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.

I’ve had my head down all day focused on the task of putting the finishing touches on the Trend Spotting in the Age of Social Media presentation for IIR’s Future Trends 2007 Conference. While searching for the perfect example of a social networking website, (realizing all the while a perfect example doesn’t exist, users determine what perfect is for them), I ran across Ancestry.com, one of the largest online genealogy search sites. Although I don’t think it is the quintessential social networking site it certainlyoffers a novel twist on the idea.

Ancestry.com is now offering DNA testing to help users find relatives. For $200.00 USD you can order a DNA test kit, return your cheek swab and receive an online report showing your DNA Haplogroup. Your results can then be compared to Ancestry.com’s DNA database which aims to house50,000 genetic profiles within six months.

According to the Financial Times Ancestry.com is creating networking groups that will allow haplogroups to share their common interests. Those with a common surname could also form a group and pool their DNA resources to work out how they are related. This kind of testing will make it possible to identify distant relatives that you could not find any other way.

Now we have one more thing we can do with our genome, network with it.

One the best things about Pop!Tech is the richly diverse community of people it brings together. This year was no exception, so we decided to devote this week’s “FringeHog Friday Five” toa few of theamazing women we met at Pop!Tech 2007:

Dr. Victoria Hale

Dr. Victoria Hale could be described in many ways: a renegade, an entrepreneur, an activist, a scientist. She is the Founder of One World Health, the first US-based non-profit pharmaceutical company. No, that wasn’t a typo: funded not by shareholders or venture capitalists but by philanthropic organizations and a network of research collaborators, One World Health (OWH) develops drugs for people with neglected diseases in the developing world, what Hale calls “diseases of poverty.”Most recentlyOWH developed paromomycin, an antibiotic used to treat Kala-azar, the world’s second most deadly parasitic disease following malaria.?

Katrin Verclas

There aren’t many people who love mobile phones as much as Katrin Verclas. But then again, where most people look at a cell phone and see, well, a phone - Katrin sees a revolutionary tool for social change. Ask her how mobile phones are being used to change the world, and she ticks off an ever-growing list: to ensure impartial elections, free political prisoners, stop human trafficking, distribute HIV/AIDS information and help farmers in the developing world get their crops to market. In her day-job she directs NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network; she also coordinates the global “mobilist” practitioner network MobileActive.org.?

Stacey Aldrich

Stacey Aldrich has spent her career advocating for one of the arguably most significant, yet often undervalued, social institutions in America - the public library. In the era of Wikipedia, libraries may seem like an endangered species, but she’s convinced that public libraries can not only respond to change, but become vanguards of the information age. A librarian and a futurist, Aldrich is the last one to call attention to herself, but thankfully others have, including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently appointed her Deputy State Librarian of the California State Library. It’s no small job: with a budget rivaling the size of many private-sector companies (nearly $90 million), Aldrich is poised to bring the public library system into the future.

Zainab Salbi

Zainab Salbi believes there are two sides to war: victims and survivors. The first we hear about on the news: about guns, bullets, bombs and the number of people killed. Survivors, especially women survivors, are often invisible; their stories of keeping life going in the midst of war are rarely told. Yet it is with the survivors of war that the future depends. Drawing on her own experience growing up as a survivor of war under Saddam Hussein, Salib created Women for Women International, a humanitarian organization that has provided financial and emotional support to tens of thousands of women to deal with the aftermath of conflict.?

Dr. Sarah Otterstrom

Ecologists often have a gift for seeing the future, and Sarah Otterstrom is no exception. Looking out at a field in Nicaragua, she doesn’t see abandoned pasture land, but rather a future forest, lush with previously endangered trees and a thriving population of native animal species. Tocreate that future forest, Otterstrom created Paso Pacifico, a non-profit organization whose aim is to build wildlife corridors along the western slope of Central America by supporting private landowners and small-scale farmers in sustainable land use and conservation activities. Paso Pacifico’s “Return to Forest” project has planted 850 acres of native tropical dry forest trees which will restore the land, curb greenhouse gas emissions and provide job opportunities to the local villagers.

Carl Honorgot on stage at Pop!Tech and spoke to my soul. Yes, I’m well aware that I’m being hyperbolic, and that it was more likely a case of the right talk at the right time. After all, his message to “slow down” isn’t exactly rocket science; my mother has been saying the same thing for years. Yet Pop!Tech was the next-to-last stop for me in a five-week personal travelpalooza. I’ve been on the road for 4+ days a week for over a month; in the course of ten days I’d been through Amsterdam, Hawai’i and finally, Camden, Maine. Maybe it was his sincerity, his humor, or perhaps it was just the slightest hint of the sexy accent, but at last I was finally ready to listen. Aside from the message to eat slower, cut out unnecessary trips and trim my calendar, what I heard Honorsay was: start to blog slow.

Let me be clear: I love - make that LOVE - the fact that I attend many of the same conferences as two of my favorite bloggers, Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno Giussani. These “twinbloggers” sit tirelessly in the back of conference rooms and crank out crystal clear renditions of the speaker’s presentations - in real time. Ten minutes after a session is over, while the rest of us are still catching our breath, they’ve posted an online record for the world to see (Ethan, while at Pop!Tech, wrote over 20,000 words in three days). Moreover, I’m grateful for the fact that they attend many more conferences than me, and so I reap the benefits of their parallel-processing brains; reading either one of their blogs is like getting a masters degree in global current affairs.

But.

Yes, there’s a but. Here’s the thing: I want to liveblog. I aspire to liveblog. But the truth is, I’m not all that good at it. I’m a futurist and as such I’m hard-wired to think before I type, to process things, to connect the dots and consider the systemic implications of any newly presented idea. Moreover, I invariably find that the most interesting people at any given conference are NOT the ones on stage, and so I instinctively spend my time meeting people and sniffing out the stories no one else is paying attention to. It’s also why I spend an inordinate amount of time talking to cab drivers, but that’s another story.

And as much as I admire Ethan and Bruno and the cadre of other livebloggers, I’m continually troubled by the sense of personal inadequacy and guilt (thanks, Mom, for the Catholic upbringing) that their presence initiates. The truth is: I can’t type as fast, I can’t think as fast, hell, I can’t LISTEN as fast as these guys. It’s a little like being at the local ice rink, casually skating around on a Sunday afternoon, and Michelle Kwan shows up and starts throwing out triple solchows.

Which brings me back to Carl Honor?, whose message I internalized as: “it’s ok to blog slowly.” If it takes me a few days (or a week) to let the ideas marinate and get my thoughts out, then so be it. I don’t know if the result will be any better, but at the very least I hope I will stop suffering from idea indigestion. And so, in my Pop!Tech haze, I make myself a promise to live less frenetically. I will practice deep breathing. I will do yoga. I will not get on airplanes before 6am. And from now on, I will slow blog. Thanks, Carl.

Like many of you I tuned into CSI NY last night to see if the show lived up to the buzz. After watching the show, I think it did. The collaboration between Anthony Zuiker, creator of the CSI franchise, and Sibley Verbeck’s Electric Sheep Company demonstrated the power of cross-platform entertainment. The narrative began in “first life” with a murder that needed to be solved and seamlessly melded into the virtual world of Second Life. Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) created an avatar and went in world to chase the killer. Throughout the episode characters moved in and out of first life and second life. Several scenes in the show played like mini-tutorials for those not familiar with the virtual world platform. The story ended in a cliffhanger and from now until the conclusion which airs in February CSI fans and Second Life residents can affect the story outcome by working to solve the crime in Second Life.

The Electric Sheep Company created a new client for this venture. They assumed thatCSI fans didn’t necessarily knowanything about virtual worlds or Second Life so they created a client that immediately immersed fansin CSI content.?

This collaboration is a proof of concept for cross-platform programming. If it goes well, we’ll see entertainment created across the television, online, mobile and gaming platforms.?

Anthony Zuiker thinks within five years all entertainment will be cross-platform.

I just returned from Pop Tech! and over the next few days I’ll post my ruminations about the talks I heard and the conversations I had while there. Before I do, I want to give a special shout out to two guys from Microsoft, Michael Aday and Ryan Calafato.

My lap top tried to die first thing Friday morning. Michael and Ryan happened to be seated behind me in the backstage screening room. As the blue screen of death appeared Ryan leaned forward and asked if he could help. To make a very looong story short, both Michael and Ryan spent the better part of Friday working to breathe life back into my lap top. While performing CPR on my computer they missed several phenomenal talks by Sheila Kennedy, Cary Fowler, Robert Boroffice and Chris Luebkeman, and they did it even though it WASN’T a software problem. It was a hardware issue. In the end, they resuscitated my lap top for which I can’t thank them enough. ?

Corporations like Microsoft can be big and impersonal. Michael and Ryan reminded me that Microsoft is also made up of individuals who take pride in their work and want to do what they can to provide a good customer experience. That’s what they did at Pop Tech! They spent their conference time helping a Microsoft customer.In my book that makes them Rock Stars.

?

And the countdown begins: only 3 days until the start of this year’s Pop!Tech, the annual “social innovation network” gathering in Camden, Maine. The tagline of this year’s conference is “The Human Impact” - a theme that’s appropriately broad enough to cover the eclectic array of scheduled speakers and performers, including marine ecologist Enric Sala, leading Islamic thinker and Grand Mufti of Bosnia Mustapha Ceric, legendary toy designer Caleb Chung and health care entrepreneur Victoria Hale, founder of the world’s first non-profit drug company.?

IMHO,one of the coolest things about Pop!Tech is that it relentlessly reinvents itselfeach year with a host of new sessions and experiences. This year is no different: special Wednesday pre-conferenceevents include an oceangraphic expedition, an introduction to the Slow Food movement and a session on “mobile empowerment.”?

Can’t make it Camden this week? No problem: in addition to the entire event being simulcast live, a host of global bloggers will be live-blogging in seven languages: English, Portuguese, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Farsi and Kiswahili.

Genes are becoming the legos of life, a super-size carton of biological toys that can be endlessly combined, cut, spliced and reengineered.The average human has about 25,000 genes - that’s a lot of A, C,T & G’s floating around. Scientists are still clueless about what to do with most of them, so here are afew ideas for putting your spare genome to good use:

Map It

The Personal Genome

Can a personal genome sequence get a creative commons license? To protect yourself, should you create a Nom de Ome, or a pseudonym, for your genome? These are the some of the questions pondered on this introspective and provocative blog, The Personal Genome. Author Jason Bobe works with George Church’s Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School, which has recruited 10 volunteers to make their complete genomic data (genome sequences, medical records and health profiles) freely available to the public, in the hopes of creating an open-source public database for genetic research.

Hack It

DNA2.0

Supply list for hacking a genome: one Linux-supercomputer, a good map, a case of Red Bull, and oh yeah, some genes. For the latter, check out dna2.0.com, one of the many retail “genome shops” that have sprouted up to support the booming business of synthetic biology. For about $2 a base pair, you can order any number of standard genes, or custom-design your own using the company’s Gene Designer tool.

Write its autobiography

A Life Decoded

In Craig Venter’s new book “A Life Decoded” the self-proclaimed winner of the race to map the human genome describes his journey of personal cartography: the quest to map his own genome. Due in stores October 18.

Make Music

http://www.toddbarton.com/

One night musician Tod Barton downloaded a string of DNA data sequence from the International Genome Project website and entered a couple of lines from chromosome 1 into his Midi sequencer. The result: a rhythmic pattern to which he mapped string, vocal and clarinet sounds. It may not be a genomic symphony (yet) but the piece, which he calls Genome 1, which was featured at the Smithsonian Institute.

Make Art

http://www.dna11.com/

Wondering what to hang on that empty wall behind your couch? Tired of poster art and reprintsNow even the most artistically challenged can tap into their inner Van Gogh with the help of DNA11.com. Simply send the company a sample of your genome using a Q-tip-like cheek swab; they extract some DNA to create a unique genetic fingerprint. Your DNA is then stained with a fluorescent dye, photographed and printed on canvas as a Giclee fine art piece. The result is a completely unique piece of art that is oh-so-you.

FringeHog Friday Five

Synthetic Biology: Creating Lego’s of Life?

Most of us are familiar with Lego’s, the brightly colored plastic interchangeable bricks that serve as platforms to build models. Lego’s interchangeability is one of its most potent features. You can mix your Jedi Starfighter^TM with Hyperdrive Booster Ring bricks and your Skeleton Tower bricks to create something completely unique. The key is interchangeability.?

What if DNA could be interchanged like Lego bricks and instead of creating unique plastic models these Lego’s of life could be used to design and construct new biological entities? This isn’t a “what if”.Synthetic biology is an emerging discipline that aims to do just that, design and construct new biological entities.?

One of the heavy hitters in this emerging field is Jay Keasling. He’s using synthetic biology to create inexpensive, effective, anti-malarial drugs. His work is funded in part by the Gates Foundation. No one can describe this project better than Dr. Keasling and if you want to find out more listen to his talk during a recent PARC Forum.

Another advocate of synthetic biology is Dr Drew Endy.Endy sees synthetic biology as a way to re-create biology from an engineering perspective. Endy says, “Synthetic biology means leveraging natural structures as a way of building things on the molecular scale”. One of Endy’sgoals is to create shortcuts so that non-biologists can build things cheaper, faster and easier. This desire led him to Tom Knight, an MIT professorwho had the idea to use pieces of DNA like Lego bricks and coined the term biobricks to describe standard interchangeable genetic components.

Endy is furthering his goal of making it faster, easier and cheaper to build new biological entities by creating a public catalog, The Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Many students who compete in the International Genetically Engineered Machine, an undergraduate synthetic Biology competition begin their projects with biobricks in this registry and when the competition is over they add their new parts to the registry.

Synthetic biology brings with it both promise and peril. If it becomes fast, easy and cheap to design and construct benevolent biological entities the same will hold true for malicious biological entities. Synthetic biologists are keenly aware of the risks this technology poses. They also know that the genie is out of the bottle. Endy would like to see synthetic biology follow the path of software and go open-source. His vision is two pronged. Give free access to the DNA for biobricks and educate both hobbyist and professionals alike so they are better equipped to recognize dangerous applications of the technology. Like all disruptive technologies, synthetic biology will push the envelopeof existing social, political and legal systems to respond to the change it will catalyze.

FringeHog Friday Five (links to more info about Synthetic Biology)

Comic Adventures in Synthetic Biology

Sometimes the easiest way to communicate complex ideas is with humor. Nature published a first ever comic: “Adventures in Synthetic Biology”, by Drew Endy, Isadora Deese and the MIT Synthetic Biology Working Group, and illustrated by Chuck Wadey in their special edition on synthetic biology.?

Here’s a video of Drew Endy defining synthetic biology.?

Another Youtube video of Brown University’s IGEM Team talking IGEM.

Life 2.0 Excellent article on synthetic biology from the Economist

OpenWetWare is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology and biological engineering.

Picking up where I left off yesterday….

I was pleased to see a grassroots example of Designers R Us in action. Animatronics Workshop was the most interesting exhibit in the future of education section. It is collaborative, generative, open-source and DIY the four values that define Designers R Us.?

Animatronics Workshop was the brain child ofPaul and Catherine Diets, a couple of parents who wanted to provide kids with “a chance to experience a significant interdisciplinary project that requires the tight integration of both artistic and technical capabilities”. The workshop, designed as an extracurricular activity, began in the fall of 2006 with 14 children ages 11 -14. Check out a video of their first show called Perspectives, based on the familiar Sunday talk show format.?

Transforming ideas into objects… Up until now 3D printers have been gigantic, extremely expensive machines making them unsuitable for the consumer market. This is about to change. The Desktop Factory 3D printer will hit the market costing $4,995.00 making it within reach of businesses, schools and individuals.?

What I enjoyed was being able to see the machine up close; it reminded me of a microwave, and to hold some of the objects that had been “printed”. They felt substantial, like they would hold up to an average amount of wear and tear. The Desktop Factory uses standard 3D file formats and it has a maximum build volume of 5×5x5 inches. Instead of a laser it uses a halogen light bulb and the feed stock is nylon based power similar to what is used in makeup.?

Think of how cool it would be to print a 3D version of your virtual world objects, your avatar, toys you design! There is a waiting list for the machine which is expected to be available in early 2008. I want one.