I was eight years old when the original Star Wars film hit the theaters. Begged my parents to take me. Waited in line. Loved it. Wanted a light sabre. Didn’t understand why they hadn’t been invented yet.

I also wanted a Landspeeder, which presumably utilized some kind of anti-gravity. And while there’s no anti-gravity propulsion still, there are increasingly powerful fans. And they can be used to power hovercraft!

Here are two awesome hoverbikes.

First, this one from Aerofex in California:

Read the story on the Aerofex bike here.

Finally, this one from Australian inventor Chris Malloy:Click on the image above (courtesy of GizMag.com) to read the full story and see the great photo gallery.

A lot of development left to do here, apparently, but great design and innovation.

Three final words: I want one.

According to Jim Dator, Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, to be a good futurist (and I quote Dator in italics), you need:

•  the widest possible knowledge of the history and present condition of as many cultures and civilizations as possible; you must know more than one culture, and thus more than one language, intimately,

• the widest possible knowledge of all aspects of all the social sciences,

• the widest possible knowledge of current and emerging developments in the natural sciences, and their emerging sub disciplines and transdisciplines, for example, evolutionary systems theory, chaos theory, and brain science,

• the widest possible familiarity with developments in engineering (especially electronics and genetics), architecture, and space sciences,

• the widest possible familiarity with philosophy, ethics, morals, and religions, and certainly the ethical discourse of as many different traditions as possible,

• the widest possible familiarity with law and planning,

• an active awareness of esthetics and the esthetic element in all aspects of life; a continuing experience of esthetic expression in some, or preferably many, modes,

• creativity, imagination, the willingness to think new thoughts, to make unmade connections, to be ridiculed, laughed at, and to laugh at yourself,

• the ability to synthesize, combine, invent, create,

• the willingness to be politically active, to test out new ideas on yourself first and while trying actually to create a better world, or some portion of it,

• the ability to try to anticipate the consequences of actions before you act, but also the willingness to risk failure and to learn from mistakes and criticism–indeed to seek out and provoke criticism–but to keep trying to do better, and constantly to relearn what ‘better’ might be,

• insatiable curiosity, unbounded compassion, incurable optimism, and an unquenchable sense of humor and delight in the absurd.

It’s an engaging (and daunting) list of interdisciplinary knowledge and open mindsets to master and develop, but I would also argue that these requirements are not just for the obscure profession of future studies. Today, as technology and globalization compress time and space, we all need to be doing at least some of this stuff. We all need to be futurists.

The future is happening now. And now. And now.

So build a tough reading list and start reading. Make connections across disciplines and cultures. Dream up an idea and prototype it. Test your assumptions. Let your curiosity run away with you.

Oh, and don’t forget to laugh a little.

The legendary product development and design firm IDEO has beta-launched OpenIDEO, a “crowdsourcing” site for innovative ideas for a variety of contemporary challenges. The concept is fairly simple: challenges are posted, ideas submitted, and a panel facilitates refinement and ultimate selection of a winning concept. You can join for free and participate in several different ways, from submitting ideas to helping in refining the ideas of others.

The challenges posted range from sustainability to education to medicine. If you’re creative and have ideas, it’s a fabulous way to interface with IDEO and a network of people like you. If you’re simply looking for inspiration, it’s a great place to browse about (see especially the Field Notes section).

The best part, to quote from the OpenIDEO site: “All concepts generated are shareable, remix-able and reusable by anyone – in a similar way to Creative Commons. The hope is that some of these concepts will become reality outside of OpenIDEO.com.”

Here’s their video introduction:

Exciting stuff, really. I see in OpenIDEO an intriguing model for all kinds of technological and social development projects. In a way, it’s a kind of democracy of ideas that neither completely dilutes the vision of the individual creator nor completely eschews the value of a rigorous vetting process. And because the concepts are shareable and resuseable, there’s the potential here to cultivate and coalesce creative problem-solving around big challenges and thus stimulate even more, even better solutions for our present (and future) challenges.

Great Labor Day weekend with friends and family in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Inspired by the landscape and hiking in the Sandia Mountains. Thinking about “machines of loving grace,” I sketched up a couple of techno-eco ideas, and here’s one (below). It’s an automated farming machine that uses suspended, interchangeable hexagonal pots, put into hexagonal pods of seven. These pods are suspended around a column, and a computer automates the watering and other processes. It’s solar-powered and reclaims some of its water.

At harvest time, just lower the pods and pick, or access the produce from the interior and drop it down an internal ramp.

Here’s the sketch:

Actually, it would be preferable if the machine did everything, but we’ll have to get to that. Lots of technical details to work out on this idea, but it’s an idea, a sketch. And good things start there.

A fascinating week of exploration for me. Key topics: facial recognition, situated technologies and the slippery privacy slope. Thinking about the future, again, is always about trajectories, convergences and the social, economic and cultural implications thereof. So here are three reflections and interesting stuff to check out and think about:

1. Facial Recognition: Immersive Labs.

Thanks to Immersive Labs’ CEO Jason Sosa for putting me and a couple of my colleagues together with COO Jill Miller for a product demo of their CARA adaptive facial detection application. The CARA system basically makes digital display screens in public spaces more intelligent and thus targeted by employing cameras and Immersive’s facial detection and content delivery technology. Through this tech, digital displays and billboards are able to detect who is looking at a display, whether they’re male or female, old or young; how long they look at the display; and presumably how engaged they are in the content of the display. The goal, of course, is first to be able to track, analyze and profile viewers of a specific display in a specific place, then to be able to deliver targeted content/advertising to that display, in order to better connect with viewers and achieve communication objectives.

The secret sauce here involves sophisticated algorithms that detect facial topography and accurately profile faces demographically. It’s amazing stuff that could be coming soon to every device with a camera and a display (tablets, phones, etc.); it will of course capture data that can be housed, analyzed and connected to other data. Right now, it’s fairly simple, but projecting it forward, facial recognition could connect people in real space with their virtual space activities, using big data analytics to profile and target further. It could also become sophisticated enough to note emotional nuances in faces and target messages based on those nuances. As a professional marketer working with targeted display, the opportunities here are intriguing to me short-term, but the way the twin technologies of facial recognition and intelligent display overlap with big data and the “internet of things,” that’s extremely interesting. The implications of the big data-enhanced internet of things are so fundamental as to literally change our world, and provide quite a few challenges, and I probably need to do a separate blog post on that convergence alone. Thanks again Jason and Jill, awesome stuff!

2. Situated Technologies

Great series of thought pieces here from the Center for Virtual Architecture, The Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), and the Architectural League of New York. These .pdf pamphlets take a look at some of the trends, issues and implications of a variety of technological and cultural areas. The most recent piece, Modulated Cities: Networked Spaces, Reconstituted Subjects, is a point and counterpoint between Helen Nissenbaum, an NYU professor of media, and Kazys Varnelis, a Columbia professor of “networked architecture.” As one might guess, the content here is a bit academic, so if you haven’t read cultural theorists like Lyotard, Habermas or Deleuze, you might miss some of the references. But it’s pretty up to date and accessible.

Anyway, key points for me here: 1) physical space (architecture and city planning) is becoming more and more intelligent and networked; 2) the physical world is beginning to model itself on the digital world (i.e, the relative dominance of the metaphors has reversed); and 3) there are tremendous social implications for both online and offline privacy, as the physical world becomes more digital, tech and data gets connected and integrated and values and social attitudes cultivated in the digital world are carried over into the material world.

Our built environment is trending toward “situated technology:” smart, networked, data-enabled space in which humans are potentially always already public, plugged-in, targeted and communicating, mediated by a screen or not. It’s also possible that it all (every thing) might converge into one network, which raises issues of power, access and control that we haven’t fully addressed yet as a species: if the world is a network of smart technology, all on one platform, who is the admin?

3. The Slippery Privacy Slope

Finally, in my undergraduate-level Strategic Management course this week, I took students through a facilitated strategic analysis of Yahoo! Yahoo! has been in the business press quite a bit because of its new CEO, Marissa Mayer. After we looked at Yahoo!’s business model, the business environment, competition, etc., the Yahoo! discussion, among my students anyway, really came down to: advertising, content, big data, and how Yahoo! leverages these assets. I raised the issue of privacy as an ethical cross-check to tempting potential uses of consumer data, but interestingly, the class had little concern about the company’s future use of data.

That’s right, even as consumers, they were not very concerned about threats to their privacy. The class’ attitude was, essentially: “Well, as soon as you get on the internet, you know you’re giving up your data.”

Through the lines, really, what I read from the class discussion was the collapse of data, permission and privacy, which Nissenbaum and Varnelis actually discuss in the piece I refer to in #2 above. The surrender of data is increasingly equated with the surrender of all privacy (thus, the slippery slope). It’s a capitulation that seems somewhat shocking — but many consumers see it as the exchange that in many ways it is. Consumers have more or less consciously traded their privacy for the benefits of technology, such as the free Facebook account.

Now, this one group of students is by no means a representative sample of the general population. Regardless, based on other casual data points, it seems we may be slipping down the privacy slope, and the old boundaries are likely to be pushed in the next year or two. As another example, this afternoon, I was online and saw ads on a news site that turned out to be targeted to me (via LinkedIn advertising) based on information in my LinkedIn profile. Hmmm.

We live in very interesting times, right?