Co-designing the Future at Katapult Future Fest

Imagine a world where food is 3D printed, the Earth’s temperature no longer increases, internet is three-dimensional and layered on top of reality, no visas or passports are required, and every human has his/her genome sequenced at birth. 

Last month, attendees of Sustainability Hub’s Future Society workshop at the Katapult Future Fest not only imagined that world, but also created tangible actions for making those ideas a reality. The two-day future festival in Oslo, focused on exponential technologies in our future society with speakers including: Larry Brilliant and the founder of Couchsurfing, Casey Fenton.

Through a joint effort, Katapult Future Fest and Sustainability Hub organized an open sourced workshop to capture the inspiration and free-flowing ideas of speakers and attendees that were generated during the festival.
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The two organizations were motivated to create this workshop because moving towards a post scarcity society is a massive and daunting task. While it is not only a bright future to move towards, it is also inevitable, given the current developments in exponential technologies - if we get it right, that is. In order to get it right, we need to have a clear goal and since all information technology tends to converge towards one platform per category, this goal needs to be global. During the workshop, participants were broken into groups: culture, education, civil society, politics, and economics.

Tharald Nustad, the founder of Nordic Impact which organized Katapult was particularly excited about the workshop, “It’s great to have amazing speakers and inspiration, but making societal changes and action is what’s really important. In collaboration with Sustainability Hub, we organized a great workshop on the Future Society, which is one of Katapult’s main themes”.

“Through this workshop, actionable items to both start working with and build upon for similar workshops to develop an even clearer roadmap of where we are headed and what we need to do”, says Andreas Friis, Sustainability Hub’s Managing Director.

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Add your own actions to a more desirable future by contributing on Katapult Manifesto

Some Workshop Generated Actions
 
Culture

• Teach people to share at a young age.
• Create a culture and education system that focuses on travel.

Education

• Teach values and about preparing students for life through gamification and virtual reality (VR).  Focus on how to take risks.
• Education systems that prepare people to tackle the challenges of the future.

Politics

• Pair politicians with artificial intelligence (AI), this will allow them to help make smart decisions based on data.

Economics

• Create the need for new financial instruments that build companies that will be privately held, solving problems in the next 100 years, or however long they need to exist. ​

Author
Lauren Guido works with special projects and writes articles at Sustainability Hub. She loves taking calculated risks, as well as bridging people and ideas. Her favorite SDG is #17, partnerships.