Smart thoughts: Designing the future

I was recently asked to share my thoughts on the future as a design space in a short essay for the launch of The Guide Project. The goal of the Guide Project is to connect the communities of practice designing the future. The Guide’s aim is to “accelerate novel, audacious, ways to improve - and then create - human futures in which we can thrive.”

The Guide Project is an inititative run out of the ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Needless to say I was honored to contribute a small piece of writing to this impressive project.

“Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
— Douglas Adams (1987)

I wrote this short essay based on the prompt: The human future as a design space – what does that mean to you?

This essay appears along 29 other contributors in the section entitled “Smart Thoughts about designing the future”. I approached this this essay by considering a preferable future space designed to leverage technology in the near-ish distance of 20-35 years and what that might look like from a personal-to-physical space interactions. This future scenario also takes the assumption that we are well into the Fourth Industrial Revolution brought on by the Third Age of Computing. Putting aside all of the potential challenges and factors that might militate against this preferable future, I presented the following exercises in thought.

Online Article: Design Your Life-Long-Learning Places For an Augmented You

Written by Dr. Sean Leahy, with editorial support from Dr. Joel Garreau