By Sérgio Brodsky The futurist brand is a bit of a blur. Those outside the community don’t understand the Futures Thinking discipline and those inside have a hard time to explain what they do and how value is added from their craft. The future may be bright, but the present is a pickle. This is a fascinating challenge and the reason why I – as a recently anointed brand futurist – came to deliver a workshop at the 5th Asia Pacific Futures Network, themed under ASEAN 2030, which focused on culture, technology and security. And, when it comes to culture,…
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Paid Essay Writing Service – How to Choose the Best OneThere are lots of paid article writing services available to choose 1ws – first writing service from, and finding the most useful one isn’t as simple as it may look. Even though a number of them assert that they have been more professional than many others, they are all pretty much exactly the same. In actuality, you can find only several great ones and the ones really should not be used for granted.It seems that most people still think that the world wide web is where everything is to be…
By Dr. Patricia Kelly The New Testament quote (Matthew 22:21) I adapted in this title contains Christ’s pragmatic advice about how to serve both God, the spiritual and Caesar, the pragmatic. I use Gaia in Lovelock’s terms (2016) as a single, interconnected living system composed of all living and non-living organisms. The quote seemed an appropriate metaphor for my experience working in engineering education. I am not an engineer. My background is Humanities, language, media and cultural studies, but I have now worked in and researched engineering education for over twenty years. This short reflection aims to support educators who…
When in April 2019 Notre-Dam in Paris was burning it was a very tragic and horrible incident to watch for me as a cosmopolitan. However, I also observed, as a resident in the Middle East, that despite breaking news coverage over the Western media, there were some other media channels that treated the incident not that much important because they and their audiences were remote both geographically and culturally from that context. They simply didn’t care. That made me wonder what humans value across the world over space-time and also if we should anticipate some significant change in this…
By Sérgio Brodsky Futurists and brand strategists have more in common than one might think. Whilst the former focuses on projecting unimaginable scenarios across the most varied contexts, the latter focuses on communicating a business promise that is expected to be kept. Despite having different lines of work, both, projections and promises exist to design the future. And, the use of strategic narratives is what unites both practitioners. In the case of brand strategists, strategic narratives can be deployed to communicate the very essence of a brand via visual and verbal identities or articulate a moment in time via advertising…
By Umar Sheraz, Awais Nazir & Saba Nazir About an year ago, the Journal of Futures Studies (JFS) blog was created as an experiment to explore the utility and facilitation that a blog could provide to an academic journal. This article reflects on the journey of the JFS blog, almost an year after its inception. Introduction The Journal of Futures Studies is a global watering hole of foresight practitioners and is an established journal with an impact factor and is indexed in the ISI web of Science. About an year ago,the idea of a blog was presented to the Journal…
By Peter van der Wel In my presentations, I often tell the audience about the very plausible possibility that in the future some of us (or even most of us) will become very much older, maybe even immortal. I tell them, for example, about the escape velocity theory. According to this theory, immortality will come within our reach when biotechnology develops faster than the aging process itself. This means that the people who lived are the first generation who are no longer sure that they will die. This train of thought always raises many questions among those present. For example,…
After the withdrawal of Trump administration from the Iran nuclear deal the tension has been rising in the Middle East and in particular the Persian Gulf and we are approaching the armed conflict stage. We can apply game theory to explore the possible equilibrium points between the US and Iran. We need to consider a range of current strategies on both sides, the payoffs of each player or opponent, and determine the strategic choices for them. In this framework we assume that there are two key players namely the USA and Iran. Available strategies for the USA are: Negotiation, Sanction,…
By Rohit Talwar, Steve Wells, and Alexandra Whittington Introduction and Background How are businesses, organizations, and communities preparing for a range of possible energy futures? What can be done to push the boundaries and reinvent the range of possibilities? This article describes the outcomes from the application of a new scenario methodology (Radical Scenario Development) to the topic of energy. Radical Scenario Development was designed for and facilitated by Fast Future at a workshop held at the Finland Futures Research Conference in Tampere, Finland in June 2018. The Radical Scenario Development method highlights social learning and creativity while the scenarios…
By Richard MacGeorge There’s a problem looming. Infrastructure: the road, water, telecom and electricity networks that serve our homes; the ports, airports and train services that handle goods and whisk us from one place to another are at risk of losing their jobs, or only being offered part-time work. That seems like a preposterous statement to make, so lets’ use the electricity sector to explore the idea. Through the eyes of investors Electricity utility companies have long been a good bet for investors. Pension funds and insurance companies especially like long term investments and steady returns. What could be better…