Being an Optimistic Futurist Last weekend, I finished reading Octavia Butler’s dystopian sci-fi classic Parable of the Sower. The book was published in 1993 and is set in The United States in the year 2025. The country is on the verge of collapse; ravaged by extreme weather, lawlessness and economic despair. The world she describes […]
Art Credit: Brown Eyed Girls by Katty Smith My book, Reimagining Our Tomorrows: Making Sure Your Future Doesn’t SUCK, was released yesterday. Which also meant that yesterday marked the beginning of the REALLY BIG BOOK PROMOTION TOUR. To kick things off, I was invited to speak at an event on sustainable tourism at a […]
Excited to be entering the next phase of what is becoming the Optimistic Futures Project. Looking forward to hitting the road (virtually and IRL) to get this message out. Please share the news and help me build a community committed to creating better tomorrows. ************************* FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Emma Boyer 856-489-8654 x305 […]
Ah, the first few days of a new year. A time when we typically wrap up the year that has ended (thank god in this case) and turn our attention to the grand possibilities of a new circle around the sun. Traditionally, this is also the time for futurists to peer into their crystal balls […]
DATE: Nov. 30, 2016, on the road to Ft. Lauderdale FORECAST: Unseasonably warm MISSION: Attend the Companies vs. Climate Change Conference When I had first registered for the conference, way back in August, I had imagined a significantly different future than the one I was living in as I made the three-hour drive to Ft. […]
Executives at one of the world’s top entertainment companies were concerned by the way new technologies were disrupting relating business sectors. To enhance its ability to keep up with accelerating change, leadership determined it was critical to raise the overall level of foresight capacity within the organization. A six-month project identified trends most likely to […]
Five of the largest peace nonprofits in the United States were searching for new ways to re-engage the public in the nuclear disarmament debate. One of their major concerns was how to ‘translate’ the highly complex information used by experts in the field into language that could be readily accessed by the general public. A […]
The Liminus Public Health Project brought together a diverse group of public and private practitioners to explore ways to address the growing public health crisis in Canada’s Newfoundland province. As convener of the strategic foresight workshops for the project, the task was to help the group broaden their understanding of the forces creating opportunities and […]
The Center for the Future of Museums recently launched their Future Fiction Challenge to encourage innovative thinking about the role of museums in the future of learning. I was asked, along with some amazing writers and futurists, to seed the challenge with example stories. What follows is my contribution. You can read all the stories […]
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,…” The opening of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities is so often quoted, particularly to describe inflamed political discourse, that is has become almost cliche. But take a look at the rest of the passage and you discover that it perfectly expresses the […]
