Relationships

Relationships may be initiated, supported, curated and managed through AI.

The forces acting on ‘Relationships’ in the future

Among the many forces influencing people’s relationships, we explore how technology may disrupt, initiate, manage or support our connections.

We explore how childhood engagement with technology has huge potential opportunities for education and creativity but may also shift some dynamics in children’s relationships with each other, with their parents or even their teachers, as the roles of these people adapt. The general increase in the time children spend immersed in digital spaces might influence the way in which parents are able to raise them. Their exposure to unparented digital spaces (where they are exposed to organisations with their own agendas), may lose ground to those spaces which are parented.

We discuss how cultural changes in our perceptions of identity may shift our types of relationships and how these relationships may be initiated or supported by technologies, which t may come to intimately understand our behaviours and dynamics. This emerging space for technologically enabled relationships is fascinating and filled with opportunity. It may help counter what could be described as a deterioration of social cohesion, isolation, polarisation of our society or dwindling communities. On the other hand, it could damage the authenticity of our connections or create even more division

In these scenarios, we explore how engagement with technology may alter or enable the dynamics of our relationships. We also explore what might happen as the relationshipss become initiated and managed through AI.

With these potential forces acting on people’s relationships, we explore three hypothetical scenarios: Digital childhoods, Enhanced Relationships and Sidelined and Connected Communities.

These scenarios consist of a future context (that is based on a trend analysis) and a concept of a future person whose experience of relationships has a large bearing on their happiness. For these future people, we predict needs, desires and future pain points relating to their future context and use this as a basis for the ideation of provocative future concepts that may solve some of the needs of the future person.

Digital childhoods

Children may spend more time in online environments that can transform their educational and creative experiences, but equally have increased capacity to captivate and shape their worldview in potentially problematic ways.

Service visions

Empath

Empath is an VR educational tool designed to build tolerance and empathy by helping children understand some of the inaccuracies they hold in their prejudice.

Find out how we ‘Explored the future landscape with the project client’.

Enhanced Relationships

People have an increased sense of independent freedom of identity, allowing them to more fluidly define who they are and how they live, outside of more societally constructed norms such as gender, nationality, race, profession or sexuality.

Service visions

Eros

Eros leverages artificial intelligence to enhance human-human romantic relationships for young adults already in them.

Find out how we ‘Prioritised the societal dimensions related to health and happiness’.

Sidelined and connected communities

The elderly are sidelined but new tools could help connect them in communities and fight for a place in society.

Service visions

Yolt

YOLT is an events organising algorithm that connects hosts, venues and people together to create amazing communities of diverse individuals.

Relationships

Relationships may be initiated, supported, curated and managed through AI.

The forces acting on ‘Work’ in the future

Among the many forces influencing our relationships with work in the future, we explore three areas.

The first is about the emergence of more workplace flexibility as people work remotely from all over the world, for varying employers, adjusting the relationships between people’s perceptions of work, home and travel. In this context, we also propose a trend in skills-based, on-the-job learning that may alter the way educational institutions are used and reframe employment purely as a pathway to more advanced skills.
At the same time, we explore how platform monopolies promote gig-working, which has the potential to produce even more flexibility in people’s lives, but could also lead to far greater insecurity. In this context, we consider what can be done to support and protect people from this potential insecurity and how their needs may change in the search for employment.
Finally we look at the emergence of augmented technology that may make it possible for people to maximise their performance in whatever they do, creating new types of working cultures and raising questions about competition, equality and consent and work/life balance.

With these potential forces acting on people’s relationship with work, we explore three hypothetical Future Scenarios: Blended work-home-travel, Work Instability and Self Expansion.

Digital childhoods

Service visions

Colo

Colo is a personal assistant for self employed people who work at home by helping them find someone to work with who shares similar interests and lives nearby and by helping you build a working routine.

Find out how we ‘Explored the future landscape with the project client’.

Work Instability

Work could easily become intertwined with education making it a lifelong process of development and reinvention rather than a specific period in our lives. To facilitate this change, more inclusive, skills-based, education platforms may expand to challenge expensive, formal education systems.

Service visions

u-path

U-Path is an online service that aims to shift the mindset of learning in order to work, towards a mindset of working in order to learn.

Find out how we ‘Prioritised the societal dimensions related to health and happiness’.

Self expansion

People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them, the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.

Service visions

Digital drugstore

Digital drug store is a store specialised in augmentation technologies that can be installed on or into humans.

Relationships

Relationships may be initiated, supported, curated and managed through AI.

The forces acting on ‘Spirituality’ in the future

Among the many forces influencing spirituality in the future we explore three areas.

There is the possibility that society and religious institutions could struggle to provide for people’s spiritual needs and in turn they may adopt new techniques to remain relevant or there may be a growth of new models of belief structures that fill their void. People may look to different contexts for tribes or value structures and their need for social belonging could influence belief structures.

Already emerging ‘bubbles’ of insulated and introspective belief systems could become more extreme, powerful and easy to control due to the technological and psychological power of the actors in these physical and increasingly digital spaces. As technology infiltrates more of people’s lives and the arsenal of tools that can be used to influence people becomes more and more sophisticated it could sway people’s perspective of right and wrong more and more and ultimately challenge people’s agency over their own beliefs.

Finally, people may fundamentally question what is worthy of their trust. Some may be increasingly aware of the potential for coercion, creating an increasingly impossible climate for trust that triggers disillusionment, the rejection of institutions, attempts of citizens to take back control, and potential cycles of populism.

With these potential forces acting on people’s spirituality, we explore three hypothetical scenarios: Pragmatic Collectives, Religious malleability and Scarce Authenticity.

Digital childhoods

Service visions

Empath

Empath is an VR educational tool designed to build tolerance and empathy by helping children understand some of the inaccuracies they hold in their prejudice.

Find out how we ‘Explored the future landscape with the project client’.

Religious malleability

Religious structures could feel unstable in their ethical foundations as they shift in reaction to threats from the world. It may be difficult to find a community to put your faith into; for instance, because it may become difficult to distinguish between religious practice and an organisational/commercial service.

Service visions

Pocket Jesus

Pocket Jesus is an application that codifies the Christian faith and quantifies your religious practice. By codifying Christian practice and rules, it can correlate your practice with your life and happiness to bring your values more in line with your life.

Find out how we ‘Prioritised the societal dimensions related to health and happiness’.

Scarce authenticity

Technologies that can alter core beliefs could be used to design lifestyles and characteristics to optimise wellbeing. Wellbeing could be co-opted to suit a corrupt agenda.

Service visions

Genuinee

Genuinee is an app that makes the ethics of everything transparent. By Codifying the product you want to buy, Genuinee recognises the level of ethics, authenticity and evil a product conceals.

Relationships

Relationships may be initiated, supported, curated and managed through AI.

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.

Digital childhoods

Service visions

Empath

Empath is an VR educational tool designed to build tolerance and empathy by helping children understand some of the inaccuracies they hold in their prejudice.

Find out how we ‘Explored the future landscape with the project client’.

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.

Non-Dinary

Non Dinary is an educational dining experience focused on the notion of gender as a construct. Non Dinary approaches this conversation…

Find out how we ‘Prioritised societal dimensions related to health and happiness’.

Real emergent services responsive to the future

Live Services

Hold

Hold is an app that gives people the personal space to let out whatever is on their mind and relax knowing that it is stored safely. It helps people give structure to their internal dialogue making self reflection become more effective.

Edit

Edit is an app that helps you fill your daily routine with more positive actions than smoking. It’s not about quitting cold turkey or feeling like a patient, it’s just about trying new things and seeing if they work for you and your lifestyle.

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests, so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Explorations Section

Explorations

Provocative future service concepts brought about by interactions between future people and their future contexts.

Propositions section

Propositions

Present-day concepts of future services.

Jump back to

Dimensions of change

Work

Work becomes fluid, remote, unstable and performative The possibilities and challenges for working life continue to grow.

Dimensions of change

Body

Your relationship with your body may be pressurised but you could have more capacity than ever to control it.

Dimensions of change

Identity

Self Identity is challenged, open for exploration and the building of character.

Present prototypes of future services

Propositions

Reading the landscape

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Need Commoditisers

The commoditisation of our needs and values to incentivise behaviour change.

Ethics Providers

Platforms as facilitators and brokers of value judgements.

Relationship Facilitators

Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.

Self-Editors

Optimising and Editing yourself and your life to meet your personal criteria for success.

Agency Enhancers

Developing a deeper AI driven understanding of yourself to influence your decisions and optimise for your happiness and prosperity.

Dimensions of change

Spirituality

Values and beliefs could be strained by a mixture of people’s environment and self-discovery.

Dimensions of change

Body

Your relationship with your body may be pressurised but you could have more capacity than ever to control it.

Dimensions of change

Identity

Self Identity is challenged, open for exploration and the building of character.

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Excursions into future scenarios

Explorations

What are explorations?

Explorations are the first major outcomes of the xploratory process. Each exploration produces service visions, which may emerge within the scenarios that we model, stimulating discussion around critical topics.

The service visions are provocative and sometimes implausible services used to model a landscape of potential situations in the future; open conversation and explore new strategies; and, build the collective imagination of the future of happiness.

Find out how we ‘Defined the scope for Exploration’.

Societal dimensions of change.

Each of the Future Scenarios and their Service Visions are organised in six categories. These categories represent our interpretation of different aspects of happiness within people’s lives: Identity, Spirituality, Body, Work, Relationships, and Money

They were created by grouping together themes that first arose in the trends that we predicted. Then, they were refined through our research with particular users who represented extreme circumstances associated with those trends.

These societal dimensions of happiness allow us to ensure that we are exploring scenarios, topics and the future needs of the people we envisage with enough investment in the right areas and with a large enough scope. Across these six themes, we look at how people may engage with their identity and their values and beliefs, how they may manage relationships, control their bodies and balance their work and education with their lives.

In each of these dimensions, you can explore multiple Future Scenarios and Service Visions that emerged from them as well as the discussion around the emergent topics.

Choose a dimension to explore

These categories represent our interpretation of different aspects of happiness within people’s lives.

Dimensions of change

Body

Your relationship with your body may be pressurised but you could have more capacity than ever to control it.

Dimensions of change

Money

The meaning of money may change as it is tied to our emotions, our communities and our responsibilities in a world that may blame capitalism for inequality and climate change.

Dimensions of change

Relationships

Technology expands the scope and meaning of what relationships are while disrupting some existing dynamics. Relationships may be initiated, supported, curated and managed through AI.

Dimensions of change

Work

Work becomes fluid, remote, unstable and performative The possibilities and challenges for working life continue to grow.

Dimensions of change

Spirituality

Values and beliefs could be strained by a mixture of people’s environment and self-discovery.

Dimensions of change

Identity

Self Identity is challenged, open for exploration and the building of character.

01 00

How do these explorations take place?

We begin by targeting particular areas for investigation based on the organisation and the context. We then explore Koa Health’s business strategy, conduct trend analysis and engage with extreme users to collect insights that inform the modelling of Future Scenarios.

These future scenarios are composed of a future context that is based on the trend analysis and a concept of a future person who might have an extreme experience of a certain dimension of change. For these future people, we predict needs, desires and future pain points in relation to the future context and use this as a basis for the ideation of provocative service visions that solve some of the needs of the future person.

These explorations, which lead to service visions, are discussed to explore the strategic relevance of the emerging topics to Koa Health. They are also selected to continue based on the significance of their impact on the world (positive or negative), their plausibility and their appropriateness to the business strategy of the company. The selected concepts are adapted and developed in the next step of the process and the resultant ideas are collected in the next section, ‘Propositions’.

Religious structures could feel unstable in their ethical foundations as they shift in reaction to threats from the World. It may be difficult to find a community to put your faith into because it could become difficult to distinguish between religious practice and an organisational/commercial service.

Portfolio of Ideas

Explorations in the future of Happiness

What’s the portfolio of ideas?

The Lab — in collaboration with over 120 designers, associates and postgraduates— produced 92 scenarios, 56 service visions, 14 tested value propositions and launched 4 minimum viable services, leading to the creation and support of 2 new ventures to further develop and commercialise service offerings in partnership with RCA and Koa Health.

In the Ideas portfolio, you will find a catalogue of the full range of ideas that we have produced during the xploratory happiness project with Koa Health.

The portfolio also houses tangible artefacts, which we refer to as service visions. Alongside each idea, we describe some of the discussions and thinking that have stemmed from it.

Choose a section to explore

Explorations

Excursions into future scenarios

Propositions

Present concepts of future possibilities

Live Services

Real emergent services responsive to the future

Societal Dimensions of change.

These categories represent the lab’s interpretation of different aspects of happiness within people’s lives. They ensure that the lab explores scenarios, topics and the future needs of the people that they envisage.

Dimensions of change

Body

Your relationship with your body may be pressurised but you could have more capacity than ever to control it.

Dimensions of change

Money

The meaning of money may change as it is tied to our emotions, our communities and our responsibilities in a world that may blame capitalism for inequality and climate change.

Dimensions of change

Relationships

Technology expands the scope and meaning of what relationships are while disrupting some existing dynamics. Relationships may be initiated, supported, curated and managed through AI.

Dimensions of change

Work

Work becomes fluid, remote, unstable and performative The possibilities and challenges for working life continue to grow.

Dimensions of change

Spirituality

Values and beliefs could be strained by a mixture of people’s environment and self-discovery.

Dimensions of change

Identity

Self Identity is challenged, open for exploration and the building of character.

01 00

Future Scenarios

These scenarios are composed of a future context that is based on the trend analysis and a concept of a future person who might have an extreme experience of a certain dimension of happiness.

Scenarios

Sidelined and connected communities

The elderly are sidelined but new tools could help connect them in communities and fight for a place in society.

Scenarios

Enhanced relationships

Scenarios

Digital Childhoods

Scenarios

Wealth legacy

In a world facing more and more turmoil and inequality, the super-rich may be held to account for their impact on the world and may be increasingly expected to use their wealth to support people who are disempowered or in peril.

Scenarios

Connected localism

Decentralised infrastructures may be adopted by ‘smart’ localised communities to provide an escape route for those who feel that larger, more traditional infrastructures always work to entrap the public.

Scenarios

Emotional money

AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.

Scenarios

Self expansion

People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills in order to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.

Scenarios

Work instability

Automation and climate change will cause huge turmoil in economies, people may be working online, based on their chosen field or “gig”, and move in search of better economic environments. Reputation will become ever more vital as people have to quickly and consistently re-establish themselves and we will see more online platforms supporting offline gig workers’ skills.

Scenarios

Blended Work-Home-Travel

The increased demand for workforces with flexible capacities alter the role of education as work and skills based training become intertwined. At the same time, geographic flexibility allows people to work remotely and we may see shifts in the relationship between people’s work-life, home-life and travel.

Scenarios

Smart ageing

People’s life expectancy may seem to perpetually extend without people really knowing when death may come, living with an ageing body will be a longer part of life and therefore illness is even more problematic. People may dedicate more of their life to extending their lives.

Scenarios

Structured Social Judgement

Constant social media judgement could lead to extended states of anxiety potentially making people attempt to perfect their outward appearance. Data could be collected against people’s will and without their knowledge and lead to further control over people’s behaviour.

Scenarios

Personal control

Devices quantify and measure all aspects of the people’s lives and body amplifying obsessive behaviours. People’s personal identity becomes more based on an idealised virtual version of oneself rather than your existing reality.

Scenarios

Scarce authenticity

Technologies that can alter core beliefs could be used to design lifestyles and characteristics to optimise wellbeing. Wellbeing could be co-opted to suit a corrupt agenda.

Scenarios

Religious malleability

Scenarios

Pragmatic collectives

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Service Visions

These visions are future service concepts designed to expand collective imagination and facilitate discussions around the potential opportunities and implications these services could bring to society.

Service Visions

Genesis

Genesis forms your child however you’d like while also using gene curation to balance characteristics and avoid health issues.

Service Visions

Plan P

Plan P helps you transition and tailor everything in your life towards parenthood.

Service Visions

Child Share

Child share is a matching system based on the needs, experiences and characters of parent types that creates a parental network for your child.

Service Visions

Sides of Me

A platform that uses AI to monitor your emotions and behaviours, so you understand all the different sides of your character

Service Visions

Non-Dinary

Non-Dinary is an educational dining experience focused on the notion of gender as a construct.

Service Visions

OSMOSIS

Osmosis is an AI expression and reflection service that helps young people focus their attention on what deeply matters to them.

Service Visions

UBH

UBH is a universal government benefits system. It evolved from universal basic income & the recognition that happiness is the most important metric for success.

Service Visions

Little Things

A platform that rewards people who bring micro-doses of happiness to others, so that whatever you bring to the world, doesn’t go unnoticed.

Service Visions

Guru

Guru helps you build your well being using your money. It creates a learning loop that helps you align your financial behaviours with what makes you happiest.

Service Visions

Off-Chain

Offchain is a toolkit for smart localisation that allows its communities to connect and access modernity without having to forgo their data privacy.

Service Visions

B-Vay

Vbay is a crowdfunding platform where wealthy people can personally buy items that vulnerable people or humanitarian organisations require.

Service Visions

Legacy

Legacy helps wealthy people understand the impact they have had on the planet and shares the ways they have had a positive impact.

Service Visions

Happy Family

Happy family is a tool designed for your family that can track and censor every member’s digital activity and enhance digital safety and transparency.

Service Visions

Empath

Empath is a VR educational tool designed to build tolerance and empathy by helping children understand some of the inaccuracies they hold in their prejudice.

Service Visions

Playground

Playground offers a digitally augmented real-world playtime to enhance and encourage active imagination and defend a space for play in a cluttered world.

Service Visions

YaYa

YaYa is your family’s digital network service that, connected to wearables and smart systems from your day to day life, helps parents get insights into their children’s mental health and emotional wellbeing.

Service Visions

Family Jar

FamilyJar responds to the insight that families do not share digital experiences. Family Jar is a safe cloud environment where each family member can share things.

Service Visions

Integro

Integro is a service built to help gamers improve in-game and out of game well-being, based on a new rewards system

Sevice Visions

Pocket Jesus

Pocket Jesus is an application that codifies the Christian faith and quantifies your religious practice. The service links teachings to the nature and subject of your prayer.

Service Visions

VR Religious Experience

On VR Religious Experiences, you can subscribe to the channel that partly funds your church.

Service Visions

APPOSTLE

APPostle is an app powered by machine learning that is trained to track your activity and to stop you if you are doing something against your religion.

Service Visions

Genuinee

Genuinee is an app that makes the ethics of everything transparent. It also provides data visualisation of your activity and spirituality profile & corrections of bad behaviours and actions that don’t match your ethics.

Service Visions

The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect creates opportunities for strangers to share delightful experiences with people from different cultures.

Service Visions

Greencoin

Greencoin is an ethically earned currency and shared personal rating system that is based on your sustainable footprint. It monitors the products you buy, transport you use and your energy consumption habits.

Service Visions

Hurray

A platform where football supporters contribute to their teams success by doing socially positive actions in their community.

Service Visions

Digital Twin

Digital Twin is a tool used to measure real life activities and create a virtual projection of what could happen if you behave outside your routine and patterns.

Service Visions

Eatopia

Eatopia is a platform with the mission to support individuals on the journey to plant-based diets.

Service Visions

Eidos

Eidos is a personal AI assistant that works with you to understand who you are and to create desired behaviour change over time.

Service Visions

Dignitime

Dignitime quantifies the life expectancy cost of all your actions and relates them to how happy they make you.

Service Visions

Portal

Portal allows you to experience other people’s life experiences through VR and the people who live the experience for you.

Sevice Visions

Perfect Friends

Perfect friends is a group of AI Agents that support your mental wellbeing with positive machine-learning-powered messages.

Service Visions

Diplomatic Mirror

Diplomatic mirror is a mirror powered by AI that assesses your level of beauty based on aesthetic standards developed algorithmically to be ‘democratic’.

Service Visions

Test Pilot

Test Pilot is an AI system that tries games and services and gives ratings on their addictiveness and potential for abuse.

Sevice Visions

Digitox

On Digitox you can find a support network of digital dieticians that help you manage your dependency on digital experiences

Service Visions

Skai

Skai is a system where people can get personal recommendations on skincare products and receive tailored advice through AI chatbots.

Service Visions

Relover

Relover is an implant designed to alter your vision, so you can see different faces mapped onto the people around you.

Service Visions

Relate

Relate divides your relationship needs into multiple categories, so they can be fulfilled by different people that are matched perfectly and arranged for you.

Service Visions

Eros

Eros leverages artificial intelligence to enhance human-human romantic relationships for young adults already in them.

Service Visions

Dignifight

Dignifight is a union style platform for organising activism for the elderly to reshape society so it accommodates them fairly.

Service Visions

Yolt

YOLT is an events organising algorithm that connects hosts, venues and people together to create amazing communities of diverse individuals.

Service Visions

Marco Polo

Marco Polo is the ‘workation’ agency for digital nomads. It’s able to match flights, accommodation and your working requirements to host your entire work and holiday combination experience

Service Visions

My home in a box

A premium shipping service for digital nomads to dispatch goods all over the world whenever and wherever you move to.

Service Visions

Colo

Colo is a personal assistant for self-employed people who work at home. It helps them find someone to work with who shares similar interests and lives nearby and helps you build a working routine.

Service Visions

Bridge

Bridge offers a smart way to reliably make and expand your network leveraging AI and data collection

Service Visions

Prepare

Prepare is an insurance service that assesses how vulnerable your current work and location is and helps you plan and take proactive decisions to prevent that.

Service Visions

GIG-OFF FOOTBALL LEAGUE

Gig-off is a football league for gig-economy workers.

Service Visions

U-Path

U-Path is an online service that aims to shift the mindset of learning to work, towards a mindset of working to learn.

Service Visions

Dough

‘Dough’ is a digital peer to peer discovery app that helps young people better understand themselves and others in the work world, so they find the right jobs.

Service Visions

Mirror

Mirror helps young people find more fulfilling work lives by enabling personal development alongside their careers and involving lifestyle in job searches, unlike the many career networks that are solely career focused service.

Service Visions

Enlight

Enlight is an online platform, which through a self-discovery game, a learning planner and a split public/private profile helps young people to make happier choices about their future,

Service Visions

Digital Drugstore

Digital drug store is a store specialised in augmentation technologies that can be installed on or into humans. The range of options is ever expanding.

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Proposition Types

These categories group multiple value propositions into service types based on how they add value to users.

Proposition Types

Need Commoditisers

The commoditisation of our needs and values to incentivise behaviour change. The advanced digitisation of our lives could result in the quantifying and subsequent unionisation of different aspects of behaviour and the values that drive them.

Proposition Types

Ethics Providers

Platforms as facilitators and brokers of value judgements. It’s possible that in the future we could foresee an advancement of AI with the ability to codify and model the highly complex ethical parameters of everyday life.

Proposition Types

Relationship Facilitators

Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.

Proposition Types

Self-Editors

Optimising and Editing yourself and your life to meet your personal criteria for success.

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

Developing a deeper AI driven understanding of yourself to influence your decisions and optimise for your happiness and prosperity.

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Propositions

These propositions translate future service concepts into more concrete and believable experiences that can be prototyped and tested with real users.

Propositions

Edit

Edit is a lifestyle service that helps you edit things in and out of your life through enriched tracking and mini-experiments.

Propositions

Spark

Spark is a service that helps you discover your financial personality to align it with your consumption and help you make better financial decisions and achieve financial health and wellbeing.

Propositions

Mymes

Mymes uses an understanding of people’s behaviour to create simulations of their future to help them make decisions and it distills different sides of their character to help them explore who they are.

Propositions

EQLS

EQLS is a digital space where people can speak to AI characters about anything they’d like. They help people learn about themselves and they help life get easier.

Propositions

Pyro

Pyro has the best access to the latest and safest physical and mental augmentations on the market. As soon as these products and services are on the market, you can get them from us.

Propositions

Yolt

Yolt is a community building app that orchestrates group meetings online and offline by matching people based on the potential quality of a conversation not simply based on being similarly minded.

Propositions

Eros

Eros is essentially a romantic relationship coach and assistant, wrapped into the convenience of an app.

Propositions

Kinderpendent

Kinderpendent helps you understand how balanced your child’s online exposure is to challenging social topics and perspectives and manages that exposure through intelligent balancing and censorship tools and offers advice and support for parents and children while navigating big topics.

Propositions

Empath

Empath assesses and builds student’s social intelligence and empathy for other people through in-school, personalised, immersive story-telling.

Propositions

Mobible

Mobible is a chatbot that helps connect your faith with you, your life and your community based on church teachings and knowledge decoded from the scripture.

Propositions

Ethos

Ethos learns, tracks and guides people’s behaviours to help them live more in line with their values and beliefs.

Propositions

Qualitime

Qualitime helps you track how everything you do influences your happiness and your life expectancy so that you can decide what is most important to you.

Propositions

Pulse

Pulse extends your gaming life outside of the digital space in order to incentivise healthy activities and prevent gaming from becoming detrimental.

Propositions

Greencoin

Greencoin tracks your environmental impact. When you have a positive impact you earn Greencoin currency which can be spent on sustainable products.

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Live Services

These services are real emergent services responsive to the future.

Live Services

Edit

Edit is an app that helps you fill your daily routine with more positive actions than smoking. It’s not about quitting cold turkey or feeling like a patient. It’s just about trying new things and seeing if they work for you and your lifestyle.

Live Services

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Live Services

Hold

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Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Altered Parenthood

New familial contracts and new forms of 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’

How the scenario could unfold

Due to an increased pace of change, people may generally be required to continue developing new skills and knowledge to survive in the workplace. Compounded by an increased lifespan and a strain on state pension schemes in some countries, people may need to work until they are older, requiring more adaptability not just in skills and knowledge but in career choice.

If we consider that having children can put strain on careers that already require constant adaptation and that within this context people have an increased biological freedom on when to have children — it is possible that people may rather delay parenthood for a period when they are financially able to step away from work for longer in order to reduce its financial risk. Alternatively, this potential need for security may conflate with other emerging shifts in relationship and community structures to mean that people form new familial contracts and new forms of parenthood.

We can explore the significance of this context from the perspective of a future character who we created based on our research with real people.

Find out how we ‘Learned from extreme users’.

What might that mean for Amma?

For someone like Amma, whose identity is closely tied to concepts of parenthood, we can explore how services may evolve, which may support or challenge her needs in the future.

“Being a mum is what I’ve always wanted. Who I am now is important because it will make me a better mum. I will finally step into who I know I am meant to be”.

Over the last two decades Amma has taken great fulfilment from evolving and curating her career as a coach. Now, with her friends surrounding her, she is starting to shape her life toward having a child in 20 years time. Nothing seems as important as leaving a positive legacy on the world by bringing a new person into it to impart everything she has learnt and to nurture her child in a loving, dependable community. She made the decision to freeze eggs a long time ago and loves that she consequently has the capacity to phase her life, rather than do everything at once.

Her goal:

Her goal is to be as prepared as possible to be a parent. To prepare her body, to have the right resources, knowledge and network and to generally create the space to have a child in her career break.

Amma’s happiness is directly connected to her dream of being a mother.

Explorations in ‘Altered parenthood’

We explore the future by looking for potential points of friction (in concepts of identity) between this scenario of parenthood and the needs of someone like Amma. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or as spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.

What beneficial elements of these services could be fostered?
What is already happening in some way?
What harm may these services do? What might prevent services such as these proliferating?
What cultures may develop around a landscape of services such as this?

Find out how we ‘Conducted lab explorations’.

Genesis

Genesis offers soon to be parents more choice than ever.
Choose when and how to grow your child – No need for eggs, sperm or a womb. Genesis forms your child however you’d like while also using gene curation to balance characteristics and avoid health issues.

Team: The Lab

An all inclusive support and preparation service offering savings plans based on the age you are planning to retire and number of children you are planning to have with oocyte cryopreservation linked to your savings plans. Alongside financial support are classes to prepare your body, tuition on how to raise and empathise with your child and ‘family preparation’ – the set up and adaptation of relationships to build complimentary surrogates, parents, siblings and friends for your child.

Team: The Lab

Find out how we ‘Crafted future service concepts’.

Service Visions

Colo

Emerging topics

In this set of explorations, we were asked to consider scenarios where huge advancements in reproductive science and general health improvements may impact the way people organise and structure their lives around child-rearing and we extrapolate services that respond to those scenarios.

We can envisage a slow emergence of human capacity to genetically adapt or design traits and characteristic elements in one’s children and the vastly complex implications that may have on society. Questions emerge around ‘parenthood’ and ‘responsibility’ if a parent’s role spreads beyond ‘nurture’ and hereditary ‘nature’, toward being the ‘designer’. We can ask who should have the right to engineer and how? How will our understanding of identity alter should people’s character be genetically styled by another?

As we look at the convergence of less provocative trends such as the ageing of populations, the fluidity of relationships and an increased reproductive freedom; we can propose outcomes where child rearing becomes an even more orchestrated activity, perhaps planned over decades in order to meet new perceptions of optimum parenting conditions. These circumstances may lead to new familial networks where distinct roles are established around what value can be brought to the family unit. In addition, this may, more simply, lead to increased age gaps between parent and child, altering their relationships, the children’s learned behaviour and the ways they may depend on each other at different stages of their lives.

Resource: Ideas

Relationships

Relationships may be initiated, supported, curated and managed through AI.

The forces acting on ‘Relationships’ in the future

Digital childhoods

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Service visions

Empath

Enhanced Relationships

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Service visions

Eros

Sidelined and connected communities

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Service visions

Yolt

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Recommended readings

Proposition Types

Relationship Facilitators

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Relationships

Relationships may be initiated, supported, curated and managed through AI.

The forces acting on ‘Work’ in the future

Digital childhoods

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Service visions

Colo

Work Instability

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Service visions

u-path

Self expansion

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Service visions

Digital drugstore

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Recommended readings

Proposition Types

Relationship Facilitators

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Relationships

Relationships may be initiated, supported, curated and managed through AI.

The forces acting on ‘Spirituality’ in the future

Digital childhoods

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Service visions

Empath

Religious malleability

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Service visions

Pocket Jesus

Scarce authenticity

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Service visions

Genuinee

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Recommended readings

Proposition Types

Relationship Facilitators

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Relationships

Relationships may be initiated, supported, curated and managed through AI.

The forces acting on ‘Identity’ in the future

Digital childhoods

Jump To:

Service visions

Empath

Identity Fluidity

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Non-Dinary