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The birth of cinema is one of many interconnecting events and inventions around the world. Born out of an array of new technology, revolving around machinery, photography, optical illusion, and a human love to be entertained and inspired. So very shortly the news will not only still be first, but many segments will be in color. By pressing this button, which I now do, the cameras are transmitting a live color picture. I don't think we've even seen it. The middle class in America will have some kind of home computer or home terminal. Do you foresee a time when most people in Madison will have computers in their homes? Oh sure. The potential of what the internet is going to do is unimaginable. So what's next? It's always the big question, right? It's interesting, like, there's so many buzzwords that you hear, virtuality, all-mentoriality, healthcare, AI. There's a lot of exciting things, but for me the big thing that's coming out that I've seen is how people can collaborate. Seeing musicians using technology in new ways, how all of these different traits of Southpia are going to collaborate in their technology. I think that's the exciting one for me. I'm Andy, I'm co-founder of Swapbox. My name is Katrina Rall, I'm the group director in Copenhagen for Fjords. It's my first time here at Southpia, so it's great to be here. We started Swapbox a year ago. It's interesting from a start-up perspective coming to Southpia, because it's kind of the world is your oyster. What really is exciting and what I also see trend-wise is that all of the different audiences start mixing. So trend-wise it's fascinating to see how things go across. Okay, floor two already. So this is Swapbox, our augmented reality toy. I'm Hannes and I work in a consumer electronics company called Baggin Orson. We're actually 91 years old, but I'm leading a start-up within the company. I actually brought a prototype and it looks like this. Yay! People are able to collaborate with each other. That's also a big thing. That's a goal, to make truly distinctive and cross-functional teams, which can actually enable us to make better visions about more complete and more deep futures. I think that's really important. I'm a full-hearted believer in cross-functional teams. My name is Allie Drought, I'm the futurist at Capital One. I think you need a wide variety of perspectives, from design perspectives, business perspectives, technology perspectives. Get a lot of people in there to start working with you. So you have a core team of people that can think critically about systems, whether that's design systems or business systems or tech systems. We believe a lot in that in Create. We think there's immense power in actually really trying to open up and facilitate and nurture co-creation with the people around us, because we're lucky to have a huge amount of experts within our company. We can join all the projects we are going on, but we've got even more fantastic people outside of the company, and it's those we actually want to try and combine and create a cool positive spiral of creation. This future I'm talking about is going to be really, really challenging, and we need a lot of help. Start with diversity in your mind. I think that's a really good thing to have before you start building your teams, because the more different point of views you'll have on an item, on an object, on a problem. These problems are not easy. These problems will not be solved tomorrow. It's going to take a long term for us. We used improv to kind of access the state of uncomfortability. And what was interesting is our ideas for us were totally some not safe for work and really, really different from some of the ideas that you normally put on a poster. But what it did was, as Will said, it got everyone on edge, and it was the most visceral feeling that we had in design. Everyone was smiling, everyone was really actively listening and collectively entering this space that we didn't know where we were going. And I think that's quite different from normal design thinking. That's where people can kind of get a little bit twitchy. They're like, I don't know if I want to imagine this, but it's really important to see what possible detracting scenarios could look like. So you can say, great, I'm going to design away from that. If we can illuminate it, then we can say, we can move in a different direction intentionally. To help us create a better future, whether or not that's growth. I think as a marketer, we still have all the big problems that we already have. We have the need to break the silos. We've now got better and better tools to talk to our customers. And I think that we need to see how marketers can use technology to make the content, the stories, all our communication need to put together. And use technology to have it all together in one system. So really getting out of that normal marketing thinking of buying a space, of doing it like that, and more saying, where are the people that would be interested in co-creating with us? And then being there. And one that would be obvious is, of course, GitHub, because that's where all the coding goes on, right? We're lucky to have something called BioWorld, which is a huge amount of super-fanatic Bang & Oleson people that just basically love everything that the company is doing. That would be another place that would be a good starting point to actually interact with people. And then, of course, I have to mention social media. That would not be a primary one for me. I think it's a cool tool to interact with people, but that's not where co-creation will happen. We need to find a space where other people feel more comfortable. And it's us that needs to get out of our comfort zone in order to make this happen. Stop thinking about this experience as an attentional economy. It's not just about having people spend a lot of time on our products and services. That shouldn't be a success metric by any point. I think it's really how can we make the most of people's lives, not just the end user, but the actual people delivering those experiences and choreographing that. I think that's probably where it's going to head to. So building on service design, it's almost like we don't just want to create this amazing service both back and front end, but at the back end, we really understand even the ethics when it comes to the algorithms that we're using, as well as the people delivering that experience, et cetera. Bill Gates in 1996 mentioned content is king, and now it's in 2017. I believe engagement is queen. So when you put the content king and the engagement queen together, this is really where the magic happens. My name is Yiyin Liu. I work at 500 Startups as a creative director. It will be really interesting to see more company that is focused on how to make the content more engaging, make it more interesting, meaningful, and also make it more accessible. I think we were already seeing a lot of changes in the last couple of years in the ways that people consume content. My name is Margaret Magnarelli. I head up content marketing at Monster. Let's go back to the newspapers as an example. They owned everything from the production to the distribution. Media companies no longer own the distribution. Oftentimes that's platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest, and any of another thousand channels that you can name. And I think that that means that we have to do more to push out content to people rather than having them come to us. So even in the era following newspapers, when we got to the digital era, there was a period of time in which people were bookmarking websites and were going to URLs that they knew. And now people are consuming content in their social feeds. I'm Tim Washer. I'm a comedy writer and producer. We'll see a lot more humor. Brands haven't felt safe with it, but I think they're at a point now where they know they need a new level of engagement with their customers and prospects and need to build in more awareness. And they're learning that humor works. If it's done the right way, they can create a tight connection with customers. I think for brands and publishers, one of the things that's next is empowering people all across the organization to do it themselves, to have fewer middlemen and shorter production lines. I'm Joe Posner. I lead the Vox.com video team. I guess my real title is executive producer. We started in 2014 as a one-person team, just me, in a basically text-first newsroom, running around, trying to figure out how we can make our mission to explain the news and the world to people be video first in addition to text first on the website. You have to deliver value in content, so a great way to do that is through entertainment. And one way that works universally is using humor. So what's next? Tacos? I think that interactivity is going to be a big portion of things. I think that creating content for bots, creating content using machines, using machine learning, I think also it's sort of the technology will also play into the distribution of it, like being able to read consumers to know what kind of content is right for them. Everything from going deep into psychology of how to really affect people and influence people and engage people to how to use artificial intelligence in a smart way to do marketing is one of the things that I've learned a lot about the last few days. We don't want to design a tablet with motors, so it's all about the interaction. I'm Laurent, I'm the software director at SurfVanc Robotics. We are working on all the software inside the robot that you can see here. And his name is Pepper. So our goal is to make Pepper a companion for people. So robots you would have at home that would like to know you, discuss with you, propose things, sometimes make you feel better. I think we can design robots for everything, but I don't think there will be one universal robot to do everything you're expecting. My name is Christian Willem. I'm program director at Danish Design Center. Our specific interest coming from a design approach is very much the interaction between humans and machines. So I think chatbots are quite sort of central to that interest. And also how personal and sort of human-like we would actually like bots to be. I find it quite interesting to follow the conversations about the sort of human centeredness of new technology. I think the great thing, the great inspiring wonderful thing about all these immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, seeing the IoT and the depth sensors coming in and everything being very connected is about having these experiences, not being about that technology. I predict that you could almost see like a reverse trend to that, that people will at some stage be so, I wouldn't say fed up, but you will have sort of a back to basics kind of trend. I get that from some of the discussions and I also for instance went to sort of a trend, futurist trend session and I think that was also one of the takeaways that often when you have a really strong trend, you will have a reverse trend going the other way. Artificial intelligence is next. I mean it's not even perhaps next because it's already here, but the proliferation of artificial intelligence is going to change things so dramatically, even in the very near future because the development of that technology or those technologies are really sort of accelerating exponentially. Her is going to be here, that movie where we can say get my dry cleaning, blah blah blah, get my masseuse, like go through the whole day again from your ear. So that's here. And this would scare us, right? This might be, this is a weird, we both live in the world of the futurist side, but we were just in a convention hall and there's a seven foot five robot walking down the convention hall and I'm taking a video and there's a little kid, maybe two years old, in a stroller and the robot walks right up, sticks his hand out and the kid does not freak out, the kid reaches his hand out and so I think for kids we're going to see this identity and the understanding of possibilities that right now for many of us are, it's such a drastic change. So what's going on is technology is evolving. My name is Hector, I'm a designer. I lead the design team for Search and Assist in Google. The way that trends are going is things are becoming smaller and cheaper, so it's going to be very easy to put these smart things into objects, into regular objects. So light bulbs and let's say tables, chairs, cars, watches, washing machines, all of this thing is going to start having these sort of smarts. Automated, connected home, synchronized, simplistic world. And our bodies will be chipped. Buzzword, I would say one of them could be health and healthcare and health tech. My name is Morten Frederiksen. I'm heading up the health and wellness offer at Overview in Copenhagen. The usage of data and AI is extremely interesting. And I think what we're going to see is a decentralization of treatments into people's own homes. The role of our general practitioner that we go and see whenever we have a flu or anything will change dramatically, becoming more a communicator than a healer or a treatment person. Actually, I don't think it's scary. The first initial, do you have a fever? Have you had any vomiting? All these types of questions. Why don't you replace that with a bot? There's no need for sitting and waiting 30, 40 minutes on a phone to get in touch with a nurse who can ask the same questions. And then you can be taken to a doctor when that's diagnosed. And it's going to be much more precise, faster and convenient. I think we're in an era where we're very keen on personalization. And we also have to start to think about how do we do that in a way that's also not too creepy. I think once personalization becomes a part of everything, you get what you wanted, but maybe you get too much of what you wanted. That's the main ethical question that the more we know about our behavior and what we can do and should do and so on, how much can we enforce on people on how they live their lives? Because if it's public health care, can we demand that people live in a certain way for them to live their lives? For them to be obliged to treatment? One of the things I find really interesting is what happens with the ethics when the machines start figuring out what you and I are really interested about and what engages us. Artificial intelligence coming now, where consumer data is used to provide generally often better services for consumers. But we also see a downside of that, where you can have targeted advertising that plays on your innermost emotions. These machines will know more about you than you know about yourself. So there's of course your things that are happening right now with chatbots, where you start to have this machine learning and also the human side of it. There's lots of discussions around how do you make sure that it's both a machine audience and voice, but also certainly the human voice is kept in there. If you program a bot, or at least sort of initially program it, you want it to be able to pick up and learn by itself. And basically how much you sort of program the bot is going to reflect and how it acts. And if you program it and you want it to be neutral and objective, then that's really hard. Because we are humans and we have biases, we have opinions, we have a worldview. So the more we transfer that into the bot, the less neutral it's going to be because it's going to be a reflection of you. We hear a lot about artificial intelligence, we hear a lot about augmented reality, where you basically combine digital service in real life. So definitely that and also bisnick ethics moving into artificial intelligence. What are the boundaries of technology? What are the good things and also what are the bad things? Where do we not want to go? I mean killer robots, I guess it's the area where we don't want to go, where machines basically can make decisions of life and death. And going from there and downwards, it's a lot of shades of grey there and I think we need to find a balance. And that's being discussed all over the place. I do think that the human interactions are where it happens, but we're actually, and I'm just being devil's advocate now, but I think it's going to get harder and harder to have them because we're going to be so cocooned inside of where we're at in our homes and having deliveries and getting things sent to us and drones flying things in. We're going to have to work harder to be better humans. That's true. A lot of gadgets and a lot of things and sometimes you look at it and you see, okay, are we doing this just for the sake of technology? And because we get so carried away with something, we can actually do that? Or does it actually serve a purpose? Does it actually solve a real problem and not just something because someone got carried away technology-wise? So this is Kayla. She's an internet-connected doll. So kids can talk to her. She's connected to the internet and she will respond and get information from the internet, basically, Wikipedia. And we discovered, so doing some research just before Christmas, that she's very easy to hack. She's very easy to connect to. She's not secure. The voice data is sent to an undisclosed third party. And basically the terms of service are horrendous. Because in order to have this kind of automation and this kind of comfort using all these technologies, the trade-off could be and probably will be an entire sort of lack of privacy because everything will be data-driven and everything will be monitored by the companies that are offering these services. Growth scenario is typically the only scenario we can imagine because that's kind of what we're bred to imagine. And so articulating other scenarios that may be uncomfortable and usually are really uncomfortable to talk about is really important. I think it's critical to think about these futures. I would even know it. We project ourselves into the botched-over program. Just dare to let go because I think good things will happen if we do so. So many interesting discussions here. So it's so bloody interesting to be here. So what's going on is technologies are evolving. Artificial intelligence is next. People that have the skill set that are very specific. Man, I was starting to feel like a diva because I really would like to wake up and have everything done for me. I think that's the amazing thing. I think that's the future I'm really excited about. Not where technology is taking over. I think where technology makes your life all the more connected with people around you. The rise of natural language processing, machine learning, AI, these aren't necessarily trends but they're enabling technologies and they're things that will be built into everything that we do at a consumer perspective for the next several years at least. Social trends, tech trends, ecological, economic and political trends to say, hey, all of these are part of a system. One changes, it will definitely affect others. I would be lying if I didn't say I was paying very close attention to political shifts and executive orders right now because that has a huge effect on what we'll be able to create, how we'll be able to create it, what that means for implementation. I think it's really important to get cross-pollination of ideas because all these things are about people. So if you think about how all these various elements of our lives come together and kind of mash together, it's really important to look at all of them. We can't just say, oh, I'm just an academic, I'm just going to read academic papers because that's not the real world.
