foresight, strategy, and communication
I deliver actionable insights on technology trends, competitive intelligence, and human behavior. I use brand, voice and narrative to tell stories in meaningful, authentic, and impactful terms, moving from 10-20 year horizons back to 1-5 year strategic roadmaps.
featured work
What a new U.S. Civil War might look like
[Foreign Policy 10.2017] Following an earlier 2017 survey, Foreign Policy’s Best Defense blog opened a poll about the likelihood of a second U.S. Civil War. However, framing it as a second civil war embeds numerous assumptions about warfare on U.S. soil that are based more on history than the current reality of how power acts in the world. The distinction is critical to effectively counter the emergence of networked violence in America.
Intelligent logistics
[Based on client work 2.2017] Logistics leaders are beginning to capitalize on the immense amounts of data generated by their cyber-physical systems. With artificial intelligence they’re finding greater efficiencies, higher performance, more sophisticated network orchestration, and more accurate demand forecasts.
State of the Smart Home 2017
[Based on client work 2.2017] The Smart Home is still a young category but it reflects deep currents of digitization, connectivity, efficiency, & security. It’s also a long game for platform leaders to further colonize the home. More interestingly, it may be a necessary response to our emerging climate crises. Yet, as the category matures there are large challenges in establishing trust and value.
When machines move on without us
[LinkedIn 10.2016] Human labor may decouple from global supply chains but it won’t abandon regional and local productivity. “You're thinking of this as you'll take an existing product and add some AI to it. That’s not what we’re seeing. What we’re seeing is an entirely new kind of product that wasn't possible before.” - Marc Andreessen
Virtual Reality gets real with Wevr & Tony Parisi
[Orange Group 2016] I’m about 10 meters below the surface, held in the gaze of a large, warm eye about the size of my head. The whale is 40 feet long and just a meter away from me, its eye panning and inspecting my presence. I’m standing on the deck of a sunken ship, its old rotted timbers still holding on the ocean floor. I can see schools of silvery fish moving on the currents...
Learning from machine intelligence
[Orange Group 2015] In the vast expanses of dusty red Australian outback, one of the world’s largest iron ore mines is being taken over by autonomous systems. Enormous yellow haulage trucks, 7 meters tall and with no human occupants, pick their way across the engineered landscape moving materials from drill sites to crushers and out to trains a mile long. In 2015, the drills and trains will also become autonomous in an ongoing effort by Rio Tinto — one of the world’s largest mining concerns — to remove human operators from dangerous conditions, increase the efficiency and scale of operations, and to enable much more rapid response to changes.
Download full report - PDF 1.2MB
The near-future of swarming robotics
[Fast Company 12.12.2014]The insurance drone skims above the roadway, humming softly as it tracks your car. Multiple failed login attempts caused by an out-of-date token have prevented the vehicle from downloading a firmware update to its stabilization system. The vehicle broadcast this to all connected stakeholders, so now the drone is watching for unexpected guidance problems. It mainly serves to add a bit more to the evidence stack in case there’s an accident...
Unicorns, startups, and giants
[Orange Group 2014, co-authored with Mark Plakias] In February of 2014, Facebook announced it would purchase WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash and stock. Once a heralded Unicorn itself, the mighty hunter took another as its prize. Sequoia Capital, the primary investor, declared that WhatsApp co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton have created the “communications backbone” of the Internet. Sequoia will likely earn a cool $3.5 billion from the exit. With less than $60 million in private funding, the 4-year old instant messaging company made its 50 employees rich, and newly-augmented with the massive resources of Facebook. Universal social messaging is now their game to lose.
How did a small mobile startup suddenly become the communications backbone of the Internet? Is there a method to the madness of these Unicorn valuations or are they just the fevered dreams of CEO’s and investors? And how can older incumbents adapt to a landscape of young giants swinging their weight around?
Download full report - PDF 2.7MB
Coherency in Contradiction - 2013 Shift Index
[Deloitte 12.2013] This report examines life in the Big Shift by exploring some of the tensions and intrinsic contradictions arising from the accelerated pace of technology and information flows. We’ll examine the conditions that are amplifying these contradictions and suggest ways to find opportunity within them. By reframing contradictions as complementary, rather than mutually exclusive, leaders may discover a greater ability to adapt and innovate in a complex, dynamic world.
Cities of the future
[Fast Company 4.2013] As complex ecosystems, cities are confronting tremendous pressures to seek optimum efficiency with minimal impact in a resource-constrained world. While architecture, urban planning, and sustainability attempt to address the massive resource requirements and outflow of cities, there are signs that a deeper current of biology is working its way into the urban framework. Innovations emerging across the disciplines of additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, swarm robotics, and architecture suggest a future scenario when buildings may be designed using libraries of biological templates and constructed with biosynthetic materials able to sense and adapt to their conditions.
2043 - a design fiction
[Personal 2013] When it’s busy like this the viz sometimes shifts like the color bleed you used to see on those old Sunday comics, way back in the day. Ubiquitous fiber pipes & wide-band wireless still can’t give enough bandwidth to the teeming multitudes downtown. The viz starts to lag, gets offset and even orphaned from the hard world it’s trying to be a part of.
A murmuration of drones - short design fiction
[Personal 2012] I saw them to the East lit in semaphore flashes by the falling Winter Sun, set against fluffy pink clouds flowing languidly inland. Moving together as a fluid, mercurial and quicksilver, this way and that, a coordinated dance of shiny metallic starlings. They seemed to circle chaotically over some unseen attractor below.
Occupy Wall Street
[Business Insider 11.11.2011] I was driving through the Tenderloin the other night – one of the most socio-economically depressed areas of San Francisco. Across a long wall someone tagged “Occupy Wall Street” in big letters with a clean font and preceded by the Twitter “#” hashtag notation. It was a big, funky chorus bridging the grimy street with a shimmering virtuality beckoning from the other side. A shiny enticement to both residents and passers-by, yet it instilled in me that there are some hard reasons why Occupy is still a bit pale, demographically.
Neuroprogramming
[Institute For The Future 2009] Advances in neuroscience, genetic engineering, imaging, and nanotechnology are converging with ubiquitous computing to give us the ability to exert greater and greater control over the functioning of our brain, leading us toward a future in which we can program our minds. These technologies are increasing our ability to modify behavior, treat disorders, interface with machines, integrate intelligent neuroprosthetics, design more capable artificial intelligence, and illuminate the mysteries of consciousness. With new technologies for modulating and controlling the mind, this feedback loop in our co-evolution with technology is getting tighter and faster, rapidly changing who and what we are.