Meet the 'Vortex of Despair': Four Predictions for Earth's Future February 13, 2010

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/10/28/Brainfood_-_Can_You_Imagine_The_Next_60_Years

Dr. Chris Luebkeman outlines four different "plausible futures" for the planet the selfish bubble, carbon is crime, ecological age, and vortex of despair. He judges each of these potential futures in terms of human development and planetary health.

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What will the world be like in 60 years? Back in the 1950s, people speculated that by now we would be flying around in commuter-copters, striding rivers with man-made sea-legs, and living in climate-controlled bubble cities.

As visiting thinker Chris Luebkeman said to an audience at University of New South Wales, "the future is fundamentally fiction." However, it's still an interesting thing to consider, and here, delivering a lecture as part of the university's BrainFood series, Dr. Luebkeman indulged in some fascinating speculation. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Dr. Chris Luebkeman runs the Global Foresight + Innovation initiative at Arup, a global design and engineering firm and a leading creative force behind many of the world's most innovative projects and structures. In his role, he conceives new ways of building - recyclable buildings, reusable offices, and furniture that can decompose - and works with some of the world's largest companies to develop what he calls "plausible futures" to better understand the opportunities that change is creating for them in the built environment.

In his book, Drivers of Change 2009, Chris and the Foresight team at Arup look at 50 important factors that will affect our world, arranged in a framework known as STEEP (social, technological, economic, environmental and political). Designed as a collection of note cards, the book provides a tool for developing business strategy, brainstorming, education, or simply to think creatively and holistically. The cards are designed to encourage deeper consideration of the forces driving global change and the role that individuals can play in creating a more sustainable future.