Tech globe with outstretched fingers
About designing the future

Smart Thoughts

Introduction / Forward


In fraught times, it might seem crazy to even think about designing the future.

Yet history shows these are the best times to offer hope. After World War II, few would have bet on the scenario in which we live today, in which no one has popped a nuclear weapon in anger for more than 70 years. This could change tomorrow. But when a species has made its own luck for tens of thousands of years, at some point you must consider the nature of its achievement.

In the face of making-the-rubble-bounce extermination it’s almost miraculous that, nearing zero hour, we invented game theory with its revolutionary and hard empirical evidence that the search for win-win is what works. Here we still are. Maybe tough times, historically, are when unexpected thinking is most required.

“The best way to predict your future is to create it,” is credited all the way back to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. So with great hope and no little audacity we share with you these initial visions. Please design some of your own.

You can’t have better futures without better dreams.

Smart Thoughts

The Guide core questions we offered our “Smart Thoughts” essayists were:

  • The human future as a design space – what does that mean to you?
  • Who blows your mind who has actually succeeded in designing the human future? Who would you want to talk to? And why?
  • If you could create The Guide, what would be in it? What would be important elements to be included?
  • If you could create a box for us to dream in, what would it be like?
  • What does “world building” have to do with treating the future as a design space?
  • What does “design thinking” have to do with treating the future as a design space?
  • What have you been waiting for?