What will your world look like in 20, 30 or 40 years? As an exercise in crowdsourcing an answer to this question, Arup's Foresight and Innovation group, in association with ICSID and the Singapore Design Council, has launched The Design 2050 Challenge that allows anyone to imagine what the future might hold. Individuals and small teams create an imaginary character, providing details of where the character lives, whether she works, how much she earns, what she likes and dislikes - the things that define an ordinary life.
Each week, the teams are given an assignment that takes their characters through the coming decades, up to 2050. The teams will decide what choices their characters make, influenced by their personality, their personal circumstances and the community and world in which they find themselves.
If you aren't registered in the project, you can still make a one-time contribution by creating a "driver of change" card - your thoughts on one key issue that you think will make a significant difference to how the world community will evolve over the coming decades. Whether or not you participate, you can read the profiles of characters that have been created for the project, and their responses to future scenarios.
The characters and their stories may be part of a presentation to the ICSID World Design Congress in Singapore at the end of November.
Unlike conventional events which tend to feature one-to-many speaker sessions, the 2009 ICSID Congress will involve both keynote speakers, studio design leaders and delegates working together to chart a better future through design. Each Design2050 Studio will present, discuss and then refine their envisioned scenarios in partnership with delegates during the congress. The global public will also be able to contribute to inventing the future during open "ringside crowd-sourcing" sessions, and on-line social media forums.
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