Nature of the Future

I've just finished a book detailing the work process and innovative methods of IDEO, one of the world's leading industrial design firms (made things, like, the Palm V, the Handspring Visor, portable defibrilators, the Apple and Microsoft Mice, etc., etc...). I can probably guarantee that you've handled, if not currently own, something that came out of their shop. An inspiring book about how to take their methods to incorporate more creative thinking in your business. Now I desperately would love to work there, or somewhere just like it!

However, the end of the book got me thinking: they not only assert that their methods can help you innovate, but can actually help you predict the future of business enterprises. No, they don't mean in some mystical, meditation way; they mean by staying in tune with current trends and encouraging creativity, it is inevitable to find the "pulse" of whatever you are involved in, making prediction easy (although they admit no one is 100% right all the time).

Now, I found myself very skeptical about this. For the longest time, I've been very taken by the writings of Arthur Danto, a philosopher and art critic. In this case, it reminded me of a lecture of his I once caught which explored his ideas about utopias and the projection of utopias. To condense the lecture into a sentence or two, he posits that when we (people in general) try to project the future (utopian, distopian, or otherwise), we inevitablely project it in terms of our own current struggles and situations. Yet when the future arrives, it arrives as a genuine surprise. A computer example would be the rise of the personal computer; experts in the field in the 1960's, and the businesses that believe in them, believed the future was in large computer mainframes plugged into many, many workstations. Yet it was a few hippies at Stanford that formed the Home Brew Computer Club that began building small personal computers. This spawned Apple Computers, which inspired Windows, which is probably what you're using to read this right now. Unless you new these guys or their friends, you didn't know what was coming next (admittedly, this is a simplified version of computing history, so let me know if you want any other examples).

Now, while the IDEO theory commits one to keeping an ear to the ground at all times (so, presumably, that you'd run into the next group of future-builders), they say that knowing the future is possible while Danto says that the future is, by definition, unpredictable. So these are the thoughts I'm having - what do you think?

Of course, I'm still pulling for Stephen Hawking to figure out how we can look forward as well as backwards in the dimension of time; I mean, we can already do that in the first three dimensions! Now wouldn't that be cool?