Futurist Edie Weiner on New Transformations, Part 2

We recently spoke with prominent futurist Edie Weiner, president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown. She laid out for us some of her fascinating insights about the five most important social shifts she predicts will take place over the coming years. We will be posting them as a series each day this week. Yesterday, we shared her thoughts on the first shift having to do with the economy. The second shift she discussed with us involves 10 new value propositions that Edie says will become increasingly important. Today, we're sharing Edie's take on the first three.

This is the second point I'd like to talk about. There are 10 new value propositions that we are seeing ahead. They are all about the altered dimensionality of space in one way or another. We're talking about inner space, outer space, micro-space, cyber-space, time-space, design space, green-to-blue space, storage space, play space and inter-space.

Inner space is about mapping the brain and figuring out what makes living things tick. It's plants, it's animals, it's the earth, but we'll focus for a moment on the human brain. There has been so much brain imaging over the past couple of decades and it's increasing at an exponential rate. Some of the things that we're finding out are very important.

We know that every individual has a unique brain. We have been deprived in school of an understanding about our senses because we've been taught that there are five senses. But the fact is that we also have a sense of motion, a sense of height, a sense of time, a sense of balance, a sense of direction, and these are all senses that we don't study, we're not taught about. And what's also important is that you can never repeat the same experience twice, the way that our senses interact with each other, everything we see and do is unique to that particular experience.

So we really have tens of thousands of senses. And with 30,000 messages coming at us every day, how something gets our attention--the science of attention--is extremely important. You're going to hear more about this in terms of marketing, as they map our brains, trying to figure out what will really attach itself to our attention.

Next, we’ll move on to outer space. The exploration of deep space is going to give us an understanding of the light spectrum that is going to change so much of our conception of frequencies and vibrations and the implications of that are going to be profound. And space tourism will become more prevalent—Richard Branson's already preparing for this.

Then in terms of micro-space, there’s an acronym, BAANGFUEL. It stands for bits, atoms, antimatter, neurons, genes, frequencies, and ultra and infraspectral energy and light. The next five to 10 years will deliver us combinations and re-combinations of those things. So the materials that we will have and create over the next decade will far exceed anything we ever thought we could do with materials science.

A lot of us have heard of 3D printing, but there’s also 4D printing, which means that over time, whatever it is that you’ve printed can change. You might add water, or maybe it’s just a matter of the item changing over time. So you can print something very small and send it up into space and it can become a huge part of the space station. Now they’re talking about knitting in printing, which is where there are many robotic arms printing at the same time, fusing everything that they’re printing. So there’s potentially the ability to print human parts, to print food, to print houses, to print anything.