Here’s the Jun issue of M/I/S/C which will be coming out in newsstand in a week. This will now be available in 22 countries outside of US, Canada and UK. We’re so happy with this issue and I always thinks the ‘Future’ idea is always an exciting one. As Terri Guillemets puts it “The past can't see you, but the future is listening.” I always find it fascinating when I see a magazine cover featuring something about the future – technology, economics, design or anything.
I have been speaking with many senior executives recently on future and strategic foresights. They were so excited when I showed them how we bring strategic foresights into their planning process and how we can show tangible futures.
Our strategic foresights approach is both rigor and unique and very tangible. It is the opposite of some dream up scenarios and random visions by armchair self-claimed futurist. Let me remember the future is not an end state. Tomorrow will someday be today, which will fade into yesterday. As our world moves through this unyielding passage of time, how people act in our world will determine just which of many possible futures we end up with and how our imaginations, actions and open-mindedness can shape a very different and more positive future. Given how little we know about it today.
What do we know about the future and what’s considered useful information to help us understand the future? The “easy” and only certain answer is simply that the future will be both dramatically different and yet pretty similar. Not only we don’t know about the future, we know how little we know about the human mind and human behavior. As the proverb says: “Every 100 years, all new people.” Now every 20 years I suppose.
This new issues you will no longer find me writing every single piece of the content, I have invited numerous contributors that enriched the content but without losing a voice. This issue we are also featuring a number of Royal College of Art / Imperial College graduate students and their work-in-progress as well as a number of future oriented innovative ideas from the MIT Global Challenge all are working towards solving some of the world’s most wicked problems. For the special feature, I will let you find out yourself, it is a piece that I collaborated with Mat Lincez and Ricky Thomas which I hope you will like.
I am in London the next two weeks and will be working on a client’s site but thinking about the next issue - the “Customer Experience” issue. I have no ideas what I want to do exactly on this one. I think I will figure out in the course of the next few days or hours. And for the cover, will be casting for a cover girl and shoot the next cover in London next week.
