THE FUTURE LABORATORY

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Something worth going to: Trend Briefing by Future Laboratory

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DATE : Wednesday 9th March 2011
VENUE : Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, London, NW1 8EH
PRICE : £495 per seat

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A FEW EXTRACTS FROM THEIR PROGRAM:

At the spring/summer Trend Briefing in 2010 we named the decade the Turbulent Teens, predicting how it would be a period of highs, lows and revolution. Now, we reveal the decade’s first revolution – the anarconomy – a shift from passive acceptance to affirmative, anarchic collaboration in politics, culture, business, retail and leisure, even in how we generate ideas for these industries. Against this backdrop, open-source, open-book policies are set to become the norm in the new punkonomic era.

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Instead of withholding information, the new winners are sharing their information and knowledge first. Instead of Betapreneurs trying things out, today’s change-makers are laying down new rules and producing manifestos that describe and define the new ways in which they want the world to work. More than anything, however, disruption has become their new mantra, dissonance their new way to market. We look at the tools, techniques and ‘unlearning habits’ you will need to acquire to survive in the Transformation Economy.

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‘Not everybody wants revolution,’ says The Future Laboratory co-founder Martin Raymond. ‘For many, the recession has been a stress too far. Hence, we are witnessing the rise of Revivalist thinking, a nostalgic yearning for all things past and comforting. Folk themes, folklore, folk fashions and the re-appearance of furniture and products with a quasi-nostalgic theme and a rose-tinted nostalgic viewpoint are all becoming more prominent.’

OUR PLANET'S FUTURE DEPENDS ON SUSTAINABLE DESIGN

Our planet cannot hold its waste forever. We have to rethink the way we use materials and the way we dispose waste. Sustainability - studying the ways nature solves problems will provide a lot of solutions.

‘If you want to build a fleet of ships you don’t sit around talking about carpentry, but you rather need to set people souls ablaze with visions of exploring distant shores’

HESSE

Goodbye, small farmhouse and my native country. I leave you as a young man leaves his mother: he knows it is time for him to leave her, and he knows, too, he can never leave her completely, even though he wants to.

SMALL TOWN

Here the true life of wandering begins, the life I love, wandering without any specific direction, taking it easy in sunlight, the life of a vagabond wholly free.

We wanderers are very much cunning - we develop those feelings which are impossible to fulfill; and the love which actually should belong to a woman, we lightly scatter among small towns and mountains, lakes and valleys, children by the side of the road, beggars on the bridge, cows in the pasture, birds and butterflies. We separate love from its object, love alone is enough for us, in the same way that, in wandering, we don’t look for a goal, we only look for the happiness of wandering, only the wandering.

RECTORY

I feel life trembling within me, in my tongue, on the soles of my feet, in my desire or my suffering, I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms, I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if something I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die.