Back to the F**kture

It’s November 2019, and an associate of Scott Perugini Kelly suggests that he adds a World Health Organization pandemic preparedness paper to a brief he’s currently readying for the head of the department. But Kelly isn’t at all convinced, as he tells me on the latest Back to the Fu**ture podcast with Sally Washington. At the time, he muses, the subject seemed too fantastical, too far removed from the politics of the everyday.   Fast forward a few years and this strategic foresight director and his team monitor anomalous and extra-ordinary signals of change as a matter of course.   But for governments and ministers who have more immediate, everyday concerns to juggle with, these initiatives tend to sit in what one UK aide humorously described to me as Boris-in-tray content: something to be read when the former UK prime minister needed to be amused and castigate civil servants for wasting public money.  A few months later, the world – and Australia with its 19,265 Covid deaths – became a changed place.   And while Australian fatalities were a lot fewer in number due to the country’s stringent lockdown measures, they were still high enough for Kelly and Washington (in New Zealand, where the Covid response was lauded) to wonder how different these outcomes could have been if, as Kelly says, ‘we [had taken] a more long-term view on the future and how we might, by more proactive and strategic interventions, make it different’. Tune in now. 

  Design and experience strategy isn’t a top-down process for the privileged few, but a collaborative engagement along a narrative arc of surprise and transformation that changes audience and designer alike, according to The Experience Book authors Adam Scott and Dave Waddell, interviewed by The Future Laboratory’s co-founder Martin Raymond. The age of experience, as we learn in the latest LS:N Global Back to the F**kture podcast, has been replaced by the age of transformation. Or rather, as The Experience Book authors Adam Scott and Dave Waddell explain, one has been subsumed into the other, so that when we talk of experience, we are really speaking about transformative moments that take us along an unexpected, and sometimes unknown and unknowable journey of change, challenge, and if we get it right, catharsis. To be truly transformative in the audience sense, experience needs to begin with, and embrace, the audience it is targeting, says Waddell. ‘It needs to be a co-created and co-conceived journey that follows a narrative arc of exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action resolution and dénouement – but that arc needs to be set by the audience as much as by the design or experience strategist.’ In other words, a more collaborative, interactive and shared narrative approach than the one used by more traditional experience designers and strategists. Tune in now. 

Reluctant futurists is the collective descriptor used by Henry Coutinho-Mason and Rohit Bhargava to describe their current career trajectory. Their preferred term is near futurists since their work is invariably about a quest to catalogue and understand the implications of the biggest innovations on our lives today and over the coming years.  The Future Laboratory’s co-founder and LS:N Global’s editor in chief Martin Raymond discusses all things normal (but not so everyday – yet!) with Future Normal authors  Henry Coutinho-Mason and Rohit Bhargava in our latest Back to the F**kture podcast episode. Tune in now and discover the future normal.

How can we use the power of everyday awe to prime innovation or create heightened levels of wellbeing? In his latest Back to The F**kture podcast episode with professor Dacher Keltner, The Future Laboratory’s co-founder, Martin Raymond, finds out.  They discuss what produces awe and the subjective qualities of it, from a leaf falling from a tree and children laughing in duets, to light shining in shadows on the ground. Tune in now and discover how awe can be used to reset our brains in ways that improve wellbeing and make our emotions more robust and agile.

In the latest episode of the Back to the F**kture podcast, The Future Laboratory’s co-founder Martin Raymond chats with Rhona Ezuma, entrepreneurial founder of THIIIRD magazine, a multi-faceted platform that champions next-generation creatives from people of colour and Black, queer, trans and non-binary communities who are redefining our collective tomorrows through their work and lives.  Tune in to hear from Rhona as she discusses third-space moments, third-culture people and ‘intersecting stories where juxtaposing ideas and identifications can meet, collide and create new and exciting things that are less hierarchical, more emancipated’.

Retail experience isn’t just about UX tech, but about understanding how we blend all touchpoints we have with the customer into a single, seamless conversation, as Quinine’s founder Ian Johnston explains to Martin Raymond in his latest Back to the F**kture podcast. Quinine Design’s Ian Johnston is a man with a mission – and it’s all about experience. Or should that read phygXperience, digUXperience, or plain old Experience 3.0 where experience isn’t just a noun or a verb, it’s a journey of many moving and inter-related parts? Tune in to hear from The Future Laboratory co-founder and Back to the F**kture host Martin Raymond and guest Ian Johnston delve into all things experiential.

Author, feminist and founder of the sober-curious movement Ruby Warrington chats to Back to the F**kture’s Martin Raymond, co-founder of The Future Laboratory, about why women without children isn’t an alternative choice, but a  mainstream reality, as 50% of women under 30 in the UK alone go without.  Ruby Warrington pulls no punches when she writes and speaks. Her determination, like her prose, hits you with the force of a full-on super-car collision. Her latest book is called Women Without Kids, easing people into a debate and a view of women who don’t have children. Tune in to the podcast episode now to find out more.

In a world of fake news and hate-fuelled algorithms, entrepreneur Sue Fennessy discusses her new power-for-good platform, WeAre8, in the latest episode of Back To The F**kture with The Future Laboratory co-founder Martin Raymond.  While many of us blame the stupidity and biases of right-leaning social media users for spreading fake news, the founder of ‘no-hate’ app WeAre8, Sue Fennessy, has a different take on the matter. She blames it on how platforms like Facebook reward us for sharing.  Tune in to our new episode with Sue to find out more.

As we seek purpose at a time of continued global uncertainty, Your Brain on Art authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross join Martin Raymond on his Back To The F**kture podcast to discuss the science behind art, and the true power it has to heal and transform.  Martin has know Ivy Ross for many years in her role as jeweller, artist and vice-president of design for hardware products at Google, while Susan Magsamen’s work as a neuroscientist and founder of the International Arts and Mind Lab (IAM Lab) has always intrigued him as one of those burgeoning areas of science that sits at the heart of every question we ask about design, architecture and the arts generally – why do they affect us so viscerally, emotionally, spiritually, even physically? In this episode, we discuss their research into, what they've dubbed as, the neuroarts movement. Tune in to learn more.

Scent is set to change the nature of health, wellbeing and self-care, according to Firmenich’s chief consumer and innovation officer Matteo Magnani, who speaks to The Future Laboratory’s co-founder Martin Raymond in this episode of the Back To The F**kture podcast. Matteo Magnani and his team are exploring how we can potentially enrich our presence in the metaverse via scent, use fragrance in more programmable ways in our public spaces and retail outlets, or shift the value and presence of scent marketing itself away from using the Hollywood icon or wafting beach body model, to smelling the moment – of love pleasure, happiness, self-care – rather than showing it. In this episode, we discuss all things sensorial, delving into the new ways for fragrance to be used and perceived. Tune in to learn more.