Futurist Edie Weiner on New Transformations, Part 3

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 are posting them as a series each day this week. 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 her take on the final seven of those. Click here for the first three.

Cyberspace. What we have now is just a tiny tip of the iceberg. We’re going to be developing whole, virtual immersion technology possibilities. In Asia, young people are already spending a lot of time in virtual worlds and gaming environments.When it comes to education, through virtual reality gaming technology, you could become a white blood corpuscle and you could swim through the bloodstream fighting off all kinds of invading bacteria and viruses and learn more about immunity in 10 minutes having fun than any brilliant professor could teach you in 10 hours. And you can live in ancient civilization, you don’t need to take anthropology or archaeology. So I think what we’re going to see over the next 10 years is the slow death of education and the rapid rise of learning, and those are two completely different things. Virtual reality is tricking the brain into believing that it’s somewhere else doing something else in real time. So if you actually believe that you own a Ferrari and you're racing it through the streets of Monte Carlo, are you? Philosophically, the answer could very well be yes, and if that’s the case, what does it mean for Ferrari? What does it mean for the travel bureau of Monte Carlo? What does it mean for the airlines? There are new industries that are going to grow up as the old ones get challenged and die.

Time-space. This is the leveraging of time and space. Time is becoming so economically valuable at this point. The definition of a luxury is, what is in short supply that you want more of. And when you ask people that, their answer is time. So that’s going to become an important business in so many ways.

Design space. Design is becoming one of the most important differentiators to be leveraged. And design thinking is becoming a whole new area of study and will be employed in so many aspects of the world of the future, not just physical design. Everything is about design. Everything we do, see, touch, smell, know, experience, it’s all about design. And a lot of solutions to the problems we have will come out of design thinking.

Green-to-blue space. People understand what “green” means, but there’s actually a spectrum of doing green, being green, and then blue. Doing green is now the price of just doing business--you’re supposed to recycle, for example. Being green means you leave the slightest possible negative footprint, whether that’s carbon use or water or whatever. That’s difficult to do for existing businesses, it’s easier for startups. But the really exciting stuff is coming out of blue, which is putting back more than was there for the first place. There’s an entrepreneur I met a few years back who takes blighted, polluted, abandoned industrial properties in inner-city environments and plants sunflower seeds. He creates beautiful sunflower fields. The real estate prices go up around these properties, he employs people to cut the sunflowers and sell them in markets. And so he’s very blue, he’s putting back a lot more than there was.

Storage space. First of all, we’re running out of room to put all of our junk.The private storage space is one of the fastest growing businesses ever. And we have to think about how we’re going to store data--we’re moving into a world where the amount of data is staggering. Some companies are looking at holographic, 3D chips to store data. We have to figure out how we’re going to store the electronic waste on the planet. Electronics is the most polluting industry we’ve ever had—we throw out perfectly good products because a new model is out. We also have to figure out how we’re going to store nuclear waste.

Play space. Play is going to become increasingly important over the next five to 10 years. We know how important it is for learning, and for our own wellbeing and health. We know how important it is to solving the biggest problems that we face. “Gameification,” using game mechanics, is going to be very big. This is basically applying game theory mechanics to things that are not fun, or shouldn’t be. So for example, whether it’s brain surgery, rescuing people from an earthquake, figuring out a math problem or solving how we’re going to get water to someplace. It can all be done through gameification.

Inter-space. This is basically using the idea of the Internet for matter. So you’re going to hear more about the “matter net.” You’ve heard about things Amazon delivering packages by drones. It involves moving matter around, as opposed to just information, and all of the connectedness that’s taking place. It's the Internet of things--everything will eventually be talking to everything and we won’t even be involved in it.