I took this picture on a visit earlier this year to Ipuli, a remote, rural village in located in central Tanzania.  Ipuli, like thousands of villages, has no clean, reliable supply of drinking water.  During the dry season, which amounts to about half the year, the villagers can’t grow crops, which severely limits their food supply.  Small holes like this are the only water source for both people and their animals.

The boy in the picture is filling up a plastic bottle of muddy groundwater to take to school with him.  It’s a heartbreaking but familiar scene played every day around the world. More than 1 billion people on Earth - about one sixth of the global population - has no access to dependable, safe drinking water. Compare that to the fact that in the United States, the world’s most industrialized and sanitized nation, smart, market-savvy consumers willing pay a 1000% premium for a product that is readily available for free in their own homes, just for the convenience of drinking it out of a bottle. 

This week’s Friday Five looks at the future of water, one of the most critical issues facing humankind in the coming decade.  While some nations, such as China, will thirst under the weight of its own industrialization, other regions will literally drown from natural disasters such as tsunamis and floods. 

Virtual Water Footprint

A fabulously designed infographic poster displaying the “virtual water footprint” (the sum of the freshwater used in the production chain) of selected commodities and nations.

Choking on Growth, Part II

The second installment in this New York Times series examines China’s pollution crisis: “For three decades, water has been indispensable in sustaining the rollicking economic expansion that has made China a world power. Now, China’s galloping, often wasteful style of economic growth is pushing the country toward a water crisis. Water pollution is rampant nationwide, while water scarcity has worsened severely in north China - even as demand keeps rising everywhere.”

When the Rivers Run Dry: Water - The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century

 “Our demand for water has turned us into vampires, draining the world of its lifeblood.”  So says former New Scientist editor and author Fred Pearce in this book that outlines (in graphic detail) the looming crisis in worldwide water shortages.

Business in the World of Water - Water Scenarios to 2025

Developed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development this report details three scenarios for the future of water built around five key drivers: people, politics, policies, past legacy systems and the planet. A lengthy but in-depth read.

Message in a Bottle

From Fast Company, one the best articles I’ve read yet on the dynamics of the bottled water industry. While the article is chock full of sobering statistics (”24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi” and “If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35″), it also explores the growing debate around the future of “ethical” consumer choices.

(MB note: We’re usually not preachy on this blog, but today is the exception.  Bottled water represents a level of affluence and conspicuous consumption that is simply inexcusable.  My personal hope is that in the next 5 years bottled water drinkers will be as socially marginalized as cigarette smokers.   Because the fact of the matter is: we know better).

It’s that time of year again: when the last of the leaves have fallen from the trees, the chill in the air has settled in for the winter, the first snow graces the mountaintops… and the annual parade of snarky “how bad were futurists’ predictions this year?” articles begin to appear.  Deputy Editor of the Economist Robert Cottrell leads this year’s procession with this article, “The Future of Futurology.”

As Cottrell demonstrates, this refrain has become a favorite ritual of bored and deadline-weary journalists who are more interested in sipping eggnog and doing their holiday shopping than in conducting proper research for an article. Even the most rudimentary Google search would have shown proof that the futurists are not, in fact, extinct.  Had he sent an email to the Association of Professional Futurists I would have gladly pointed him to any of our global members working in corporate functions, consulting or academia. Ah, but this is the perennial “dead time” in the news cycle, the journalistic equivalent of summer re-runs. Editors know that we readers are too pre-occupied to pay close attention to anything beyond the headlines and so they forgo research in favor of hyperbole and sloppy reporting. In Cottrell’s case it’s a good thing spell check is automated.

Cottrell’s article represents the worst kind of cynicism, a sour-grapes approach to the future: “if we can’t predict what will happen in the future, why bother thinking about it?”  And: “anyone who tries to think about the future must be either a crackpot, a snake-oil salesman or named Faith Popcorn.”  (The ultimate irony is that Cottrell, who decries the modern utility of futurists, is listed as a speaker for hire under the “Futurists and Technology” section of the London Speakers Bureau.  Talk about biting the hand that pays your five-figure speaking fee).

Cottrell’s diatribe against futurists is a particularly malevolent form of propaganda, a social poisoning that has infected society at all levels, making us immune to long-term thinking and thus unprotected against complex threats such as climate change, terrorism or future pandemics.  This type of thinking isn’t just stupid, it’s dangerous.

Predicting the future isn’t difficult - it’s impossible. Yet just because we can’t predict what will happen doesn’t mean that we should abandon the effort. What we can know about the future is directly proportional to our capacity - as individuals, organizations and societies - to see change and to imagine possibilities.  Cottrell’s argument that we should stick to what we can see in the short-term is ridiculously absurd today, when given the scope of the challenges we face, what we most urgently need is to think consistently, creatively and rigorously about what lies far ahead. 

What can social media tell us about the future?

That was focus of a workshop Sandra and I led recently as part of IIR’s Future Trends conference, the goal of which was to explore how the social media sphere can be used as resource for identifying, monitoring and analyzing future trends.  It was an afternoon-long session so there’s too much to cover in a blog post, but what follows are some of big themes.

The social media sphere has become the primary means for disseminating information and ideas throughout society.

The social media sphere can be divided into six categories: Wikis, Blogs, Content Ranking sites (Digg, Technorati, etc), Boomarking sites (Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon, etc), Visual media (Flickr, YouTube, etc) and Social Networking sites. All are seeing exponential growth:

In 1993 there were 130 web pages; today there are over 108 million.*  There are over 2.5 billion Google searches every month. According to Technorati, there are 120,000 blogs created every day; that’s about 1.4 per second.  Japanese is the world’s number one blogging language; English is number two, followed by Chinese.  The 10^th?  Farsi.

Facebook currently gets over 60 billion page views per month, making it the 6^th most trafficked site in the U.S. Flickr is home to 3.5 million photos - 82% of which are public. Wikipedia has more than 75,000 active contributors, working on some 9 million stories in more than 250 languages. And don’t even get me started on Twitter.

The Clickstream Culture & Making the Invisible Visible

As inherently social spaces (in which users share, collaborate, create, ideate and muse) social media sites act as idea transmission systems.  The clickstream of our online lives - our Google searches, Facebook walls, del.icio.us links and blogs - are digital archives of our thoughts, ideas, emotions, behaviors, actions and desires.  Collectively they create a collage of our lives, rendered visible to the world (John Battelle calls this the Database of Intentions). In a sense, we’re making the invisible visible.

And here’s the punch line:

 If We Can See It, We Can Map It

For the first time in history we are able to see - in a real, tangible way - the physical movement of ideas throughout society.  To use a familiar metaphor, we can think of the social media sphere as a complex urban environment where blogs act as villages, bookmarking sites become neighborhoods, ranking sites are cafes (or billboards), Wikipedia is a community garden, Facebook a dense city center.  The links and trackbacks and blogrolls which connect them become highways and roads on which ideas travel. 

Because we can “see” this landscape, we can map it. The electronic exhaust of our clickstream culture allows us to see how a thought, a meme, a sentiment move from blog to Digg to delicious and beyond.

The New Physics of Information Flow

By understanding the “physics” of information flow throughout various social media platforms, we can use them to identify and track future trends. Several transmission models have emerged in recent years to map information flow, including Social Network Analysis (SNA) (mapping of human relationships), Complexity theory (a “systems” view) and epidemiological models (a popular metaphor and model, using the modeling of disease epidemics to understand how ideas spread by identifying their source and mapping “infection” rates).

A final model draws from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point which attempts to explain how ‘social epidemics’ spread via three types of people: connectors, mavens and salesmen.  Categorizing social media platforms in the same way provides  an interesting lens through understand how - and why - ideas spread in the social media sphere:

Connectors : social networking sites & bookmarking sites, which connect large (and often diverse) numbers of people;

Mavens: blogs & wikis, which are knowledge hubs on topic areas;

Salesmen: content ranking sites & media sites, which “promote” an idea and provide a context for its popularity.

NEXT UP: Social Media and Foresight ….

*(that, BTW, is mind-blowing if you think about it. I’m rather unsurprised by the number of web pages today, but I admit that it’s almost incomprehensible to think that at one time there were ONLY 130 web pages in the world. Total. Wow.)

note: THANK YOU to our colleagues at Pinkegreen Design for designing the above Social Media Map; the online version will be available in a few weeks.

There’s no doubt that the phrase “think outside the box” is the most overused term in management today.  Yet sometimes a box is just what’s needed.  This week’s Friday Five looks at projects that are designed with simplicity - and the box - in mind:

 Data Center in a Box

The box may be big but Sun Microsystem’s Project Blackbox is taking the concept of portable computing to a whole new level. It’s a data-center-in-a-box: as many as 250 servers inside a standard 20-foot shipping container provide up to seven terabytes of active memory and more than two petabytes of disk storage - at 1/100^th the cost of a traditional corporate data center.  Rather than building out increasing expensive server farms in high-rent offices, Sun is betting that its customers will choose a portable Blackbox which can deployed anywhere there’s a power cable and an Internet connection. In addition to saving corporations millions in power costs, Blackbox could also be useful for other organizations that need mobile data centers such as humanitarian relief efforts and the military.   

Hospital in a Box

Produced by Global Medical Systems, the Hospital in a Box is a portable, off-grid emergency medical system that can be dropped by helicopter to allow doctors to carry out common surgeries in remote or natural-disaster stricken areas.  The self-contained unit weighs about 150 lbs, can be run by solar power and contains anesthetic equipment, a defibrillator, a burns unit, surgical equipment and a built-in operating table.

For Sale (in a box)

This Trendhunter photo gallery showcases 16 innovations in the most ubiquitous box in the world - the vending machine.  From mobile phones to soccer balls to charity donations, these big boxes deliver the goods.  Notable: the Bike Dispenser (available in Amsterdam); Japan’s charity vending machine, and my personal favorite: the Art-o-Mat: retired cigarette dispensing machines filled with pocket-size art pieces.

The History of the Box

Now for a look at the box itself: if you’ve never thought of truck drivers as masters of innovation, think again. Fifty years ago a trucker by the name of Malcom McLean devised the standardized shipping container - and in doing so ushered in one of the first waves of globalization. This great read,  THE BOX: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the Economy Bigger by Mark Levinson combines an economist’s view with a novel-writer’s tone to explore one of the most important innovations of the 20^th century. 

School in a Box

To ensure the continuation of children’s education in the first 72 hours of an emergency, UNICEF’s School-in-a-Box contains classroom supplies for up to 80 students.  The culturally neutral materials include writing utensils, notebooks, rulers, counting blocks and posters and are and are often supplemented by locally purchased products, such as books in local languages, toys, games and musical instruments.

One of my favorite possessions as a child was a world globe. I spent hours spinning it, stopping it randomly with a finger tip and then imagining what each far flung place would look like. I wondered what it smelled like. I wanted to know what and where people ate and where they played. Simply put, I wanted to know what it was like to live there. Back then it never occurred to me that the art and science of cartography would make it possible to create collaborative maps of individuals’ emotions.

All of us unconsciously tag places with the emotions we experienced while there. Not only that but we re-experience those same emotions when we revisit the place and sometimes when we simply think of it. Mapping feelings is a continuation of the making the invisible visible trend. However, mapping something as intimate as your feelings, emotional cartography, strikes me as a very different expression of this trend. When we make our feelings visible, we reveal intimate bits of ourselves for all to see. What this means for the future, I’m not sure. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on emotional cartography.

Mood Jam is a platform to explore the colors people associate with their moods. You can record your moods and describe them by selecting a color from the palette that best represents your mood and then you can use the text box to describe your mood. There is even a Google gadget for mood jams so you can display your mood on your homepage and share it with your friends.

Map My London is sponsored by the Museum of London. The map is a repository of peoples’ memories attached to specific geographic locations all around London. The memories are sorted into six categories: love/loss, fate/coincidence, beauty/horror, joy/struggle, friendship/solitude and what else. When I clicked on the love/loss tab red dots popped up all over London. When I moused over the dots memories like this popped up.

Too nervous to kiss after our second date. We stood with our hands in our pockets and at first desperately and then with increasing enthusiasm talked about Mister Men. For an hour. I missed the last train, but I got my first kiss.

Bio Mapping San Francisco is one of the most recent projects by Christian Nold. His maps explore the emotional relationship people have with their local environment. Volunteers strap on a bio-mapping device, a Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) device that is GPS enabled. The bio-mapping device records the wearer’s emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. The resulting maps reveal the participants’ unseen emotional responses to their environment. The maps make visible locations where communities feel stressed and excited.

We Feel Fine is another masterpiece by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. When you launch the site after a few moments you see a message that says, “Looking for feeling from people in the last few hours”. After a few more moments your screen is filled with what seems to be millions of multi-colored particles careening through space, each represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. Any particle can be clicked revealing the feeling or photograph it contains. The particles self-organize along a number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metric and Mounds. I’ve spent more time than I will admit playing with this site.

The FeelMap is a Google Maps Mash Up of We Feel Fine data. You can explore the worlds’ feelings two ways. Storyteller mode that lets you watch as emotions are bubbled across the screen or Marker Overload, which is a display of map pins with data.

The five websites I’ve mentioned represent five ways to map our emotions. If you know of more please share. I’m very interested in tracking the emerging practice of emotional cartography.

Does the world seem a little more crowded these days? If so, it might be because on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 a subtle but significant tipping point occurred: for the first time in human history, the world’s population became more urban than rural. On that day say researchers, the global urban population exceeded that of the global rural population by 125,849 people. The after-shocks of this seismic shift are just starting to reverberate in cities throughout the world. This week’s Friday Five features a collection of links about how and where we might live in this urban future.

The Smart City: New Songdo

A new key to the city: imagine a city in which a your house key can be used to not only unlock your front door, but also to pay for the subway, see a movie, borrow a free public bicycle or pay for a meal. A city where sensors and computers are built into houses, streets and office buildings that share data, where citizens enjoy wireless access to all of their digital content anywhere in the city. This is dream of New Songdo City, being built 40 miles outside of Seoul, South Korea. Billed as the world’s first ubiquitous city or “U-City” when it’s completed in 2014 it will be home to an estimated 65,000 people. The developers have spared no expense in promoting this vision: the website for the project reads like the trailer for a major motion picture, complete with its own soundtrack. How futuristic is New Songdo? It even has its own Wikipedia entry, though it hasn’t been built yet.

The Eco-City: Dongtan

China is building new cities almost as fast as it does cars. As it does, it’s tweaking the source code of the typical urban habitat. Dongtan, an “eco-city” planned near Shanghai, is one such example. According to the developer, Dongtan will “produce its own energy from wind, solar, bio-fuel and recycled city waste. Clean technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells will power public transport. A network of cycle and footpaths will help the city achieve close to zero vehicle emissions. Farmland within the Dongtan site will use organic farming methods to grow food.” Set it open in time for the Expo 2010, Dongtan is expected to be home to over a half-million residents by 2040.

The People-less City: The World Without Us

What about a city without people? Alan’s Weisman’s The World Without Us sets the stage for an alternative future that explores what would happen to the earth if humans suddenly disappeared. The New York Times described this as a “pop-science ghost story, in which the whole earth is the haunted house.” It’s the perfect description - without humans, how long would it take nature to reclaim its territory? (Answer: not as long as you’d think).

The Virtual City: Virtual World Population Explosion

If you think Beijing, Mumbai and Lagos are growing fast, consider virtual cities: South Korea’s Cyworld has a reported population of 20 million, while the tween virtual world StarDoll has over 10 million. Check out this cheat sheet of the major virtual world platforms and their current populations.

The Mega City: 192021.org

By 2030, two of every three people will live in an urban world, creating one of the most defining trends of the 21^st century: the rise of the megacity. In 1995 there were 14 cities with populations over 10 million; in 2015 there will be 21. 19.20.21 is a new project by Richard Saul Wurman (author and founder of the TED conferences) to collect, organize and package information on population’s effect regarding urban and business planning and its impact on consumers around the world by focusing on 19 cities with populations over 20 million in the 21^st century.

Hawai’i is perhaps most well-known for its warm tropical breezes, endless beaches and laid-back lifestyle. Soon, however, the aloha state may be known for something vastly more valuable: it’s innovative style of planning for the future. In recent months Hawai’i has become a hotbed of futures thinking;in particular, three home-grown projects showcase Hawaii’s potential to make foresight the state’s most lucrative export.

I had the pleasure of speaking at one such event: the first annual Hawai’i Futures Summit, which took place October 6-8. Designed by Richard (Kaipo) Lum, CEO of Vision Foresight Strategy Inc., the Summit was a brain camp for business and community leaders to “catalyze productive change in Hawai’i.” Attendees looking some relaxing down-time from the office at the luxurious Ihihani Resort were undoubtedly disappointed: this was a hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves and deep-dive-into-the-future event that tackled everything from the future of environmental waste to chaos theory.

Waikiki under waterAnother effort to envision Hawai’i’s futureis the populous-based Hawai’i 2050 Sustainability Summit, which unveiled last month a draft plan to chart the long-term future of the state. While promoting economic diversification and affordable housing were on the list of issues, sowere environmentalpreservation and cultural restoration, increasingly common themes in Hawai’i as the state continues to grapple with issues of political and cultural sovereignty.

And last but not least, some “future-shock therapy” from the team atJim Dator’sHawai’i Research Center for Futures Studies. Graduate students Jake Dunagan and Stuart Candy have been making waves with their project FoundFutures. The project is exploring four future scenarios for Honolulu’s Chinatown by creating and distributing art, artifacts, images, performances and other media that embody possible worlds to come, such as the poster above that depicts the struggle of the islands to recuperate after a future bird flu pandemic.