Rethinking the Future - Six Patterns Shaping a New Renaissance

The point is simple: prediction is very difficult (if not impossible) to get right. The best we can hope for from our futurists is to draw attention to unfolding patterns and their possible implications. That’s it. And that is what this book does. It was developed from a presentation given to a meeting of Fellows of the Royal Society for Arts and Manufacturing (RSA) held in Vancouver in 2011, and explores several unfolding patterns and their possible implications. I seek here to offer an interpretation of the significance of these developments in terms of unfolding and overlapping ’S’ curves, and suggest that there is an opportunity for a new enlightenment or Renaissance, despite the disruption many of the patterns I describe have on our understanding of the world around us. This Renaissance can already be seen in some regions of the world, and there are signs everywhere of the change it will involve. Towards the end of the book, these examples are explored to illustrate what the new Renaissance may be like.