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It can be easy to admire new technologies that promise magical solutions, or to denounce modern developments as being counter to our nature as humans. This interview explores the origins of both mindsets.

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This online magazine has built a completely self-sufficient website running off solar power and designed for minimal energy use. Low-tech Magazine explores past knowledge and technologies to solve current and future problems.

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Some ‘light’ holiday reading, Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff is an important book laying out how data and big tech have supercharged the negative aspects of capitalism into something very anti-human. As we move into the next decade this new strain of capitalism seems poised to become the dominant model.

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A more hopeful book from the CEO and founder of Kickstarter Yancey Strickler, This Could Be Our Future looks at how we might move away from the current default of financial maximisation towards a more generous and rounded idea of value.

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The 2010s saw us enter post-normal times; a period of complexity, chaos, and contradictions. It’s seen us faced with big, complex challenges that need creative and urgent responses. It’s the context that inspired us to create Today – a way to dive in and explore new ideas that might move us towards the world we want to see.

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The World Economic Forum’s Global Future Councils imagine what 2030 might look like if we get things right. There are some big ideas here that build on emerging trends, but the theme is leveraging technology to enable and amplify fairness, equality, integrity, and care.

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Social innovation has increased significantly in the last decade, helping scale human-centred design across governments, NGOs and industry. This has seen the development of a huge range of initiatives, global collaborations, reorienting around value based outcomes and embedding this within various sectors as way to build social value into enterprise, systems and services.

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I’m really excited by biomimicry and how we move from thinking about designing from nature to mitigate our impact, to learning and designing with nature, towards cities and services that act as an ecology that mimic and learn from environmental systems. Human-centred design practices, service design, system design and ecology will merge with technology to enable this reality and help the transition.

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Leading the way: how Finland has built upon its culture of trust, equality and pragmatism to lead the world in flexible work.

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Leveraging AI to create smart work environments, enhance collaboration for geographically dispersed teams and diversify and enable a more efficient remote workforce.