clinical Center, Dave Wendler understands the need to keep his work transparent. "Developing a community-based process is essential," he says. "Poor, non-empowered groups are worried this process will be used to cut off treatments. But I am trying to identify what is the best way to make decisions for these patients."Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/06/21/computer.decides/ Article contributed by Alex Rubio

ECONOMY:
Making Whuffie David Ewalt, 04.08.10, 07:20 PM EDT Social networks change the way we look at the world and introduce new economic incentives.

Imagine entering a cocktail party full of strangers, and instantly knowing all of their names. Or meeting a business contact for the first time, and not having to exchange cards--you already know his contact information, his reputation among his peers and even his criminal record. Web-based social networks are cutting-edge technology in 2010. By the year 2020 they'll be so commonplace--and so deeply embedded in our lives--that we'll navigate them in the real world, in real time, using displays that splash details over our own field of vision. We'll even use the social capital that results from these networks as a form of currency.