Participatory Parks will Create New Cultures in Communities Choosing to Charter Their Own Destiny

Great cities throughout history were known far and wide for the grand parks that served as their centerpieces. But what do we think about today when we conjure up the image of a park? Fresh cut green grass, trimmed trees, playground for the kids, and perhaps a stream of water running through part of it.

Parks have somehow deteriorated into rubber stamped open space, boiled down to the bare essentials of grass, trees, sidewalks, playgrounds, and benches – nothing memorable, with little to inspire the mind. While there are a few exceptions to the tedium of today’s park culture, like the famed sculpture parks in Loveland, they remain isolated examples of what most would aspire to become.

For this reason, I would like to propose a new approach – the idea of participatory parks where the community decides on a particular theme and becomes integrally involved in creating the distinctive features. Participatory parks will range from active to passive on various community involvement scales, but in each case, the host city will set into motion a long range plan for people to rally around.

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Launching a New Era in the Future of Money

Imagine yourself sometime in the future sitting in front of a television, watching your favorite show, and a pizza commercial comes on. This is one of those commercials that hits you at exactly the right time and you instantly start craving pizza. For the next few seconds you stare at the screen and your mind thinks of nothing other than pizza. Finally you give in and utter the single word “yes”.

Thirty seconds later a flying pizza drone docks at your house with a piping hot pizza with exactly the right toppings. In addition to the pizza the drone also comes with a six pack of beer, and not just any beer, but you’re favorite import beer from Australia. When you gave the command by saying “yes” it automatically knew what you wanted.

The marketing world has long tried to figure out a way to combine the buying moment with the marketing moment. In this example I take it one step further and combine the marketing moment with the buying moment and the fulfillment moment. No time to second guess yourself because the transaction is complete. In this scenario, you will very likely have a slice of pizza in your mouth before you realize how much you spent. For major cravings, price is irrelevant.

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Frictionless Vehicles and Binary Power will Define Transportation in the World Ahead

Transportation technology is progressing at a much slower pace than some of the other sciences such as information technology, biotech, and nanotechnology. As an example, the world’s human speed record was set in 1969, a full 37 years ago, when Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan flew in Apollo 10 at 24,790 mph. While there is much talk about flying at a speed that approaches the speed of light, very little effort is actually being expended in this area.

However, transportation technology is about to move ahead more rapidly in the coming years with the advent of two radically new technologies – frictionless vehicles and binary power.

Throughout history we have learned that the two principle driving forces of humanity are freedom and control. While current automotive technology gives us the freedom to drive as fast or slow as our vehicle will take us, and control over our timing and direction, we are still restricted to driving on the ground and we have a hornet’s nest of laws to contend with regarding speed, flow, and operation.

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A New Way to Measure the World Around Us

What is the value of being happy?

Yes, happiness means different things to different people, but even without having a common definition, happiness has become a significant focal point of study and research around the world. And working on the assumption that whatever we measure will get better, the “happiness index” will become a significant measuring stick for our progress.

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Planning Our Next Generation Libraries

Literacy is a learned skill involving an ability to transform characters on paper into mental concepts and images. Listening to an audio book requires a slightly different skill, but requires the ability to transform audio sounds into mental concepts and images.

The trend in the information world is to make the interface between information and our brains as seamless and as invisible as possible. However, if all we do is download tons of information into our brains, we haven’t accomplished much. Information needs to be relevant, useful, and somehow meaningful. In short, we need to experience it.

So how do we take dry, boring information and turn it into a meaningful experience?

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