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Future by Design is the title of a movie featuring the work of Jaque Fresco, a futurist who leads a non-profit educational think tank operating out of a 25-acre Research Center located in Venus, Florida.

Jaque’s background includes industrial design and human factors engineering. Some of his most impressive work focuses on the integration of technology into a comprehensive plan for a new society with the objective of delivering a higher quality of life in a balanced environment. The following are a few interesting quotes I retrieved from his organization’s website:

“The only limitations are those we impose upon ourselves”.

“Future by Design presents a bold, new direction for humanity that entails nothing less than the total redesign of our culture”.

“Future By Design is neither utopian nor Orwellian, nor does it reflect the dreams of impractical idealists. Instead, it presents attainable goals requiring only the intelligent application of what we already know”.

I have not yet seen William Gazeki’s documentary, but I have read good thinks about its technical and artistic quality as well as about the fact that this film might have gone unnoticed by most (including myself until now). Here is the trailer:

When talking about “futurists” we often think of authors, designers, consultants, organizational leaders with interdisciplinary skills advising private and public organizations on concept research, innovation, trends, market opportunities and risk management. This requires a rationally-grounded exploration of change.

The job description of a “futurist” is about developing coherent scenarios based on visions plausible enough to engage our imagination in constructive ways. As an example, product concept research can be undertaken by first understanding our current environment, focusing on a given set of relevant parameters, then making projections to define future scenarios and subsequent models. Alternatively (or in parallel), some professionals chose to first develop an unconstrained vision of the “bigger picture” to facilitate out of the box thinking.

Either way requires creative thinking, understanding how systems work, interact and evolve, thus becoming valuable tools to those working on innovative projects. As a side note, and as mentioned in some of my previous blogs, when addressing consumer product design, it pays to focus on the quality of the user experience. Note that this is fairly different from a process driven by technological or design excellence, which can suffer from delivering elegant solutions at the expense of market potential.

The following is the History Channel’s challenge to design the city of the future thinking of our society 100 years from now. The winning designs from Chicago, New York and Los Angeles were selected to compete for the National Grand Prize of The City of the Future: A Design and Engineering Challenge:

The following video shows an architectural proposal for a new city in a not so distant future:

José de Francisco Lopez. Chicago, 14 June 07

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This blog’s Long Tail:

• Minority Report’s GUI
• Sci-Fi based scenarios
• Design concepts: future cars
• QoE: immersive scenarios and experiential marketing
• CNN’s Future Summit
• Corporations present at SecondLife
• IBM: 5 innovations for the next 5 years

References:

• Future by Design
• Future by Design, The Movie
• Imdb for Future by Design
• Association of Professional Futurists
• Association for Strategic Planning
• Institute of Business Forecasting

Picture Credits:

• Future by Design Photos
• Future by Design