Reading list
Links to the future
Seven recommended sites, four of which still exist.
The project maintained a list of external sites it considered worth reading on the future of technology, design and society. The introduction was characteristically unbothered: “Talk of the future is on everyone’s lips!”
The list is reproduced here as a record of what an aviation futures project was pointing at in 2009. Rather more than half of it no longer exists, which is itself a reasonable comment on how durable futurism sites turn out to be. Entries that still resolve are linked; entries that have gone are described without a link.
Still online
- Future Cars — described at the time as offering insights into how professionals and semi-professionals are shaping the future of the car industry, with news from manufacturers and scenarios ranging from electric to flying vehicles.
- Future news for Year 2020 and Beyond — playful predictions about the following fifty years, covering economy, politics, environment, health, society and technology. The horizon in its own title has since passed.
- Global Future and Foresight — a strategic futures think tank working on economic scenarios for various industries through a network of specialist researchers.
- Jump the Curve — the blog of futurist Jack Uldrich, gathering news on nanotechnology, biotechnology and robotics and, in the original list’s words, delivering it “in a way that is almost intelligible to non-experts”.
No longer reachable
- Future Design by Tuvie — a site dedicated to future technologies from industrial design and car concepts to futuristic gadgets, open to reader-submitted design concepts. The domain still answers but no longer serves the site to ordinary requests.
- Future sustainable communities (Future Vision Award) — promoted the development of sustainable communities and ran an annual contest for the best concepts, with entries ranging from very bold to very simple, all aimed at improving villages and towns. The domain no longer resolves.
- NASA Future Flight — an interactive exercise in which visitors became virtual NASA researchers designing air transportation systems able to cope with rising traffic. It was hosted on a NASA Ames research subdomain that has since been retired.
What the list says about the project
The selection is revealing in two ways. First, only one of the seven entries was about aviation, and it was a public-sector education tool rather than an industry resource. The rest are about cars, design, gadgets, community planning and general technology forecasting.
Second, the tone is enthusiast rather than analytical. Sites are recommended for being inspiring, playful or bold. The one entry with a research methodology behind it, Global Future and Foresight, is also the one described in the flattest language.
That matches how the project treated futurism generally. The futurist column ran essays on fashion and auditing next to a technically serious argument about contrail warming, without ranking them. A link list assembled in the same spirit was always going to mix a think tank with a gadget blog.
On the dead entries
Three of seven gone in the time the list was meant to be looking across is worth noting, given that the project was asking what would survive eighty-five years. The NASA entry is the interesting casualty: it was the best-funded and most institutional item on the list, and it disappeared because agencies retire outreach subdomains, not because anyone lost interest in air traffic growth.
What replaced this kind of list
Curated outbound link pages were standard practice on editorial sites in 2009 and had largely disappeared within a decade. Search made the discovery function redundant, and the maintenance burden — visible in the three dead entries above — made the pages a liability rather than an asset.
The futures-studies field the list was drawing on did not disappear with the websites. Institutional foresight work continued at exactly the sort of body the list mostly ignored: the Finland Futures Research Centre, where Sirkka Heinonen wrote her contribution to this project, remained active, as did The Millennium Project, whose director José Cordeiro wrote twice for the futurist column.
The gadget blogs went. The research centres stayed. For a link list assembled to point at the future, that is a reasonably instructive outcome.