Hasta La Ideas

As a media sponsor of 2012’s DMI Design/Management conference, Core77 Design Directory is proud to present an exclusive conference preview.

What does the future hold? Designers are said to hold a bit of this magical future dust in their work, but at the upcoming annual DMI conference, the speakers and attendees will grapple with the looming question of What’s Next? now that design has earned a seat at the proverbial table and garnered the respect of business leaders.

Edie Weiner, a futurist and one of the most influential practitioners of social, technological, political and economic intelligence-gathering has built a robust business consulting with everyone from the U.S. Congress to Fortune 500 companies on the facts and trends of the present and how they might impact the future. Here, she speaks with Core77 on how design will effect every aspect of business in the future, the importance of competencies over skills and how 3D Printing will disrupt our relationship with products as we know it.

DMI Design/Management Conference, Annual 37
NEW AMBITION: DELIVERING THE PROMISE OF DESIGN

October 23-25, 2012
Museum of Jewish Heritage
New York City, USA

Core77: Thanks for speaking with us, Edie. Can you share a bit of background on what it means to be a futurist and the the work of your firm, Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.?

Edie Weiner: We study the future and we have been studying the future for over 40 years. I’ve had my own firm since 1977, and the way we do it is we do a lot of reading. We read a lot of things on a regular basis. It used to be all print publications, but now, of course, many of those have migrated over to online. So we read a lot of carefully vetted online publications, print publications, plus a lot of additional sources that come along. And we look at social, economic, political, technological, demographic and environmental content.

We abstract somewhere between 60-100 articles every month—they can deal with anything so long as they meet our criteria about somehow affecting the future. Every three months we stop the world and we save all we know about the future with the prior three months’ worth of readings and we develop six new themes every quarter. We present those six themes at a quarterly meeting here in New York, which many of our clients and a lot of other interesting invited guests attend. We generate probably a thousand article abstracts a year and 24 new themes a year.

In more recent years, have you seen that things are shifting more rapidly within those 3-month cycles?

There’s no question about it. In fact, one of our recent papers covered something that I’m going to talk about at the DMI conference, which is a concept that we call templosion, the implosion of time on an escalating basis so that even the biggest things now take very small amounts of time.

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