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Wired magazine continues its co-exploration of the possible futures together with its readers. This time the subject is the future of health spas – “What will replace mud baths and seaweed soaks? Will robots administer massages? Will avocado and yogurt facial scrubs be replaced by gray goo?”

But these, and other questions are to be answered not by the Wired staff, but by all the readers; they can submit their own ideas and opinions, bring already visible signals and manifestations of the future, and vote for the ones brought by others.

So far, I submitted only one idea, about Immersive Multimedia Cocoons; I used the example of Visual Piano, a wonderful installation we saw at the Glow festival here in Eindhoven.

Next week MadLab, “an emergent art center’ in Eindhoven, will be running a… hackathon (!), apparently a new sport of our days. Sounds terrific – just imagine a possibility to hack for 24 hours non-stop! And if you didn’t hear before such cult words as IoT, Arduino or Pachube – that’s your chance! Do visit the website or the Facebook page to learn more and register for the event (it’s event FREE!)

This is one of slides from an excellent presentation by Patrick Copeland, head of innovation at Google; although the very title of the presentation is not particularly innovative (it goes as… Innovation at Google), the story is interesting, and also well presented. I can’t say that any of the points he talks about is also particularly new – i.e., “try to figure out what people *really* want as early as possible”, “test, iterate, get feedback, rinse, repeat”, “base you innovations on data rather than intuition” etc. But it is a very appealing story nevertheless, especially because it reveals, even if slightly, the inner kitchen of innovation in Google. In fact, I personally found more useful a couple of slides in the beginning, about different modes of innovation; I am currently preparing my own slides, about ‘people-driven’ innovation, and could use his slides as an example (of thinking, that is).

I started this retro-futuristic series with the work by Mark Weaver, and I would like to also finish it for today with another nice work by him, called Make Something Cool Every Day.

There is a lot of interesting comments about these ‘forecasts’ and ‘predictions’ at the NYT’s site – both by the invited ‘debaters’ and participating public. Worth reading, but less entertaining for sure.

The last of the NYT’s forecasters, Willis Whitney, was a chemist and for many years a head of the General Electrics’ Research Lab; I can feel this spirit, of more opportunistic and creative exploration in his views about the futures. He argues that we will vote not for an incremental improvements of what we know already, but rather support less predictable and more chaotic (=’bold”) experimentation. I like the ‘joy of electrically supplied home entertainment’ (I am engaged in it in this very moment, in fact). Better education, moratorium on wars, and, most importantly, pure research.

It’s more a contemplating than predicting remark; ‘I wish it would happened this way, but it wont’, alas’. He predicts further specialization, ever growing specialization, and frightened by it. Are we? Should we?

As a professional anthropologist, he finds it important to comment on the possible developments of human species, but these comments are incredibly vague: “The innate nature of our grand-grand-children will be the same as ours [... but] their reactions will be modified according to the direction in which our present civilization develops.” Which is what?

He was more specific when he argued after the World War II that anti-Semitism has ‘racial origin’ and that Jews live by a ‘dual code’ (??).

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Michael Pupin, or rather Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin how he was officially called, was a completely unknown a figure for me. His surname sounds Slavic, and indeed, he was of Serbian origin, although born in what is now Hungary (and back in his time was a part of Austr-Hungarian Empire. Again, a prominent physicist and inventor, he should talk about technological developments (including, for example, long-distance communication, promoted by his inventions). But no, he instead talks about ‘industrial democracy’ and more equal distribution of wealth among people.

Arthur Compton was another famous physicist from the US, who received his Noble Prize in 1927 for the discovery of the effect of light particles scattering in the mater named after him. As a man working with the matters electronic, he envisaged eventual harnessing of the atomic power, and an inevitable penetration of all sort of electronic gadgets, impacting various sides of our lives. As a result, ‘the whole Earth will be one great neighborhood’ (a harbinger of the McLuhan’s Global Village). Again, he naively assumed that we will soon figure out all the physical problems, and focus on cosmology. He foresaw the raise of China (but didn’t think that for many decades Japan will be the second largest economy, not Germany).

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Surprisingly for myself, I was most impressed by the ideas about the futures by Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company and a (now increasingly hated) father of ‘mass production’. He is often portrayed as an arrogant dumb-ass allowing “any colour as long as it is black”. In reality he was a much more sophisticated thinker (and practitioner, of course), which is only confirmed by his views here.

“Perhaps our most progressive step will be the discovery that we have not made so much progress as the chatter of the times would suggest” – you rarely expect such humbleness from the tycoons of today. Benefiting massively from technology and science, he was rather skeptical about their role to improve our lives in the future (at least, technology and science alone). Whether a father of allegedly dehumanizing mass production or not, his words may well be the motto for the coming century of ‘humanizing technologies’: – “The newest thing in the world is the human being. And the greatest changes are to be looked for in him”.

Robert Andrews Millikan was an American physicist awarded with the Nobel Prize for the measurement of the charge on the electron and the studies of photoelectric effect. He of course believes in science, and scientific method as the key driver of development (he even believes that it will be applied to the government’s conduct too. Yet blindly foresees no further significant developments in physics, his native territory (‘we’ve learned it all’ sort of thinking), and instead bets on biology.