The forces acting on ‘Identity’ in the future
Among the many forces potentially influencing identity in the future, we highlight three areas:
- The convergence of global issues and rapid developments in technology could mean that our capabilities as humans are remodelled at increasing rates, our everyday lives may be reshaped with limited consent and challenge our models of personal identity.
- There may be more freedom for people to explore themselves. Not only in the sense that society may allow more freedom in career, sexuality, age, gender and geographic or social ‘belonging’, but also in the sense that society is increasingly tolerant of fluidity. In other words, it is not simply that you can be what you want to be, you are now also able to change what you want to be.
- While these first and second areas describe growing flux and growing freedom, the third area is about capacity. Increased interest in ourselves coupled with deeper AI learning could lead to heightened understanding and subsequent malleability of ourselves, our psychology and our identity.
With these potential forces acting on people’s identity, we explore two hypothetical scenarios:
- Altered Parenthood
- Identity Fluidity
These Future Scenarios are composed of a future context that is based on the trend analysis and a concept of a future person whose extreme experience of Identity has a large bearing on their happiness. For these future people, we predict needs, desires and future pain points in relation to their future context and use this as a basis for the ideation of provocative future concepts that solve some of the needs of the future person.
Altered Parenthood
Advances in medicine could result in increased life expectancy and the extension of sociological or biological phases of life, such as reproductivity. New ways of creating children and alternative types of familial structure may remodel important concepts of identity relating to families, in particular, what it means to be a ‘parent’
Identity Fluidity
Identity could grow more fluid as people gain more freedom to pursue the lifestyles of their choosing outside normative assumptions of race, nationality, sexuality, gender, age and more. More nuanced characteristics are supported by social media niches alongside AI that may raise self awareness to help you define what works for you.
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