My old archaeology professor, John Witthoft, shared a bit of wisdom I have not forgotten in the nearly 30 years since I took his classes. He said, “ask a small, simple question, and you will find a great complex of things to explore.” He knew that too many of us undergraduates would reach for huge [...]
“Because everything in her home is waterproof, the housewife of 2000 can do her daily cleaning with a hose”
Paleo Future is a blog that explores past ideas about the future. Its authors mine old books and magazines, movies, and literature for what we used to think the future would be like. It’s a visually-rich and [...]
Environmental scanning is a technique in which almost anything goes. Scanning simply means exploring the universe of information available to discover deeper insights about what is going on and what is changing in the world. It’s the core technique of foresight, and there is no substitute. But too often, people’s environmental scanning is too [...]
Nokia’s Jan Chipchase travels the world, exploring often subtle cues in societies, and taking pictures of them. His blog Future Perfect, is a marvel to look at. It often is not clearly meaningful at first glance, but there’s always something to ponder. He doesn’t explain everything, you have to do your own thinking, but he [...]
