Welcome, you have just entered a global circus of
dreams from people of every age and every continent,
part of the Steelcase 100th anniversary. Glad to make
your acquaintance, I'm John Hockenberry an author
and journalist and something of a ringmaster
for these proceedings.
Together we are going to gather the dreams
of what the next century might look and feel like.
From the whimsy of 100 children to the brilliance
of 100 great minds from enterprise, these dreams
are just the beginning. Let their words,
their dreams, be your springboard.
We come to understand that there is struggle in every dream.
Imagine what would happen if you started respecting your own wishes of how to spend your time.
I am proposing performance-based consumption. And an economy based on values not markets, driven by innovation but respecting the environment.
My dream for the future is a working world that is more inclusive of all people irrespective of age and ability.
Being inspired is not a luxury. It is a right.
The one big challenge of future urban systems is the smart use of resources. The holistic use of cradle-to-cradle systems for production and consumption will be imperative.
Knowledge is the most powerful weapon to fight geographical, social and economic adversity.
...I dream that we don’t erode or lose the rich cultural diversity that exists around the globe - that it continues to inspire creativity and innovation...
As creators we must demand of ourselves to invent new ways to live by rather than inventing new places within which to live.
Forget fanciful, futuristic forecasts. Give more people the freedom to dream – and the future will take care of itself.
Creative confidence—the natural human ability to come up with new approaches to solve a problem and the courage to try them out—is one of our most precious resources.
Our vision is for humanity to dream anew.
In 100 years, we simply won’t work for companies that don’t represent our core personal values, no matter how much they pay us.
Over the next 100 years, we have an opportunity to shape a new story, a positive vision of what it means to live sustainably in our world.
We have to rethink how we utilize workers in our advanced economy.
I see a world full of magic and stories. Artists, technologists and storytellers will come together to engender empathy!
In the future, Architecture will be defined by its materiality and its intelligence. The role of the Architect will morph into a choreographer of infinite spaces in one space.
My dream is to see that we succeed in improving many more lives and make India 100 percent literate.
We need to ensure that the seed of education is planted deep into the thinking of mankind and its diverse societies.
The next 100 years give us an opportunity to bring back in alignment material well-being and personal/social well being.
Creative collaboration between experts and everyone else is the key to cultural vitality in the future.
As it escapes the screen, the potential of the digital enters into the realm of architecture and an entirely different wealth of knowledge.
I am a big fan of “homeostasis in nature.”
Gender, race, sexuality, ideology, and faith are just going to be unimportant characteristics that will not define ourselves.
I dream of [...] a transformation in collective consciousness resulting in a peaceful, just, sustainable, healthy, and joyful world.
For me, simple pleasures are what most make life worth living.
...the parks, trails, streets, open spaces, and green infrastructure that we are building now will profoundly affect how the world lives and works in the future.
The power of the people is far greater than that of people in power.
In 100 years, design will be at the center of things, a benign and necessary force in all facets of human experience.
Hard work, perseverance and creativity will play a key role in success – and Michigan’s workforce and innovative companies will continue to lead the way in the century to come.
In place of a global solution, instead of locating a constructed mono-cultural life world, the concept for a better world has to be reflected in very different scales.
The power of computing technologies is directly measured by how computing extends human expertise; knowledge, learning, communication and discovery.
Everyday citizens can be producers and distributors of information, which can then travel the world in an instant. Social media can amplify and extend the voices of individual.
The future of work and the richness of life is not tied to a desk.
In 100 years, what we require from a workplace will change beyond our recognition.
Let’s create a world that will facilitate health and happiness in the future. Most importantly, let us behave more responsibly today so that our dreams of tomorrow can be realized.
Almost all of last century’s developments placed a high, heedless demand on energy. Almost all of next century’s developments need to work to mitigate that demand.
One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it.
One hundred years from now, the world will go about its work unhampered by systems of inequality.
I love change. Change is important. With change comes innovation.
We live in a spirited system laced by connectivity with each other and the planet. What we do has a ripple effect. Make yours humane.
In the future, there will be virtual spaces for the most energetic and imaginative people to come together and change the world.
With a commitment to health care for all, nations will be pushed by economic necessity to adopt preventive medicine that is based on scientific research and best practices.
Imagine an Africa with women leading it into the future. They would not just be left to pick up the pieces after war. They would be integral to averting conflict in the first place.
We think having Google at our disposal has changed how we think about knowledge retention, but imagine when that knowledge is literally integrated into your being.
We are revolutionaries, evolutionaries, and solutionaries finding the power within ourselves to make the world anew.
In the future, I hope people will enjoy and work with the light and color the world has to offer; go out on a limb and turn dreams and ideas into reality.
By fusing technology with telepathy, we could simultaneously look to the past and the future to generate solutions to current problems.
I envision a world where we have transcended the need for spatial limitations. Personal expression will ebb and flow with the rhythm of our lives and creation will be truly mobile.
Human intelligence itself is about establishing an inner dialog between what is and what could be, between actualities and possibilities.
Tomorrow we will be what today we are becoming. In reality we are what we’re not: we are what we want to become. This happens at the individual and collective level.
In 2012, isn’t the whole world up in arms because they want to be Meaningful Participants? Why wait 100 years?
The global world is tied together in unprecedented ways where the collective “we” is no longer a company, culture, or nation, but a very interconnected, shared world.
One hundred years in the future, our world would at last follow the Buddhist mantra “to live our lives to increase the happiness and decrease the suffering of all sentient beings.”
Learn how to celebrate our ecological footprint instead of worrying about minimizing it...how to be beneficial and not "less bad."
Education is the key to transform society and make it progress. We can´t build a better world made up of the dreams of millions of human beings who have no access to education.
Curiosity and its cousins Exploration, Learning, and Investigation have been at the center of human evolution and history. They will play an even greater role going forward.
No one can predict the future with any certainty. But I look forward to the day when the United States of America gets its mojo back—and it's not 100 years away, either.
Imagine workplaces where employees are encouraged to take risks and failure is not viewed as a negative but is seen as an opportunity to learn and grow.
We are in the infancy of civilization…In a hundred years, we will watch mankind mature into adulthood.
“If businesses celebrate cultures, people will fall in love with the companies they work for. Diversity will be made tangible and ignite creative thinking.”
The wasteful “version 2.0” mentality that incessantly forces obsolescence of “product” will give way to refreshable “platforms” that simply allow for future modification and enhancement.
I believe that “being human” will transcend our current notions to include powers of creation that remain unacknowledged today.
Let’s reinvent participative democracy for the 21st Century.
The workplace of tomorrow will regenerate each one of us, our families and our communities, sharing access to precious resources and to the sustaining qualities of nature.
Can multidisciplinary industry leaders and competitors collaborate and harness their expertise to eliminate healthcare-associated infections and other hospital-acquired conditions?
We don’t just eat the apple. We grow a tree that will feed generations to come.
We must prepare the next generation of informed global citizens who address global challenges. I believe that the key to creating this change is education.
I dream of the power of individuals, whether alone or in small groups, to unleash their creative spirits, their imagination, and their talents to develop a wide range of innovation.
Imagine. Companies will produce embryos for implantation made from engineered DNA which will yield physically and mentally enhanced, disease-resistant people.
Any major goals for the future will be difficult to achieve unless we increasingly view the world through the lens of emerging complex systems and long time frames.
Technology will advance to humans the ability to touch objects to gain the physical, emotional and historical experience behind each thing.
We dream of a world where children are raised as global citizens and people are not dying from hunger as people are socially aware and emotionally concerned for the welfare of others.
The single largest technology driver in terms of time conservation (and one of the most challenging as well) will be the development and the deployment of teleportation.
Dreams unlock not just a better version of something, dreams unlock the possibility of addition, subtraction, opposites and void. Dreams unlock a space in which ideas are formed.
The future should be what you think is what you get—by means of advanced technology and innovative material, we can directly translate our abstract ideas into products.
Life is no longer about working to make money to buy "stuff." It is about making the best decisions possible together to make systems work better, so we can enjoy our time together.
Think of it: a world without borderlines or flags and where geography no longer defines lifespan or lifestyle; a world as a blank slate.
Just imagine the brain power when people from all the different continents can come together and collaborate to find solutions to the biggest problems of our day.
Detroit’s future is promising. We are blessed with a wealth of talented young people, committed residents and unlimited potential.
In 2112…Work and life have come to be valued as a holistic understanding of what it means to be creatures that value connectivity, accomplishment, creativity, and beauty.
No doubt you’ve heard the old business cliché that hope is not a strategy. I disagree. Hope is a sustainable value that inspires us to see the world as a source of meaning.
In 100 years, machines may manage the economy, not economists or politicians.
In this historical moment we are living in, of obvious model change, my wish is that we learn to swim through the excess of information and to dive into the essence of things.
Meet the Dreamers
We will the future by dreaming it. We get out
of
the way of our dreams by giving them to others,
encouraging them to become viral.
Join us, help us dream big about the next 100 years.
The wasteful “version 2.0” mentality that incessantly forces obsolescence of “product” will give way to refreshable “platforms” that simply allow for future modification and enhancement.
The Old Testament prophet Amos once said, “I am no prophet, nor am I the son of a prophet; I am but a herdsman and a grower of sycamore trees.” Similarly, I must share that I am no futurist, nor am I a futurist’s son; I am but a business writer and a provoker of new ideas. In providing my dream of what might or should unfold over the next 100 years, I seek to avoid two missteps: (1) any pessimistic prognostication that might unduly flow from thinking left-to-right from the truly dire economic circumstances in which we presently find ourselves in the year of 2012, and (2) any hyper-optimism that typically characterizes such future-projecting exercises. And let me note that nothing I outline below has any likelihood of emerging should global capitalism collapse — whether from the lack of monetary integrity in our financial markets, the failure of businesses to truly innovate and create new economic value, the public sector excessively draining wealth from the value-creating private sector, or the militant actions of tyrants or terrorists.
Here then are my hopes for the future. Energy production: the current pursuit of nebulous “sustainability” gives way to practical cost/benefit decision-making in terms of energy consumption; government guesswork and misguided subsidies do not lead to replacing Big Oil with Big Wind or Big Sun (littering our landscapes and waterscapes), but some portfolio of nano-energy (or other-energy) sources emerge from market competition. Food nutrition: grocery stores will stop selling individually packaged goods and instead charge explicitly for total maximum calories consumed (per week, per month, or per year) on a subscription basis — and the supply of foodstuffs is delivered via more efficient (and permanent) packaging systems. Consumer durables: any good not used all the time (by any one party) will be time-shared, resulting in less equipment, fewer cars, and fewer toys being required to support work, travel, and play. Devices will “keep score;” for example, dishwashers will track who loaded or unloaded the machine most recently or more frequently. Consumer electronics: the wasteful “version 2.0” mentality that incessantly forces obsolescence of “product” will give way to refreshable “platforms” that simply allow for future modification and enhancement; built-to-be-replaced wares are themselves replaced by built-to-be-refreshed approaches. Higher education: fewer students matriculate; those that do, do not pay semester-by-semester tuition, but rather pay only upon actual graduation. Drop-out rates plunge as universities have to actually guide real learning. Health care: hospitals no longer operate as inefficient non-profit institutions, and third-party health insurance is no more. Individuals contract directly with for-profit health care providers which no longer charge for drugs and treatments (for sickness), but only for demonstrated outcomes (of wellness).
Bottom-line: The future will see less buying and selling of goods and services—in the form of things made and activities performed—more buying and selling of experiences and transformations—in the form of membership time and personal change.
James H. Gilmore wrote The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage (Harvard Business School Press, 1999), the highly influential book that spawned worldwide attention in experience design and innovation. Tom Peters rightly called it “a brilliant, absolutely original book”; 800-CEO-Read named it one of the “100 Best Business Books of All Time." In 2011, The Experience Economy: Updated Edition was released. IDEO’s Tom Kelley called it “one of the best business books of the twentieth century, now renewed for the challenges of the twenty-first.”
Gilmore’s other book, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), outlines how authenticity must be managed as a distinct business discipline if any innovation is to find a receptive audience. In a March 2008 cover story, TIME magazine recognized the significance of Gilmore’s insights on this subject and named it one of “Ten ideas that are changing the world.”
Gilmore is co-founder of Strategic Horizons LLP and a Batten Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia. He is also a Visiting Lecturer in Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California, where he teaches a course in cultural hermeneutics.