One of the hazards of being a futurist is being peppered regularly with the “flying car” question. Variations on this question are “where’s my ray gun?” and “when are we going to have Star Trek-style matter transporters?”

The simple answer is “when someone invents it,” but of course the answer is more complicated than that. There are thousands of things that need to happen before the toys of the future become the tools of today. Undoubtedly, the most important is vision -- the set of ideas that will guide the development of a new technology.

Recently, as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition on design entitled "Design and the Elastic Mind," the concept team at Nokia submitted their vision for how mobile communications, computing, and advances in nanotechnology would merge to create the infotech device of the future, which they dubbed "Morph." The wizards of Espoo, Finland have imagined an elegant and creative device that explores the intersection of form and function and how both of these requirements play on each other. It can be stretched, collapsed or reformed to whatever shape is needed, is self-cleaning, and runs on solar energy. Sound cool? It is. If you have five minutes, you can see a video of the Morph in action here.

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Vertical farms—urban, indoor, multi-story agricultural systems that some envision supplementing or even replacing conventional farms—have been receiving a bit of press recently, such as this CNNMoney.com article.
Farmland of the future? The innovative concept is being promoted by Dr. Dickson Despommier at Columbia University, among others.

We reported on Despommier’s idea several years back in our Technology Foresight project, and as I think about it now, they are an interesting twist on another trend we’ve been tracking for a while—the rising interest in “local food” and in reducing the carbon footprint and “food miles” of one’s food. To view our 2005 analysis of Dr. Despommier’s idea, see this research brief.

For more from Dr. Despommier, check out his vertical farming site here.

Image: Photos.com

Since I already made a "Re-Touch the Earth" pun in an earlier post, I will spare readers a "Touch the Future" gag title to this entry. Clever titles aside, touch is indeed where one future lies for interfaces -- in particular those consumers use on their favorite bits of technology, such as computers, phones, and MP3 players. Three important examples of innovation in gesture-controlled interfaces for consumer information "devices" have emerged recently. All three are similar, but taken together, they signal a phase change coming in the way people interact with information and interfaces in a spatial sense.
Image: Flickr/John_Evans

The first of the three (in order of introduction) is Jeff Han's multi-touch interface, developed for his company Perceptive Pixel and demo'd to great fanfare at last year's TED conference. The video below gives a good idea of how Han has advanced the use of touch, gesture and movement as a means of interacting with digital objects. While Han's work was mainly known to VCs and technology-watchers, Apple's iPhone brought the basic reality of multi-touch interfaces to the public at large. And Microsoft has unveiled its Surface concept, a table-based touch-controlled computer with a large display. Of course, the film Minority Report can be credited with giving laypeople a first impression of what this kind of interface might look like.

Using a fingertip to move virtual objects and, most importantly, have those objects respond as they would in physcial reality -- gliding, spinning slowly, rippling, even providing tactile feedback -- seems much more natural than the point-and-click of a mouse. After all, the Macintosh OS, and the Windows desktop metaphor that aped it, are just clunky, simplistic ways of representing the way we deal with objects on a real desktop. Han, Apple's iPhone, and Microsoft's Surface are trying to take bring more natural movement to screens all around us.

Real applications are already surfacing, such as the city of Helsinki's new tourist information display, called CityWall. It allows visitors to the Finnish capital to flick through media such as snapshots of events and festivals as if they were sorting through a pile of postcards and brochures -- in other words, as you probably would on the kitchen table or hotel bed when deciding where to go and what to see in a new place.

While touch and gestural control brings a new kind of "gee-whiz" to technologies we are familiar with, it has major implications for consumers who aren't familiar with or capable of using a text-centric interface with mechanical controls like a mouse or keyboard. More natural movement and visual metaphors can extend the reach of digital interaction. For example, the hundreds of millions of textually illiterate people whom consumer technology is just beginning to reach in the developing and underdeveloped worlds may be better able to take advantage of that technology with these new options. 

Perhaps more profoundly, the emergence of more natural touch interfaces will draw a generational line between those using consumer electronics today and those who are yet too young to do so. In other words, an infant today will probably grow up in a world where touch control is the norm. They will wonder why we old folks point and click, when they just "do".

The industrial Design Society of America (IDSA) and BusinessWeek recently announced winners of their 2006 IDEA Awards, a competition that calls for unique and innovative design across a wide range of categories, from furniture and medical products to packaging and transportation.  One winner, in the category of packaging design, caught my eye today on Core 77, a design blog: Pluma, a radical redesign of the mundane propane gas cylinder that is a fixture in Worlds 2 and 3 (developing and impoverished, respectively), where many households must use portable gas as a means of cooking and heating.

Pluma, designed by Portugal's Brandia Central for Galp Energia, a large energy company in the same country, puts the familiar clinking propane cylinder on a diet, slimming it down and dropping 50% of the weight of a typical canister. It also sports more ergonomic handles for efficient lifting. Last but not least, it's attractive, a definite improvement over its predecessors, with a softer, more streamlined skin that doesn't make as much noise as metal containers.

Why are these changes notable? One only has to look at some of the major trends that define the next 20 years in all three Worlds to see the significance of these design changes. Lighter, more manageable cylinders work for a population that is aging and may lose dexterity. They also pack more easily in small, densely populated environments, certainly a side effect of urbanization. Lastly, they appeal visually. As more inhabitants of World 2 in particular move into the middle class, and acquire middle-class tastes, the aesthetics of products will matter more to them. These cylinders may sit alongside an upgraded stove as often as they may reside on an apartment balcony next to a clothes dryer. With Pluma, the rotund cylinder may not create so many sore eyes and backs in the future.

(Image: IDSA)